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The general reform of public policies is obliging the state to ensure better control of all its expenditures, especially those on administrative staff, and it is very tempting to introduce greater flexibility into the official status of civil servants. Right or wrong, this is discredited for being too strict and rigid. Bearing this in mind, might the status of the territorial civil service (i.e., those working at the local and regional levels) offer a good example, with its more flexible system of employment grades in comparison to the corps, and the higher number of contract staff, which ensures a better mixture of skills? On one hand this may be so, but the drawback is that different regions can interpret the basic system differently, and this may undermine the standard nature of the status and effectively lead to the privatization of local government employment. It will no doubt be necessary to invent a new model, halfway between the strict status of the state civil service and the flexibility of that of the territorial civil service. One immediate way to achieve greater clarity in the system would be to go back to having a single management structure for senior state and territorial executives.