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This article analyzes the implementation in France of an international bureaucracy standard for debt management in the early 2000s. Shaped by international organizations to send a credible message to financial investors concerning the technicization and depoliticization of debt, the agency format was redesigned to suit the specificities of the domestic government. Far from being an example of the rational, voluntary depoliticization automatically proposed by the model, the controversies raised by the design of Agence France Trésorprovide new insights into the demands of the global capital environment, the desire for reform of political representatives, and the political capacities of the Treasury Department and civil servants.