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Existing research on the French grands corps de l’État (the major State institutions and administrative bodies) has so far focused on the circulation of their members — their spinning off or “swarming“ between agencies — or, on the contrary, their entrenchment within the administrative, political, and economic elite. In contrast to this approach, this article analyzes the work carried out within the Conseil d’État (Council of State), the Cour des comptes (Court of Auditors), and the Inspection générale des finances (General Inspectorate of Finance). It shows that these three administrative grands corps have revamped their institutional mission since the 1970s. It elaborates a framework to account for the internal working methods of the grands corps and then explains how that work was recontextualized by renewed professional competition within the French State and emergence of new social demands for expertise. Finally, it studies how the grands corps have reconciled new institutional imperatives with their existing corporative logic.