This week’s issue of The Cairo Report covers the contradictions of a state that is competent at consolidating its own power, but paralyzed when asked to govern: from the presidential takeover of civil service appointments and the multi-billion-pound implosion of the social insurance platform, to a sitting senator purging women from his factory floor while captive trade union boards are kept frozen in place.
The presidency takes another inch of the civil service
The New Republic has never been shy about its preference for loyalty and patronage over competence in the management of public institutions. What recently changed is one of the many mechanisms by which that preference is enforced.
Recent amendments to the executive regulations of the Civil Service Law, codified under Prime Minister Madbouly's Decree No. 1509 of 2026, transfer the authority to select candidates for “state leadership” and supervisory roles from nominally independent unit evaluation committees and the Central Agency for Organization and Administration (CAOA) to the National Training Academy (NTA), which is an institution that reports directly to the President. Completing an NTA-administered training program is now a mandatory prerequisite for any appointment. The NTA assembles the final shortlist and submits it upward, sidelining the old machinery by decree.
The NTA’s institutional role was explicitly modeled on France’s École Nationale d’Administration (ENA), an elite school that produced four French presidents and generations of senior civil servants before Emmanuel Macron abolished it in 2021 on the grounds that it entrenched class stratification and produced a self-replicating administrative elite unaccountable to the public it served.
Thus, the New Republic has adopted a model France was dismantling; the difference, however, is that while the ENA was an independent educational institution, the NTA is a heavily securitized presidential apparatus. Its Board of Trustees, appointed by presidential decree, is chaired by Sisi himself, with a Presidential Advisor for Strategic Planning and Crisis Management—a military general—seated alongside him. The board also includes representatives from the ministries of finance and higher education, though the security establishment's fingerprints run deeper than formal membership suggests: the Minister of Defense and the Director of the Military Academy both attend board meetings as participants, even if they hold no official trustee designation. The result is an institution nominally dedicated to youth training and talent development that, at its apex, is governed and supervised by the head of state, and convened in the presence of the country's top military commanders.
On the enrollment page of its “Junior Presidential Leadership Program,” the Academy outlines its institutional vision as producing “an aware and responsible generation of youth, equipped with a spirit of creativity and innovation, capable of discovering and harnessing their unique abilities and talents to contribute effectively to the realization of Egypt’s national vision within the framework of the New Republic.”
The assessment process for entry into NTA programs is equally instructive. It includes psychometric testing of mental abilities, emotional intelligence, and social skills, as well as mental health screening. There are English and Arabic proficiency tests, and a culture and knowledge test. The New Republic is, in effect, constructing a comprehensive psychological and ideological profile of every candidate seeking a “leadership” appointment in the state’s civil service apparatus.
Moreover, the academy’s budget for fiscal year 2023-2024 was ratified at 407.7 million EGP. It is running a deficit exceeding 152 million EGP, sustained entirely by public subsidies. The academy that cannot balance its own books is now in charge of selecting who runs the state.
The new regulations also impose testing fees on candidates seeking the mandatory pre-appointment certification, codified under Decree No. 1566 of 2026, with fee levels set by the CAOA under a separate instrument. While such fees in civil service are not unprecedented, what is new is their embedding in a legally required qualification system for “leadership” posts, further centralizing hiring and making access to it contingent on payment, pricing out precisely those with no existing foothold in the apparatus.
What lays bare the political intent of this apparatus is not merely its organizational chart, but whom Sisi actually summons to dictate its implementation. A meeting on June 11 ostensibly focused on civil administrative reform brought the NTA’s executive director to the table alongside the Minister of Defense, the director of the Military Academy, and the head of the Administrative Control Authority (ACA)—a body nominally tasked with fighting corruption but trained, staffed, and led exclusively by military and intelligence officers. That a session on civilian bureaucratic appointments is effectively overseen by a cadre of military and intelligence generals continues a deliberate, systematic pattern of what political scientist Hossam el-Hamalawy identifies as the “militarization of the civil service.”
Established by Law No. 118 of 1964, the CAOA was ostensibly designed as an independent body with public legal personality. Originally attached to the Nasser-era Executive Council—and only formally subordinated to the Prime Minister by legislative amendment in 2021—it was nominally tasked with proposing civil service laws, developing training policies, maintaining records of leadership-level employees, and ensuring justice and transparency in public employment. Its official mandate also explicitly tasked the agency with planning and mobilizing the civilian administrative apparatus for the “war effort” in times of emergency.
On June 6, the same week as the civil service amendments, the NTA signed a cooperation protocol with the National Anti-Corruption Academy—a subsidiary of the ACA—to develop integrated training packages for state leadership candidates, producing a pipeline that links political screening, security oversight, and administrative appointment in a single institutional sequence.
Half a million pending, no one accountable
The National Organization for Social Insurance (NOSI) launched its new fully digitized pensions and social insurance platform in late March 2026, after shutting down the paper-based system entirely in February. A senior NOSI official told Mada Masr that the system was developed by an unnamed foreign software company under the supervision of “sovereign bodies,” a designation that functions as a full stop on accountability.
Sessions on the rollout were attended not only by the Minister of Social Solidarity but by Major General Walid Adly, Director of the Armed Forces Information Systems Department, and Major General Gamal Awad, Chairman of the NOSI. The platform serves 11.5 million beneficiaries and manages the pension contributions of Egypt’s entire formal workforce.
Within weeks of rollout, the system stopped processing any transactions involving updates or new registrations. Households could not open pension files, claim benefits, or obtain the most basic insurance documentation. By late May, NOSI’s own figures acknowledged 76,000 pending pension claims accumulated since February. Parliament’s Labor Committee was working with a different number entirely, roughly half a million backlogged transactions.
A parliamentary Inquiry filed June 6 accused the government of wasting approximately 1.4 billion EGP in public funds on a digital transformation project that had produced systemic paralysis. The Center for Trade Union and Workers Services (CTUWS) consistently condemned the government for minimizing the impact of what it categorized as a "structural failure.”
The institutional response moved through the standard stages. Major General Gamal Awad promised Parliament a fix within one month in May. When the deadline passed, he did not appear at the follow-up session. When he eventually spoke on state television in early June, he described the episode as a mere “performance bottleneck” during peak hours that had been largely resolved, contradicting his institution’s earlier insistence that the system was rigorously tested before launch. The Prime Minister, after the June deadline elapsed, moved the full resolution target to August.
The man who oversaw a platform that crashed the civilian pension infrastructure within months of going live, spent over 1.3 billion EGP in public funds doing so, refused to appear before parliament to answer for it, and then declared the crisis a temporary bottleneck—holds the rank of Major General, was appointed by presidential decree, and possesses no actuarial or civilian welfare economics background whatsoever. He spent his entire professional life managing military pensions inside the Armed Forces, before being moved sideways to manage everyone else’s.
The logic of digital transformation in the New Republic follows a consistent pattern of the state taking credit for the process of “modernization,” then offloads the cost of failure onto beneficiaries, and ensures that the opacity of “sovereign body” contracting forecloses any public reckoning. The paper-based system had local, recoverable failures. This system failed at scale, overnight, with no contingency and no accountability.
The senator’s factory floor
At the Ceramica Remas factory in Qalyubia, the merger of political authority and industrial ownership is functioning exactly as designed. The company is owned by Salah Al-Soudi, a sitting Senator and a member of the National Security Agency-backed Nation’s Future party.
Egypt, The New Republic’s Electoral Onion
The National Security Agency (NSA), operating under the Ministry of Interior, has become the primary architect of domestic political engineering. In the 2025 cycle, the NSA acted as the patron of the Nation’s Future Party. Leveraging its control over local municipalities and police infrastructure, the NSA aimed to maintain its parliamentary majority, managing the election as both a security operation and a political acquisition.
In late April, management initiated a squeeze on the workforce, systematically denying workers their weekly rest days and compensation for official holidays, while imposing arbitrary wage deductions.
By June, the factory escalated from wage theft to structural discipline. Management launched a wave of arbitrary dismissals specifically targeting the factory’s women workers, terminating them without legal justification or severance.
Following the dismissals, the remaining workers were coerced into forfeiting their statutory leave simply to keep their jobs. The arrangement relies on pure economic coercion.
Throughout this whole process, workers have filed complaints with their local labor directorate, but to no avail; the pattern documented by labor rights monitors has actually worsened over time.
By law, the senator’s position does not exempt him from labor legislation. There is also, in the actual functioning of the New Republic, a practical reality that complicates that provision enormously. When the factory owner sits in the upper house of parliament, local labor regulators understand their unwritten mandate is to ignore worker complaints, not act on them, an institutional structure that ensures state regulatory bodies act to shield the politically connected from the consequences of their own accumulation.
Parliament moves on virtual jobs, ignores the physical ones
The same week that labor monitors were issuing escalating warnings about violations taking place in the senator’s factory, parliament mobilized around a different employment crisis: online scam pages posing as job recruiters, extracting fees and national ID data from young people desperate enough to believe in high-paying job offers on Facebook.
A member of parliament submitted an urgent briefing request demanding state intervention, mobilizing communications infrastructure, security forces, and regulatory bodies to identify and prosecute the fraudsters.
While the scams are real, and the victims are real, what is particularly striking is the institutional contrast. The parliament that filed an urgent briefing to protect workers from anonymous digital criminals has produced no comparable motion regarding a sitting senator who has been, for at least two documented months, operating a factory where workers are illegally dismissed and denied their statutory wages. The urgency that attaches to hypothetical victims of internet fraud does not attach to documented, named, ongoing violations by a member of the upper house, revealing a preference of a legislature that is considerably more comfortable policing abstract digital spaces than regulating the physical labor conditions of politically proximate employers.
Unpaid in Aswan
Around 100 workers at the Edfu Health Administration, under the Aswan Health Affairs Directorate, have not been paid since April. They continued showing up. They continued working. They filed complaints with the Edfu City Council and the Aswan Health Directorate, but they remain unpaid.
The workers fall under a budget classification in which their wages are disbursed from a dedicated services fund rather than central payroll. This administrative distinction has no practical meaning to a health worker who has not received a salary in two months. What it does accomplish is to create a technical gap between the non-payment and any supervising authority’s formal obligation to act. The city council is not technically responsible for the fund, nor is the directorate technically responsible for the disbursement schedule, essentially making a worker who has not been paid everyone’s problem and no one’s emergency.
Keeping the union boards in place
On June 10, Sisi ratified Law No. 74 of 2026, extending the term of the current trade union boards—elected under the restrictive Trade Union Law of 2017—by an additional six months.
The government’s framing was administrative: logistical continuity, preparation for new elections, routine governance. However, such a move is not without historical precedent; the pattern of keeping compliant union leaderships in place while major legislative restructuring is underway was used in 1995, ahead of the privatization wave that dismantled large chunks of Egypt’s public industrial base. Workers at the time were represented by union boards that had already demonstrated their willingness to accept and promote decisions made over their heads. The result was the liquidation of public enterprises with minimal organized resistance.
The current legislative moment, more or less, resembles 1995 more than it resembles routine administration. The package of legislation in motion—amendments to the Public Business Sector Law, and existing provisions for public sector restructuring—maps onto a similar trajectory. A six-month extension of existing union leaderships, in this context, is more about ensuring that the bodies nominally representing workers when these decisions materialize will be the ones least likely to contest them.
Whether that reading proves correct depends on what the next six months produce in terms of the state’s IMF-mandated privatization plans.
So what?!
There is a glaring contradiction in how the New Republic operates: it is only ever slightly competent when consolidating its own power.
When the state wants to gatekeep the bureaucracy, it seems hyper-capable. It can rewrite civil service laws overnight, mandate psychometric testing through a military-chaired academy, and deploy sovereign agencies to oversee billion-pound digital infrastructure projects.
But when it comes to basic social reproduction, the state suddenly shows how truly incompetent it is. It cannot figure out how to pay local health workers in Edfu, its multi-billion-pound digital pension system leaves half a million people stranded without a lifeline, and its labor regulators are mysteriously paralyzed the moment a sitting senator decides to purge women from his factory floor.