With the axing of 16,500 public servants over the next three years, the Abbott government's first budget has included the biggest staff cut in the federal bureaucracy for decades.

An unprecedented 7336 full-time-equivalent civilian government workers will be cut in the next year– following a budget that left Canberra with nothing to stand on and nothing to look forward to.

The Coalition Government says it has done very little to bring this about however, claiming it is largely a continuation of the former Labor government’s ‘efficiency dividends’; a blunt instrument formed to beat the public service down to a less expensive size.

The figure of 16,500 is 4500 more than the Abbott government pledged before the election, and is 2000 more than the 14,500 that the Coalition alleges Labor would have cut.

The efficiency dividend will almost double in size from a 1.25 per cent reduction to 2.5 per cent. One quarter of a per cent of this increase comes from the Coalition, with the rest of the hike hanging over from Labor’s initial plans.

Community and Public Sector Union national secretary Nadine Flood says keeping the old dividend is convenient for the new government, but the cuts will keep coming.

She says the Government has kept quiet about a “massive wave of privatisation it is about to unleash”, which will include the loss of many thousands more government jobs.

“I think our [original] 25,000 figure might look conservative in a few years,” she said.

The government intends to abolish over 230 bureaucratic programs and 70 government bodies, a table at the bottom of this article shows which ones.

The back-end operations of major cultural institutions will be merged, forcing together work for the National Gallery, the National Archives, the National Portrait Gallery, and the National Library.

The Government has also announced it will look into the sale of Defence Housing Australia and the National Mint.

Cuts will take slices from all parts of the federal services.

The Australian Taxation Office’s job losses will reach 2329 by June 2018, with 2100 jobs going over this financial year.

Australian Services Union organiser Jeff Lapidos has told the Canberra Times that the Tax Office will have to force redundancies.

“A 2100 reduction in staffing will require compulsory redundancies,” the union official said.

“The budget does not appear to provide any additional money to the ATO to pay for these redundancies... turmoil is about to strike the ATO.”

Civilian staff at the Defence Department will be slashed by 1200, with another 300 “service providers” cut to save $606 million over four years.

About 500 public servants will be cut from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in the next 13 months.

Departmental Secretary Peter Varghese warned his 4200 workers of the cull of 12 per cent of the department this week,

“Divisions providing corporate services and delivering or supporting the delivery of the aid program will be most affected by the reductions,” he said.

“The final overall reduction and allocations will be decided by the committee at its meeting on 26 May.”

Foreign affairs insiders have also pointed out that the budget brought with it less transparency of foreign aid expenditure.

There appears to be no “blue book” - a document which details where, when, how and why DFAT and foreign aid money is spent – missing for the first time in decades.