President Yoon Suk-yeol, right, speaks with Lee Chang-yang, minister of Trade, Industry and Energy at the presidential office in Seoul, July 12. Yonhap

Each government agency will slash 1 percent of its workforce annually over the next five years to redeploy the extra employees to new administrative tasks under the Yoon Suk-yeol government's campaign for public sector efficiency and restructuring, the interior ministry said Tuesday.

As part of the manpower downsizing and redeployment drive, the government plans to conduct a large-scale organizational diagnosis for 48 central government agencies for the first time since 2006, the ministry said.

The organizational diagnosis, which will be carried out every year, is aimed at finding out obsolete, outdated and overlapped administrative functions at the government agencies, it said.

Reporting the so-called "integrated government employee quota system" to the Cabinet meeting on the day, the interior ministry said the measures to improve efficiency in manpower management will be enforced in consideration of the recent difficulties in people's livelihoods and changes in the administrative environment.

The integrated quota system will allow the government to flexibly and efficiently manage its workforce in accordance with the Yoon administration's new policy tasks, including inter-ministerial cooperative tasks, while maintaining the current level of government manpower, the ministry explained.

The Yoon government has vowed to minimize the public sector manpower increase, as the number of government employees has steadily increased over the past two decades, swelling from 978,000 during the Roh Moo-hyun government (2003-08) and 990,000 during the Lee Myung-bak government (2008-13) to 1.03 million during the Park Geun-hye government (2013-17). The number then surged to 1.16 million during the preceding Moon Jae-in government.

Vice Minister of the Interior and Safety Han Chang-seob said in a media briefing government manpower can actually be reduced in the process of implementing the integrated quota system.

New manpower demand from the government agencies is expected to reach 1,500 to 2,000 annually and the demand can be met by the 1 percent workforce downsizing scheme, Han said.

The ministry said the integrated manpower quota system will also be applied to local government agencies nationwide. (Yonhap)