The PM's long standing dissatisfaction with the quality of service delivery by some departments has been well documented since his Treasury days. He and Josh Frydenberg flagged plans for major reforms less than a week out from the election.

Another significant factor is that the release of the reportedly hastily reworked Thodey review recommendations is imminent.

What we should be asking is what makes the PM so confident these changes, which will reduce the number of departments from 18 to 14 as of February 1, and have already resulted in five departmental secretaries being axed three weeks out from Christmas, will be the game changers he seems to think?

How will the creation of even more "super departments", with the difficulties this is going to create in lines of communication and the complications implicit in having at least two, and in some cases three, ministers responsible for a single department, make life better for punters trying to access Medicare, social security and other benefits or get their tax issues resolved?

Politicians can frequently be ambitious and competitive; especially if they feel their turf is under threat.

Isn't there a risk that as a result of this concentration of competing sources of power professional public servants, whose loyalty should be to the community and not to individual administrations or ministers, could end up the meat in the sandwich?

"Having fewer departments will allow us to bust bureaucratic congestion, improve decision-making and ultimately deliver better services for the Australian people," Mr Morrison said while standing next to a comprehensively decorated Christmas tree on Thursday.

That sounds terrific except for the absolute and total absence of detail.

Implementation, we are told, will be the responsibility of the surviving and newly appointed departmental secretaries.

We have also been told this is not a cost cutting measure and there are no stated plans to axe public service jobs.

That needs to be taken with several large tablespoons of salt given it is highly likely that by February 1 the government will be under considerable pressure to deliver on its commitments for aged home care packages, drought and bushfire relief while still protecting the surplus.

While it may be true no instructions to cut staff will be issued, the fact is as a result of the politicisation of the public service in recent decades departmental secretaries have a very good idea of what is expected of them.

That is especially true when five of their peers, three of whom were women, have just been issued with "don't come mondays".

Nobody cuts the number of public service departments by more than a fifth with the expectation that the same number or more public servants will be employed at the end of the process as at the start.

Recent history, including the amalgamations of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Ausaid, the formation of the Department of Home Affairs and the merger of the Department of Defence with the Defence Materiel Organisation, would tend to support this line of reasoning.

The immediate consequence of Thursday's announcement is that many of the ACT's 55,000 Federal Public Servants are going to have a less than happy Christmas and a stressful new year.