Especially one that had been touted as the biggest shake-up of the public service since the 1970s.

The Thodey review, commissioned by Malcolm Turnbull more than 18 months ago, seems likely, at this stage, to be consigned to the shelf, where it will gather dust until the next round of optimistic rumblings about the need for reform.

The government unveiled the long-awaited review on Friday, just one week after Prime Minister Scott Morrison cut the number of Commonwealth departments from 18 to 14, sacking five departmental heads.

The independent review, led by former Telstra boss David Thodey, is a particularly forthright one, decrying a segregated public service, narrow-sighted and with poor program delivery, degraded research ability and expertise, and no clear or unified purpose.

It paints a picture of a bureaucracy that's slow to respond, rigid and hierarchical, overly secret and focused on itself. It has out-moded systems for hiring and promoting staff, and structures that encourage timidity and fear of politicisation at the highest levels.

Ultimately, it says, the public service is under-performing and unprepared for problems that would arrive in 10 years.

MORE ON THE THODEY REVIEW:

The review panel has called for a "dedicated and sustained" reform effort and warns that failure to change would strike at the heart of the purpose of the public service.

But if the commissioning of a review is intended as a kind of optimistic wake-up call, this one, coming 18 months after being commissioned, looks set to fall, for the most part, on wilfully deaf ears.

The government has accepted more than 20 of the review's 40 recommendations only in part, and rejected several others, including a move towards common pay and conditions for staff - seemingly a no-brainer for anyone who's been involved in the sprawling patchwork of disparate agreements across the service.

The present government maintains that the current remuneration system is efficient, begging the question of whether the government is working off an entirely different - and opaque - definition of the word.

It has also rejected a recommendation to abolish the staffing level cap limiting public servant numbers in the bureaucracy, as well as greater controls over disruptive machinery-of-government changes and rules for the dismissal of departmental secretaries.

The main legislation for the public service dating from the early Howard government will also stay the same, despite the Thodey review's call for changes.

In the meantime, the Coalition will begin reforming the federal bureaucracy with a three-month sprint, and will spend $15 million pursuing the early stages of the overhaul.

But a sprint is, not surprisingly, very much the opposite of what the "dedicated and sustained" reform effort recommended by the report.

"It will not be easy to transform the APS and deliver these outcomes," the report says.

"The previous experience of APS reform shows that success will require deep commitment by the APS and its leaders as well as strong endorsement by the government."

But without such a commitment on the part of the current government to see its engine room reformed, it seems that success, as defined by a carefully considered report, will remain elusive for the foreseeable future.