France 2030 investment plan evaluation system, Digi Mart USA News: In a report devoted to France 2030, the Cour des comptes (France’s national audit court) concludes that the plan’s evaluation framework does not yet make it possible to measure its first effects. The court points in particular to a centralized information system that arrived three years after the plan was launched and that it considers “not very robust,” as well as evaluation credits that have been very little used.
The Secretariat General for Investment (SGPI) had made evaluation the main argument for defending its management of the France 2030 plan. At the mid-term review in July, the body attached to the Prime Minister’s office presented several evaluations carried out by independent experts and defended its methodology.
Bruno Bonnell, the SGPI’s secretary general, said it was a decision-support tool he would like to see generalized across all public policies.
The court’s assessment is not fully shared. The Cour des comptes has published its report on France 2030, a investment program of 54 billion euros aimed at supporting long-term economic and technological transformation.
The magistrates examined the plan’s design, governance and management, as well as its evaluation framework. The court did not carry out its own evaluation of the plan, citing insufficient hindsight to measure its effects.
It noted that only 642 projects, fewer than 10% of those funded, had been completed by the end of 2025.
The court’s conclusion is clear: to date, the system developed by the SGPI does not allow the plan’s first effects to be measured. The evaluation tools are described as improvable, unfinished and producing incomplete results.
In particular, the SGPI’s IT tool would not allow the plan to be monitored efficiently. Because implementation of France 2030 is delegated to four main operators and several secondary operators, the report warns that consolidating their data in a single, real-time tool is essential to monitor the plan and measure results.
The building blocks of this centralized system were deployed only in 2024 and have been “fully operational” only since March 2025. For three years, operators sent project monitoring information to the SGPI by email and by spreadsheet extracts from their own IT tools.
The magistrates said the delay in setting up a centralized monitoring system is hard to explain given the financial stakes and the ambition of France 2030. The SGPI has never had an information systems directorate, and only two staff members from different departments are assigned to the function.
Even after years of waiting, the IT tool is judged “not very robust in use.” The problem stems largely from the lack of interoperability with operators’ tools, which forces them to upload financial information and project indicators to a platform every month, a process the report describes as costly in time and resources. The tool also does not cover the full scope of France 2030.
The SGPI acknowledged to the magistrates the “weakness” and “malfunctions” of its monitoring tools. The body plans to launch several IT projects, including linking databases, but the court regrets that they are not backed by a coherent, prioritized workload plan with the resources required.
The Cour des comptes therefore calls on the SGPI to strengthen management of its information systems, interconnect them, and, if necessary, mobilize the credits earmarked for evaluation to do so.
One original feature of France 2030 is that a share of its budget was set aside for evaluation from the outset: 0.1% of credits is allocated to project evaluation. However, the SGPI was slow to use these funds.
At the end of 2025, only 16% of the 51 million euro evaluation envelope had been committed, or 7.5 million euros. The 2024-2026 programming had planned to devote 23 million euros to it.
The report notes that while the financing of the next two three-year programs is expected to draw on a little more than half of the evaluation credits by 2032, it is paradoxical that so few resources have been used at the midpoint of the plan, even though monitoring its rollout was set as a priority. According to the SGPI, the low use of credits is explained by delays in IT projects and in executing study contracts launched by the evaluation directorate.
The report also raises an independence concern. A “very large majority” of evaluation work is outsourced to consulting firms and research laboratories, and the SGPI does not steer it; management is largely delegated to the operators.
The court says these operators conduct their own evaluations of France 2030 actions, which undermines the consolidation of studies and the use of their results at the highest level of plan governance. Because the operators responsible for implementing the plan also carry out evaluations, the independence of those assessments is questioned.
To improve implementation, the Cour des comptes calls on the SGPI to consolidate its information systems, make its monitoring data reliable, and prepare ex-post evaluations so that measurement of impacts rests on a more independent, more consistent method that can be used directly for strategic steering. Starting next year, the authority attached to the Prime Minister’s office is asked to set up an organization and shared tools with the main operators and to develop cohort tracking of beneficiaries, so that evaluations can be carried out after projects are fully implemented.
In the report’s words, evaluating the plan’s effects must be designed as a component of steering, not as an exercise imposed at the end of the period.
