GreenZone clubs stymie restructuring plan

The director of the office of the presidency of the republic, Nasir al-Ani, told a reporter for Aswat al Iraq:

that the retention by the main blocs of their allocations [in terms of number] of portfolios in the government, which Prime Minister Maliki is trying to fill now, has stymied the idea of downsizing it, which means that we are back to repair and filling posts that have been vacant since last year.

Al-Ani is himself a member of the Iraqi Accord Front, the main Sunni parliamentary bloc, and he explained that

at first, there was an agreement to propose technocrats, and the idea was to first reduce the ministries to 22, and then restructure them to 17 after merging similar ministries like science and technology with higher education, environment with health, and agriculture with natural resources. But it seems the blocs hung on to their ministries, and the concept wasn't successful, so we're back with the project of patching up and filling vacancies, in other words the return of ministries to the blocs that abandoned them, such as the Iraqi Accord Front.