The digital summit is considered the high office of the federal government, science and business for everything to do with digitization. Throughout the year, experts from all disciplines get involved in a wide variety of working groups before they discuss publicly at a festive event in December how the state, society and companies can make the leap from the analogue to the digital world.
What began in 2006 as an IT summit under Angela Merkel is also to take place in the future – with one small difference: the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology no longer organizes the work and the summit meeting alone. In the future, officials will have to share the task with colleagues from the Ministry of Digital and Transport.
But: Didn’t the new federal government of SPD, Greens and FDP want to eliminate the chaos surrounding digital responsibilities internally? During the federal election campaign, the Liberals even campaigned for a ministry for digital transformation.
The result is the Ministry for Digital Affairs and Transport, which is to be given the powers of other ministries and the Chancellery under the leadership of FDP Minister Volker Wissing. At least that’s what the organizational decree by Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD), which the federal cabinet passed on December 8, provides for.
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But far from it. Instead of a strong digital minister in the self-proclaimed “progress coalition”, the departments are jostling for tasks and staff. The reorganization should be completed by the middle of the month. In the meantime, however, government circles are circulating February 7th or even February 14th as a date on which there may be clarity as to what the new digital minister will now be specifically responsible for.
“Shared Responsibilities”
There doesn’t seem to be much hope for centralization anymore. There is talk of a new “magic word”: “Common responsibilities”, it says. Observers of the digitization policy of the past years have bad feelings about this assessment. For example, before the federal elections, the Regulatory Control Council, which is responsible for reducing bureaucracy, tried to map the responsibilities in the state for digitization on a DIN A4 page. It was successful, but countless bodies and authorities appeared, together with the headline: “Does it work?”
Digital Minister Wissing will not change anything about that. He will have to share the responsibilities for digitization with at least six other departments. This seems to have been the unanimous opinion in the coalition for a long time. “I think it’s right to have the topic in a ministry now and to upgrade it,” said SPD leader Lars Klingbeil, adding: “But digitization remains a cross-cutting issue that all ministries face major challenges with.”
The responsibilities of the ministries show how cross-sectional it actually is:
The president of the digital association Bitkom, Achim Berg, regrets that the digital policy competences were not bundled “more decisively and courageously”. “It is now important that all departments pull together in digital policy matters,” Berg told the Handelsblatt. The Digital Ministry should play a leading role in this.
It turns out, however, that the new Digital Ministry makes some things more complicated. Example of digital identity: The federal government has decided to manage the future project of a legally secure ID card for smartphones itself and not to leave the field to Google, Apple and Co. With the Digital Ministry, however, the already confusing project now has another collaborator – who could further increase the fragmentation of the project.
Digital Ministry wants to have a say
While the Ministry of Transport was previously only involved in digital identities via the digital driving license, it is now also responsible for coordinating the German position on the EU eIDAS regulation on legally secure identities valid throughout Europe.
Volker Wissing’s house probably has just enough responsibility that it sits at the table and has a say in internal government votes, but can hardly influence technical decisions or the governance of the project, as the Handelsblatt learned from government circles.
Instead, the Federal Ministry of the Interior should assume responsibility for the digital identities. In addition, the Federal Chancellery and the Federal Ministry of Economics should continue to be involved in various project strands. However, joint operational responsibility will lie with a “cross-departmental agile project group”. To what extent the houses will be willing to hand over competences, staff and budget there, however, seems unclear so far.
The Federal Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of the Interior will also have to coordinate on the subject of digital administration in the future. In keeping with the new maxim of “common responsibilities”, Ministers Christian Lindner (FDP) and Nancy Faeser (SPD) have now set up their own steering committee in order to “be able to make short-term and pragmatic decisions” on IT consolidation, as the Ministry of Finance announced . The project has been stagnating for many years and now devours not the half a billion euros that was once forecast, but at least 3.4 billion.
The CDU MP Rainer Brandl pulled out a graphic to illustrate the back and forth of responsibilities in the opening debate of the digital minister in the Bundestag. “We once tried to understand who was given which responsibilities for digitization,” he said. “It’s complicated.” Red and green and yellow arrows, corresponding to the party colors, showed which ministries are moving to which ones. Every color gives something, and every color gets something,” Brandl summed up. “The result is a fraudulent label.”
The Minister of Construction is responsible for intelligent cities – from digital urban planning to equipping the infrastructure with sensors – which the Digital Minister, who is also responsible for traffic and thus for networked and autonomous driving, should have been entitled to do. And the Economics Minister wants to continue having a say in all digital policy issues.
And so digitization remains a cross-cutting issue, with different ministries responsible. Just like with the organization of this year’s digital summit – but there in “joint responsibility” with the digital and transport ministries. Parliamentary State Secretary in the Economics Ministry Franziska Brantner (Greens) promises that civil society should also be more closely involved there in the future. Another actor with whom the responsible ministries have to coordinate.
More: More courage, less small-stateism: How Germany’s administration should learn from the economy