To a large extent, the state has stumbled through the crises.
(Photo: Burkhard Mohr)
In a small group, Volker Wissing (FDP) recently expressed a bitter truth. The turnaround in traffic is a difficult task anyway. But how he should achieve his climate goals with this administration by 2030 is a mystery to him, said the Minister of Transport.
The state is not only reaching the limits of its capacity when it comes to the traffic turnaround. Whether property tax chaos, the snail-like progress in digital administration or the desolate state of the fight against money laundering – the state, like the chained giant Gulliver, is often hardly able to act. However, unlike Gulliver, who was chained by dwarfs, the state has chained itself – through “perfectionist over-regulation”, as Wolfgang Schäuble recently put it.
This criticism is not about state bashing, but about self-preservation. If Germany not only wants to manage its prosperity in the 21st century, but also wants to increase it, a debate is now needed on how the state can become more effective again through a reorganization of tasks and a more modern administration. Or as the economist Moritz Schularick writes: Exponentially growing threats in the 21st century “can no longer be fought with fax machines”.
More and more departments and staffs
The two most recent crises have shown what a state can and cannot currently do. A lot worked. Very few people have any idea how complex the quasi-nationalization of just one energy supplier like Gazprom Germania was during the energy crisis.
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But to a large extent, the state has stumbled through the crises. Again and again he fell into inaction, although the next wave of infection was foreseeable, although other countries had long since introduced energy price brakes in the energy crisis. The repeated conclusion of the crisis: the state is only partially ready for action.
Politicians always reacted to this realization according to the same pattern: with more government. Nowhere else can the new belief in the state be seen as clearly as in the organization chart of the Federal Ministry of Economics, for which a new DIN size will soon have to be invented in order to be able to depict all the new departments and management staffs.
The debate about state reform is not about the question of more or less state, but about the question of efficiency. In some areas – keyword internal and external security – more government is needed. In internal administration, on the other hand, there is an overhead. Investment funds are stuck for months because the state secretary from the finance department has more important things to do in the 18th round of voting between the ministries involved. Other funding, on the other hand, is distributed by hand because there are no criteria or sufficient data. And in the end, all of this is sold as “agile working”.
Disputes between the federal and state governments
The fact that administration is increasingly paralyzing itself is largely due to widespread risk aversion among civil servants and the now completely blurred responsibilities between the federal and state governments. The federal government has recently seized more and more powers and, in return, showered the states with money. They can still have a say in everything. Result: Now no one is responsible anymore.
An honest description of the status of the internal work processes and the status of digitization would be a first step towards improvement. But a fundamental state reform is needed: a debate about the cuts of ministries, authorities, federal states and a federalism reform, the purpose of which is not that the federal states wrest more money from the federal government, but that create clear competencies and responsibilities again.
More: The loss of prosperity – What the crisis is costing Germany