The Scholz cabinet suffers from Parkinson’s. No, not from the tremor sickness. But on Parkinson’s law, named after a British colonial official.
This is about administrative apparatuses having a bad habit of bloating, and it says: the more people sit together in an agency, the more time they need to manage themselves. This law applies to the new traffic light government.
No other government has ever been as big as the one now in office. There have never been so many ministries, so many state secretaries, and such large management staff. The new federal government is an XXL federal government. This threatens a machine that deals more and more with itself and slows down government work rather than accelerating it.
This criticism has nothing to do with “bashing” against allegedly lazy and sleeveless officials. Many work well beyond the agreed working hours.
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.
And the demands on the state have certainly increased in the 21st century. The world is becoming more confusing and the state must be prepared for new threats such as cyber attacks.
There are also glaring shortcomings in the state, as the corona crisis and the Wirecard scandal have shown. The state has actually saved some areas and the lack of personnel in the municipal building authorities has been adequately described. So more staff are needed – but in the right places.
The fish stinks from the head
However, the traffic light mainly inflates the management staff in which politics is coordinated. Both economics and finance ministers each have four civil servants, the Chancellery has four ministers of state. A novelty.
At the same time, the creation of new top civil servants is at the expense of the civil servants who are really needed: judicial officers, police officers, customs officers. Because the coalition wants to delete planned posts.
Even before this increase in jobs, the number of civil servants in the federal ministries was at a record level. But that has not led to better politics.
Two examples: In the 2020 economic stimulus package, the federal government made two billion available to promote artificial intelligence. Not a cent was lost in a year because federal ministries played administrative ping-pong. One official puts it this way: Actually, 80 percent of the officials should be removed from the process. Then you might have a chance to get the money on the road faster.
Foreign Office: Less importance, more staff
Another example is the Federal Foreign Office: Because the Chancellery and the Federal Ministry of Finance have increasingly acquired competencies in foreign policy, the House is experiencing a loss of importance, and in the coalition negotiations it was even a kind of leftover ramp.
In stark contrast to this are the development of personnel and budgets: The AA budget has increased from 3.7 to 6.3 billion euros since 2015, and the number of civil servants has increased by nine percent since 2017. Since the beginning of the year there has even been a new Federal Office in Brandenburg that supports the Foreign Office in its work.
Other houses such as the Chancellery and the Ministry of Finance are also currently expanding because they have grown so much in terms of personnel. The bureaucratic apparatus is thus also structurally building an ever larger swath through Berlin-Mitte.
This is only logical: because if there are more chiefs, there also needs to be more subordinates, true to Parkinson’s law: everyone wishes to increase the number of their subordinates, but not the number of their rivals.
More: “Biggest transformation in at least 100 years”: Scholz announces a big leap in climate policy