What a compromise could look like in order to avoid staff chaos

Berlin At the moment it looks as if one of the most pointed demands of the FDP in the election campaign could fail because of questions that seem simple at first glance. According to the will of the liberals, a digital ministry should help to catch up with the large delays in digitization – a separate department for one of the core problems of the 21st century.

But the new ministry could fail mainly because of organizational hurdles: Where would there be a vacant building for a new authority? Where do the staff come from? And which departments would the other ministries have to give up in order to fill a new digital ministry with life?

Actually, it should have been so far in 2017 that digitization got its own department, but in the end it only became the cumbersome position of Minister of State for Digital in the Federal Chancellery in the person of Dorothee Bär (CSU). Bär was always trying, but she lacked voting rights in the government cabinet and the necessary funding to really advance the overdue digital projects.

“There was clearly no instance that would coordinate and actively shape complex digital projects across departments,” said the technology policy spokesman for the FDP parliamentary group, Mario Brandenburg, to the Handelsblatt. The Expert Commission for Research and Innovation (EFI) is also calling for a digital ministry that should be equipped with enough money and “react proactively and quickly to changes and quickly involve relevant actors”, according to the EFI.

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Therefore, according to the FDP’s plan, a separate digital ministry should be created in the next legislative period. But the restructuring would be enormous and would require a lot of energy, which would then be missing in the implementation of large projects. A deterrent example is the change in the broadband expansion department to the Federal Ministry of Transport in 2013. At that time, it took 18 months for the new department to be operational at all, according to political circles in Berlin.

A completely new ministry would involve even more effort. Because in the last four years a total of 504 people in the federal ministries were busy with the topic of digitization, that is evident from the answer to a small request from the FDP parliamentary group. Many of them would have to change ministries, entire departments, some of which were just newly created, would have to move.

Chaos in the ministries

In the Ministry of Justice this would include, for example, the sub-departments of fundamental questions and consumer policy of the information society, but also telecommunications and media law. The Federal Ministry of Labor only created a new department “Digitization and the world of work” in May 2018, including the “Think Tank Digital Working Society”, which functions in a similar way to a think tank.

At the Federal Ministry of Family Affairs, the large-scale project “Digitization of family benefits” is likely to come into focus when it comes to withdrawing competencies. The “Digital Society” working group monitors all digital activities of the Ministry of Family Affairs.

Because whether digital pact age, gender-equitable digitization or child and youth media protection – the topic of digitization plays a role everywhere in the ministry. There are also bright minds in the working group who could arouse covetousness in a digital ministry.

There are also various departments in the Ministry of Education and Research that could be considered for a transfer: For example, the sub-department for “Technology-Oriented Research for Innovations”.

Hardly any other ministry has embraced as many digital projects in the past legislature as the house of Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU). In order to catch up with the delayed digitization of his predecessors, Spahn appointed his confidante Gottfried Ludewig (CDU) as head of the digitization department in 2018.

Since then, Ludewig has put the minister’s enthusiasm for digital reform into practice: with the electronic patient file, the electronic prescription, the app on prescription and the billions in the hospital future law, Ludewig had to push projects that had been delayed over decades.

The society for telematics applications of the health card (Gematik), in which the Federal Ministry of Health is the majority owner, could switch sides to a new digital ministry as a digital project.

State Secretary Christian Kastrop, who is responsible for digitization in the Federal Ministry of Justice, has a clear opinion on the question of whether a new digital ministry would be a sensible solution. He doubts whether such a ministry would make sense, which “according to Prussian tradition would bring the digital expertise of other ministries into the house”. “What was separated out there, the houses would then probably rebuild”, Kastrop told the Handelsblatt. “Then we would have a less useful duplication of structures.”

Compromise multiple skills

It is also clear to the FDP that the restructuring of the ministries would be a mammoth task with potential for chaos. That is why party circles are now saying that affiliation to an existing ministry, such as in Rhineland-Palatinate or North Rhine-Westphalia, would also be possible. In Mainz, the topic of digitization is affiliated with the Ministry of Labor, in NRW with the Ministry of Economic Affairs.

A viable solution against the background that the potential coalition partners SPD and Greens are skeptical of their very own digital ministry. “You can’t get rid of the digital policy deficits of the last few years automatically by setting up a digital ministry,” says the Greens’ spokesman for the digital economy, Dieter Janecek, for the Handelsblatt.

However, they are quite open to compromises: “Of course we will talk about which structures a new federal government needs so that digital policy finally gets the necessary momentum and the necessary stringent control,” said Janecek.

A multiple ministry with digital expertise could also be a good compromise for the SPD. In Rhineland-Palatinate, for example, where a traffic light coalition governs, the SPD parliamentary group leader Alexander Schweitzer is Minister for Labor, Social Affairs, Transformation and Digitization. The Social Democrats are well versed in running such a super ministry.

Collaboration: Dietmar Neuerer, Frank Specht, Heike Anger, Barbara Gillmann, Jürgen Klöckner

More: This is what a German digital ministry could look like

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