The End of a Form of Administration

1Introduction

German public administration does not fail in individual cases; it fails as a form. It fails in construction, in migration, in education, in the health sector, in research funding, in digitalisation. It does not fail because its staff are incompetent — most are trained, conscientious, often committed. It fails because a particular historical form of administration — the administration of the 20th century — has lost the conditions under which it could function. The crisis becomes visible as a symptom: a building permit that takes five years; an asylum procedure that never ends; a funding programme whose effect is never measured; an electronic file that is merely a scanned piece of paper. These are not mishaps. They are the signs that an entire construction has lost its preconditions.

This working paper attempts to describe the phenomenon in such a way that it is not mistaken for a programme proposal. It is not about how the administration ought to be reformed. There are proposals enough. It is about what is happening structurally, why the reform routines the system has provided for itself do not take hold, and which observer position is appropriate for the diagnosis.

The finding is old. Max Weber theorised bureaucracy as a historical form around 1920 and already named its limits at the time. Renate Mayntz described the problem of the self-observation of programme policy in the 1980s. In 1970, in The Pentagon of Power, Lewis Mumford developed the thesis of a megamachine that cannot reform itself. The theoretical references are at hand. What is missing is a sober inventory of what we are currently observing.

2Bureaucracy as a Historical Form

Bureaucracy in today's sense is an achievement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was built in a particular social constellation and optimised for its tasks. Its conditions of construction can be summarised in four preconditions:

First — stability of rules. Bureaucracy works when rules remain valid over a longer period. It can apply a new rule; it cannot constantly design new rules while implementing the old ones. Its files, forms, training courses and procedures need time to become established. A rule that is changed again after two years has hardly any half-life in the administration.

Second — territorial closure. Bureaucracy is made for a jurisdiction that coincides with the borders of the state. Its responsibilities end where the state ends. Tasks that run across several states or across state borders can be represented in its logic only to a very limited extent.

Third point — separability by subject. Bureaucracy is divided into ministries. This presupposes that substantive questions can be broken down separably into departmental responsibilities. Economy, transport, environment, research, health, education — each ministry has its files, its officials, its rules. Whatever lies between the ministries is, in terms of organisational structure, a blind spot.

Fourth — reliance on writing. Bureaucracy is record-keeping. A case exists when it has been described; it is closed when it has been recorded. The file is not a side issue; it is what constitutes administration. It makes the case traceable, verifiable, legally secure.

Today these four preconditions no longer hold, partially or completely. Change happens in weeks, not decades. Problems are intertwined transnationally. Substantive questions cut across ministries. Writing is now only one of several media forms — data, images and algorithms stand beside it or take its place. Bureaucracy tries to carry on working as if the preconditions were intact. The result is a form that formally still functions but substantively no longer fulfils its tasks.

3Four Fracture Lines

The erosion of the four preconditions has not advanced equally far everywhere. But it can be described precisely as a diagnosis in each of the four areas.

3.1 Industry

Industrial mass production was the basis of a form of administration that, for its part, processed mass cases. Tax collection, social insurance, trade supervision, market regulation — bureaucracy and industrial society developed in parallel. Today industry is deterritorialised; value chains run across continents. The administration tries to continue capturing them by location, ownership and legal form. Terms such as company or location are, in many areas, now merely accounting fictions.

3.2 Nation State

Bureaucracy was the bureaucracy of a nation state. Today the level of action above the national one — the EU with its regulations and funding programmes — and below it — the region, the federal state, the municipality — have at the same time become more important than the national level itself. German administration sits between two directions of pressure that it cannot serve simultaneously without being ground down. The EU demands standardisation, the region demands distinctiveness. Berlin tries to mediate and in doing so produces a language that nobody understands.

3.3 Writing

The file is the past. What counts today are data flows — structured, searchable, combinable information. A file describes an individual case; a database links patterns. The administration has remained trapped in the logic of writing. It produces files, scans them in and calls that digitalisation. But it has no idea what it means to work on the basis of data — that would be not only a technical question but an epistemic one. Data connect according to different rules than file references.

3.4 Hierarchy

Bureaucracy is structured hierarchically because it assumes that those at the top know more than those below. This assumption used mostly to be right. Today it is mostly wrong. The case officer in the building authority knows more about the building problem than her head of department; the programmer of a funding database knows more about its weaknesses than the head of unit responsible for it. Hierarchy works when knowledge runs along the hierarchy. When that is no longer the case, hierarchy becomes an obstacle instead of a clarification.

4Digitalisation as a Symptom

Anyone who wants to observe German administration can start with digitalisation. It makes visible what remains invisible in the classic file structure. When you apply for an online public service, you typically go through a process that leaves the old structure unchanged: you enter data into a form, the form is sent off, a case officer receives it, checks it according to the old rules, writes a notice that is delivered by post. Digitalisation is confined to the input channel. The processing remains analogue.

That is not missing technology. The technology is available. What is missing is the structural, organisational, legal and mental readiness to leave the old logic behind. Estonia shows how it could be done differently. There the administration was built after 1991 without historical baggage. Digitalisation was not an appendage but the basic assumption. Today most Estonian administrative procedures can be completed in seconds, because data flow between authorities instead of being managed in files. A marriage is registered electronically with one office; all other authorities — tax, social insurance, residents' registration — are informed automatically. That is not advanced administration but a different administration.

Germany will not take this path, because it would destroy the existing structure. Whoever builds an electronic connection between authorities deprives the authorities of their autonomy. Whoever lets data circulate fluidly between the federal government and the Länder wears down federalism at a decisive point. Digitalisation does not succeed because it cannot succeed without shaking the political structure that would have to carry it.

The lack of digitalisation is therefore not evidence of incompetence. It is the logical consequence of a form of administration that cannot give itself up.

5Symptoms in the Policy Areas

The same diagnosis can be traced in almost all major areas of administration. Here are six examples, kept brief.

5.1 Research Funding

More than twenty project management agencies administer more than four hundred funding programmes on behalf of around twelve federal ministries plus the EU plus the Länder. In 2026 the Bavarian Supreme Audit Office put the number of Bavarian programmes alone at more than four hundred, with administrative costs of up to sixty per cent in individual cases. The programmes' success is monitored — if at all — through commissioned reports by the funders' own research organisations. Fraunhofer ISI researchers said in a blog post in July 2025 that the learning aspiration of previous strategies had not been fulfilled.1

5.2 Construction

Building applications in Germany today take four times as long as twenty years ago. Building codes have not become simpler but more complicated, because every crisis adds a new layer of regulation: energy, fire protection, accessibility, structural engineering, noise, listed buildings. There is no office whose task would be simplification. Complexity grows because it accumulates. A thorough reform would affect lobby groups, associations, professional bodies, the insurance industry and case law all at once — it is therefore politically impossible to push through.

5.3 Migration

Asylum procedures take two to three years on average. The federal offices are chronically overloaded. Family reunification works formally but not in practice. Integration is invoked, but the administrative structure that is supposed to enable it is fragmented between the Federal Office, the immigration authority, the job centre, the education authority, the municipality, the welfare association, the language school and the recognition office. Each authority demands its own documents, its own forms, its own office hours.

5.4 Schools

Teacher shortages in almost all federal states. Dilapidated buildings. Outdated curricula. The answer is always the same: another reform, another programme, another strategy. The structural question — how to educate children in a digital, multilingual, climate-critical world — is not asked, because it is too big for the forms of administration available. The federal structure guarantees sixteen parallel answers to every question and no common solution.

5.5 Health Care

Hospital reforms for thirty years, without thoroughgoing success. Long-term care insurance was introduced in 1995 on the assumption of a demographic development that is today proceeding completely differently. But the structure does not adapt; it is fed with additional funds. The digital patient record has been announced for over ten years and is still not functional.

5.6 Tax System

More than two hundred special provisions, exceptions, privileges. Nobody fully understands the system any more. A fundamental simplification has been promised for thirty years and never implemented. Complexity grows because each new provision is formulated as an answer to a specific lobby demand, without the overall system being considered.

The list could be extended. Pensions, social insurance, justice, internal security, environmental law — everywhere one finds the same structure: an old form of administration, overloaded with tasks for which it was not made, helpless in adapting because its construction does not provide for adaptation.

6Incapacity for Self-Reform

Why does reform not succeed? This question has three answers that work together.

First — the structural answer. By its construction, bureaucracy is a rule-executing institution. It knows how to follow rules. It does not know how to turn itself into an institution that develops, tests, discards and replaces rules. That would be a learning institution — something that classic bureaucracy structurally excludes, because learning presupposes discretion and discretion runs counter to the bureaucratic principle. If administration is allowed to learn, it could become arbitrary. Weber explicitly wanted to prevent that.

Second — the personnel answer. Whoever works for thirty years as an official in an authority becomes a bureaucrat. That is not a moral failing but conditioning. The structure shapes behaviour. It rewards risk avoidance, record-keeping, attendance at meetings. It punishes initiative, taking responsibility for failure, criticism directed upwards. Over four decades a population has accumulated in the German ministerial bureaucracy that is predisposed to administering, not to shaping. Even committed officials who know that the funding logic is wrongly designed cannot change it — they have to check proof-of-use statements because the Federal Budget Code prescribes it.

Third point — the incentive answer. Even someone who wanted to has no reason to commit to reform. Careers are made by superiors, not by external impact. Whoever stands out is not promoted. Whoever keeps quiet inherits the post. The promotion structure trains people to conform; conformity reinforces the structure.

The three answers interlock: the structure produces the people. The people reproduce the structure. The incentives stabilise both. The result is a self-preserving system in the strict cybernetic sense — a system that produces exactly the conditions of its own continuation. Not because anyone wants it that way, but because the feedback loops are closed accordingly.

The reform routines the system has provided for itself are all ineffective:

• A new minister changes the top, but not the apparatus.
• An administrative reform changes forms, not incentives.
• A new strategy replaces the old strategy without anything having been learned from the old one.
• An evaluation produces a report that is archived.
• An audit office report produces a day of press coverage that passes.

The system cannot reform itself. It would have to abolish the structures on which its actors live.

7The Question of Transition

If the diagnosis is correct — if bureaucracy is a historical form that has lost its preconditions, and if it cannot reform itself — then the question is no longer how it can be reformed. It is what comes after it.

In his late writings Lewis Mumford formulated a similar diagnosis for large-scale industrial society. He called the construction in which we live a megamachine — a large structure held together by bureaucracy, hierarchy and standardisation that cannot observe its own functional logic. It is, he wrote, incompetent in a higher sense. Not incompetent at executing its routines — but incapable of self-observation, of learning, of correction. Mumford saw no possibility of reform from within. He expected either a deliberate replacement by other structures — he called them polytechnics: decentralised, rooted in craft, capable of learning — or a disintegration.

Mumford's answer was unsatisfying because it was too closely tied to wishful thinking. But his diagnosis has stood the test. What we are observing today is not a crisis within a form of administration. It is the crisis of a form of administration — and the question is what will take its place.

There are tentative indications of transitional movements:

The generational question. The officials who began their careers in the 1970s and 1980s will retire over the next ten years. Younger people are coming in who were socialised in a different world — with a different relationship to hierarchy, to transparency, to responsibility. That is no substitute for structural reform, but it creates possibilities.

The fiscal crisis. Over the next ten years, demographic change and the fiscal burden will narrow the scope for financing so severely that the existing system will no longer be able to continue for lack of money. That will force reforms — probably hard, painful, unplanned ones.

Alternative structures. SPRIND (Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation), the Cyber Agency, individual pilot projects — recent years have produced attempts to work within the state but outside the ministerial bureaucracy. These structures are small, are watched suspiciously by the classic administration, and some are ground down. But they show that alternatives are conceivable.

Subnational movements. In Estonia, Denmark, parts of Switzerland and individual German municipalities, administrative structures are emerging that are built differently from the national apparatus. They are not directly transferable, but they demonstrate that the form of the 20th century is not the only conceivable one.

It is possible that a different form of administration will gradually emerge from these movements. It is just as possible that the old form will carry on until it collapses at some point — through a fiscal crisis, a political upheaval, a demographic dislocation. What does not appear possible is a reform under its own steam. The megamachine does not reform itself. It is replaced — or it disintegrates.

8Open Questions

This working paper is not a closed analysis but an attempt to order a field of observation. Several questions remain open.

First — how long is the period of transition? In the 1970s Mumford reckoned with time horizons of decades. But crises can accelerate. We do not know whether the dissolution of today's form of administration will extend over twenty or over fifty years.

Second — what breaks first? If the administration collapses, it will not do so equally everywhere. Some areas are more robust (social insurance, land registry), others more fragile (asylum, construction, schools). Which areas collapse first — and what consequences that has — is an empirical question that is not yet being asked.

Third point — what role does the public play? Structures are changed by pressure; pressure arises through attention. The German administrative malaise produces no continuous pressure, because it has no scandal format. It is slow, structural, without personalisation. As long as that remains so, the pressure for change will not arise. That may change when the consequences become directly noticeable to the electorate.

Fourth — what role do technical developments play? Artificial intelligence will arrive in the administration in the coming years. It is open whether it will stabilise the old structure (by making it more efficient) or undermine it (by showing what administration could be otherwise). Probably both — differently in different areas.

Fifth — who observes? If the administration cannot observe itself, the observer position outside becomes important. Who takes it on? The audit offices try, but without resonance. Academia carries out commissioned studies for the agencies. The media focus on scandal formats. What is missing is a form of external observation that argues structurally, stays with the subject over the long term and generates resonance. Whether it will emerge is open.

The diagnosis of this working paper is sober, not resigned. It does not claim that nothing can be done. It claims that what needs to be done cannot be found within the logic of the administration itself. Whoever expects reform from the system is mistaken. Whoever considers the system unchangeable is equally mistaken — it will change because it can no longer hold. The only question is whether the change will be consciously shaped or suffered as disintegration.

That is a different question from the reform question of the twentieth century. It demands a different observer position, a different language, a different patience. This working paper is an attempt to take up this position — provisionally, with open questions, in the awareness that the real work is only beginning.