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 health care, 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 twentieth 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 impact is never measured; an electronic file that is merely a scanned sheet 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 named its limits even then. In the 1980s Renate Mayntz described the problem of programme policy observing itself. In 1970, in The Pentagon of Power, Lewis Mumford developed the thesis of a Megamachine that cannot reform itself. The theoretical references are ready to 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. The conditions of its construction can be summed up in four preconditions:

First — stability of rules. Bureaucracy works when rules remain in force over a longer period. It can apply a new rule; it cannot constantly design new rules while implementing the old ones at the same time. Its files, forms, training courses and procedures need time to become established. A rule that is changed again after two years has scarcely 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 the state border can be represented in its logic only to a very limited extent.

Third — separability of subject matter. Bureaucracy is divided into ministries. This presupposes that substantive questions can be broken down separably into specialist 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 written down; it is closed when it has been recorded. The file is not a side issue; it is what constitutes the administration. It makes the case traceable, verifiable, legally secure.

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

3Four fault lines

The erosion of the four preconditions has not progressed 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 foundation of a form of administration that in turn dealt with 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 still tries to capture them by location, ownership and legal form. In many areas, terms such as company or location are 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 the level below it — the region, the federal state, the municipality — have both become more important than the national level itself. German administration sits between two directions of pressure that it cannot serve at the same time without being ground down. The EU demands standardisation; the region demands distinctiveness. Berlin tries to mediate and in the process produces a language no one 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 and calls this digitalisation. But it has no idea what it means to work in a data-based way — that would be not only a technical question but an epistemic one. Data combine according to different rules than file reference numbers.

3.4 Hierarchy

Bureaucracy is built hierarchically because it assumes that those at the top know more than those below. In the past this assumption was mostly correct. Today it is mostly wrong. The caseworker 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 wanting 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 caseworker receives it, checks it according to the old rules and writes a decision that is delivered by post. Digitalisation is confined to the input channel. Processing remains analogue.

This 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 any historical burden. Digitalisation was not an appendage but the basic assumption. Today most Estonian administrative procedures can be completed in seconds, because the 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 link between authorities takes away their autonomy. Whoever lets data circulate freely between the federal government and the Länder grinds 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 no proof 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 some 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 success of the programmes is monitored — if at all — through commissioned reports from the funders’ own research organisations. In a blog post in July 2025, Fraunhofer ISI researchers stated that the learning aspiration of previous strategies had not been fulfilled.1

5.2 Construction

Building applications in Germany now take four times as long as twenty years ago. The 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 the courts all at once — and for that reason it cannot be pushed through politically.

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 meant to make it possible is fragmented between the Federal Office, the foreigners’ authority, the job centre, the school 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 lasting success. Long-term care insurance was introduced in 1995 on the assumption of a demographic development that is now taking an entirely different course. But the structure does not adapt; it is fed with additional funds. The electronic patient record has been announced for more than ten years and is still not functional.

5.6 Tax system

More than two hundred special provisions, exemptions, privileges. No one 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 in response to a specific lobbying demand, without the system as a whole being taken into account.

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

6Inability to reform itself

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. That is precisely what Weber wanted to prevent.

Second — the personnel answer. Anyone who works in an authority as a civil servant for thirty years becomes a bureaucrat. That is not a moral failure 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 conceived cannot change it — they have to check proof-of-use statements because the Federal Budget Code requires it.

Third — the incentive answer. Even those who wanted to have no reason to commit themselves to reform. Careers are made by superiors, not by outside impact. Those who stand out are not promoted. Those who keep quiet inherit 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-sustaining system in the strict cybernetic sense — a system that produces precisely 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 filed away.
• An audit office report generates 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 we live in a Megamachine — a large structure held together by bureaucracy, hierarchy and standardisation, which cannot observe its own functional logic. It is, he wrote, incompetent in a higher sense. Not incompetent at carrying out 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 disintegration.

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

There are tentative signs of transitional movements:

The generational question. The civil servants who began their careers in the 1970s and 1980s will retire over the next ten years. Younger people are following 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 room for financing so much that the present system will no longer be sustainable for lack of money. That will force reforms — probably hard, painful, unplanned ones.

Alternative structures. SPRIND (the 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 twentieth-century form 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 keep running until it collapses at some point — through a fiscal crisis, a political upheaval, a demographic dislocation. What does not seem 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 put a field of observation in order. 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 stretch over twenty years or over fifty.

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

Third — what role does the public play? Structures are changed by pressure; pressure arises from 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 instead). Probably both — differently in different areas.

Fifth — who observes? If the administration cannot observe itself, the observer position outside becomes important. Who takes it up? The audit offices try, but without resonance. Academia produces commissioned studies for the funding 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 itself together. The only question is whether the change is shaped deliberately 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 that position — provisionally, with open questions, in the awareness that the real work is only just beginning.