The Frogs in the Pond

I. The Saying

There is an old saying that surfaces sooner or later in every reform debate: "If you want to drain a stagnant pond, you must not ask the frogs for permission." The saying is punchy. It is memorable. It captures the dilemma of every bureaucratic reform in a single image. And it has a blind spot as large as the reform itself.

The saying talks about the pond. About the frogs, it says nothing.

It says nothing about what is to become of them. Whether they can move. Whether there is another pond. Whether they can swim or only croak. It treats the frogs as an obstacle — not as living creatures. And this is precisely why almost every bureaucratic reform that begins with this saying fails. Because it does not answer the question that five million people in Germany and nearly fifty million across all of Europe ask every morning when they go to work: What will happen to me?

II. The Arithmetic of the Problem

Before one reforms, one should count. Approximately 5.2 million people work in Germany's public service. That is more than in the entire German automobile industry, more than in chemicals, more than in mechanical engineering. It is the largest employer in the country. If one adds the indirectly dependent — the compliance consultants, the grants administrators, the lawyers who live off the system's complexity — one arrives at perhaps eight million people whose income depends directly or indirectly on the existence of the bureaucracy. That is one in every five members of the workforce.

Then the European level — and here one must distinguish three layers. The first layer is the EU administration itself: around 80,000 employees spread across 76 institutions, bodies, and agencies — from the European Commission with its 32,800 officials to the Parliament down to the last regulatory agency. That sounds like a great deal, but it is fewer personnel than the city administrations of Berlin and Hamburg combined. The Brussels bureaucracy is not the problem — it is the cascade it triggers.

The second layer consists of the national administrations of the 27 EU member states. With approximately 195 million people in employment and a public service share ranging from twelve per cent in Germany to over thirty per cent in the Scandinavian countries, an estimated 35 to 40 million people work in the public services of the EU states. Every regulation that Brussels issues binds a multiple of implementation staff in the member states. Behind every rule stands someone who transposes it into national law, someone who implements it, someone who monitors compliance, and someone who litigates its interpretation.

The third layer, however, is the decisive one — for the problem does not end at the borders of the EU. The bureaucracy crisis affects all of Europe: the United Kingdom with its 5.7 million public servants, Norway, Switzerland, the Balkan states, Ukraine. If one takes the entire European continent together, one arrives at an estimated 45 to 50 million people in public service. That is more than the population of Spain. The vision of an acratic debureaucratisation cannot stop at the EU's borders — it must be conceived as European, not merely European-institutional.

These people are not an abstraction. They have rental contracts, children in school, mortgages on the house, fear of the future. Most of them did not choose the civil service because they wanted to smother the world in forms. They chose it because it offered security — and because someone once told them it was an honourable profession in the service of the public good. That was once true.

III. How One Becomes a Bureaucrat

Nobody is born a bureaucrat. One is made into one — slowly, thoroughly, and usually with the best of intentions.

At the beginning there is often a young person interested in the public good. They study public administration or law or economics. They pass a selection process that rewards diligence and knowledge of rules. They take up a post, receive an office, a staff badge, and a body of regulations thicker than anything they ever read at university. In the first months they are still motivated. They want to make a difference. They have ideas.

Then the apparatus begins to work on them.

They learn that their ideas must pass through coordination procedures — internal, cross-departmental, with the federal states, with the industry associations. They learn that a good idea submitted through the wrong channels is worse than a bad idea submitted through the right ones. They learn that one is punished for a mistake but not for doing nothing. They learn that the person who drafts a submission so that no one can attack it advances faster than the person who drafts a submission so that it actually achieves something.

After five years they have learned to navigate the system. After ten years the system is second nature. After twenty years they cannot imagine a life outside it. Not because they are stupid — because the system has rewarded them for capabilities other than those needed outside. They can write memoranda that withstand any appeals procedure. But they have forgotten how to make decisions whose outcome is uncertain. They can steer a submission through eighteen rounds of consultation. But they have forgotten how to look a customer in the eye and say: "We'll do it." They can assess risks. But they have forgotten how to take them.

This is not a weakness of character. It is the rational adaptation of an intelligent person to a system that demands precisely this behaviour. And it is the reason why one cannot simply "abolish" bureaucracy — one must build the people it has shaped a path back into open life.

IV. The Three Failed Methods

The history of bureaucratic reform knows three methods. All three have failed. It is worth understanding why.

The first is the lawnmower method. One cuts across the board — ten per cent less personnel, twenty per cent less budget, every third vacancy goes unfilled. Javier Milei is currently attempting this in Argentina. Elon Musk is promoting it with "DOGE" for the American federal government. Margaret Thatcher tried it in 1980s Britain. The method has the charm of simplicity — and it is cruel. It does not distinguish between the superfluous form and the essential building permit. It hits the dedicated caseworker who distributes welfare payments just as hard as the bureaucrat who has spent years producing regulations no one reads. And it provokes maximum resistance, because it threatens everyone — including the good ones. In Britain, Thatcher made the civil service smaller. She did not make it better. The remaining officials were demoralised, the failures in public services catastrophic, and twenty years later the apparatus was already growing again — only with less experience.

The second method is natural attrition — one stops hiring and waits for the posts to vanish on their own. Germany has effectively practised this with the Bundeswehr: from 585,000 soldiers in 1990 to 180,000 in 2023. The result is an army that can neither attack nor defend. The method has a systemic flaw: it is not the superfluous who leave first but the most capable — because they have alternatives. What remains is the apparatus minus its best people. A pond that one does not drain but from which one lets the cleanest water run off.

The third method is reform from within — one commissions the bureaucracy to reform itself. Every German federal government has attempted this. There is a Commissioner for Bureaucracy Reduction, a staff unit, an annual report, a positive list, a negative list, a Bureaucracy Relief Act I, II, III, and IV. And every time the same paradox emerges: the reform generates more bureaucracy than it removes, because the reduction itself must be administered. The National Regulatory Control Council examines whether new laws create bureaucracy — and is itself a bureaucratic institution with its own budget, its own reports, and its own rules of procedure. The frogs have produced an expert opinion on the drainage. Conclusion: the pond is indispensable.

V. What Oppenheimer Would Say

Franz Oppenheimer never wrote specifically about bureaucracy. But his theory strikes at the core of the problem with surgical precision.

Oppenheimer distinguished between the "political means" and the "economic means." The political means is the appropriation of others' labour through force, monopoly, or privilege. The economic means is voluntary exchange among equals. In Oppenheimer's analysis, the state was historically the instrument of the political means — the organised apparatus through which one class exploited another.

Modern bureaucracy is something Oppenheimer did not yet know in this form — but would have recognised instantly. It is the political means in its most sublime, most sophisticated, most difficult to penetrate variant. For the bureaucracy no longer exploits in the classical sense — it takes no one's money directly, it compels no one to forced labour, it imprisons no one who pays their taxes. What it does is subtler and therefore more dangerous: it monopolises permission.

In a thoroughly bureaucratised society, one needs authorisation for almost everything. To build, to manufacture, to trade, to heal, to teach, to research. The bureaucracy is the gatekeeper between citizens and their own capacity to act. It creates a monopoly — not on land, not on capital, not on labour, but on permission. And like every monopoly, it generates unearned income: the millions of working hours that citizens and businesses must expend to apply for permits that in a free society no one would need.

Oppenheimer's solution was never destruction — it was transcendence. He did not want to abolish the state but to make it superfluous by creating the conditions under which it is no longer needed. Applied to bureaucracy, this means: one does not drain the pond — one creates a landscape in which no pond is needed.

VI. The Fourth Way

If the lawnmower method is brutal, natural attrition suicidal, and reform from within a joke — what remains?

What remains is the path of obsolescence. One does not replace the bureaucracy with nothing — one replaces it with something better. And one does not hand bureaucrats their notice — one hands them a bridge.

The first pillar of this bridge is called digitalisation — but not the kind of digitalisation that Germany has pursued so far. So far, digitalisation in Germany means: one takes a paper form and turns it into a PDF. This is not digitalisation — it is an insult to technology. Real digitalisation means: one asks whether the form is needed at all. Whether the information it requests does not already reside in another database. Whether the approval it grants cannot be replaced by an automated cross-reference. Whether the person who reviews it could not be doing something more useful.

Estonia has shown the way. Ninety-nine per cent of all government services are available online there. Filing a tax return takes three minutes. Founding a company takes eighteen minutes. Not because Estonia has fewer rules — but because the rules are applied by machines instead of by people shuffling files from left to right. The Estonian model did not throw thousands of civil servants onto the street — it freed them for other tasks. For advisory work. For oversight where it is genuinely needed. For personal contact with citizens who cannot manage the digital system.

The second pillar is called subsidiarity — not as a principle but as practice. Wherever citizens and businesses can regulate themselves, official regulation becomes the exception. This is not a libertarian fantasy — it is lived practice in Switzerland, where municipal assemblies decide on concrete issues, or in the Scandinavian countries, where the trust between state and citizen is high enough that much rests on personal responsibility which elsewhere must be controlled. The decisive condition: transparency. When everyone can see what everyone is doing, fewer inspectors are needed.

The third pillar — and the most important — is called transition funding. No bureaucrat may be pushed into poverty by the reform. This is not only a moral demand but a strategic necessity: whoever offers those affected no prospect will never overcome their resistance. The frogs will not leap from the pond voluntarily if all that awaits outside is asphalt. But they will leap if there is a lake out there — larger, cleaner, more alive than the pond they are sitting in.

In concrete terms, this means: generous retraining programmes for civil servants who wish to move into the private sector. Start-up support for those who want to become self-employed — and there are more of them than one might think, for many officials have long harboured quiet business ideas that they never dared pursue in the safe harbour of public service. Transitional salaries for three to five years to cushion the income shock. And above all: the honest recognition that the skills the system rewarded are worth something outside too — conscientiousness, knowledge of rules, organisational ability. Not every bureaucrat is a buried entrepreneur. But every one deserves a fair chance.

VII. The Costs — and the Savings

Anyone who objects at this point that all this is unaffordable has not done the arithmetic.

The annual bureaucratic costs for the German economy are estimated by the National Regulatory Control Council at around 65 billion euros. These are the direct costs — the effort required to fulfil bureaucratic obligations. The indirect costs — delayed investments, prevented start-ups, emigrated skilled workers, missed innovations — are many times higher but inherently difficult to quantify. Conservatively estimated, bureaucracy costs Germany at least 100 billion euros per year — probably considerably more.

A comprehensive transition programme for — let us say — one million civil servants transferred into other activities over ten years would, at an average transitional salary of 40,000 euros and a transition period of three to five years, cost 120 to 200 billion euros. Spread over ten years: 12 to 20 billion annually. That sounds like a great deal. But it is at most one fifth of what the bureaucracy causes in costs every single year — and the savings begin immediately, not only after ten years.

One might also put it this way: Germany spends 100 billion every year to obstruct itself. To redirect 12 to 20 billion of that toward liberating itself is not an expenditure — it is an investment with a return that any economist would dream of.

VIII. Why It Still Does Not Happen

If it were that simple, it would have happened long ago. It is not simple. Not because of the costs, not because of the technology, not because of a lack of ideas. It is not simple because it runs counter to the interests of those who control the system.

The political class in Germany — and in Europe — has grown symbiotically intertwined with the bureaucracy. Politicians need the bureaucracy to convert their promises into procedures that hurt no one. The bureaucracy needs the politicians to legitimise its existence. Both profit from the complexity: the politician can point to the procedure when a decision is unpopular. The bureaucrat can point to the political mandate when the regulation is absurd. Nobody is responsible. Everyone is busy.

Add to this: in an Ochsentour democracy, where political careers are built over decades within parties, there is no incentive to reform the bureaucracy. Whoever reforms creates enemies — among the civil servants, among the trade unions, among the associations that profit from regulation. Whoever does not reform creates no enemies. The choice is not difficult.

And then there is a deeper, cultural problem. The Germans have a particular relationship to the civil service. In the German imagination, the civil servant is not simply a state employee — they are an institution. They embody order, reliability, legal certainty. They are, in the ideal conception, the incorruptible servant of the public good. This conception was once justified — in the Prussia of Frederick the Great, in the German Empire, perhaps still in the early Federal Republic. But it has become a legend that obscures the view of reality. The modern bureaucrat is no longer a Prussian servant of the state. They are a caseworker in an apparatus that has become its own purpose. But the legend protects them — and turns every attempt at reform into sacrilege.

IX. A Word About the Frogs

The saying about the frogs and the pond has yet another problem. It implies that the frogs are the problem. That they prevent the drainage out of self-interest. That one must overcome them in order to move forward.

This is the half-truth. The whole truth is: the frogs are just as much victims of the pond as the surrounding landscape. They sit in murky water that grows murkier every year. They croak louder because they feel threatened — and they are right to feel threatened. Their pond is shrinking. The society around them is losing patience. The populists point their fingers at them. And nobody offers them a way out.

There is a quiet desperation within the administration that rarely surfaces. Civil servants who know their work is pointless but do not want to forfeit their pension entitlements. Caseworkers who have been reviewing the same forms for years, knowing they protect no one. Department heads who wake in the morning and wonder why their department still exists — and dare not voice the question, because the answer would put their existence in doubt.

These people deserve not mockery. They deserve an alternative. An honest, funded, thought-through alternative that tells them: you are not the problem. The system is the problem. And we will help you out of it.

X. The Lake Beyond the Pond

Oppenheimer's vision of acracy — a society that governs itself without domination — sounds abstract until one asks what it means for the individual civil servant. It means: freedom. Not the freedom of unemployment, but the freedom of self-determination. The possibility of deploying one's own abilities where they are needed — not where an organisational chart demands.

Imagine: a building inspector who spent twenty years stamping approvals founds an engineering consultancy with two colleagues, offering the same review faster, cheaper, and more competently — as a service, not as a sovereign act. A tax official who reviewed returns now advises small businesses that cannot afford the large firms. A senior civil servant who administered grants for twenty years builds a cooperative investment platform that connects citizens directly with regional projects — without the detour through ministerial funding pots.

These are not fantasies. These are possibilities that already exist today — but are blocked by the system, because every official who leaves tears a hole that the system refuses to fill. The apparatus holds its people fast, not because it needs them, but because it regards its own size as its raison d'être.

Acracy promises bureaucrats no less than it promises citizens: liberation from the political means. For the bureaucrat, if one looks closely, is themselves a victim of the domination they exercise. They rule over forms and are ruled by service regulations. They control others and are themselves controlled. They are prison warder and prisoner in one person. In an acratic society, they would simply be: a human being deploying their abilities freely.

The pond must be drained. But not to destroy the frogs — to show them the way to the lake.