The State That Builds on Itself and Bricks Up the Future

I. Two Building Sites

In Berlin there are two building sites that, together, say more about the condition of the country than any government address. On the bend of the Spree the extension of the Federal Chancellery is rising — a building that nearly doubles the seat of government, though at over 25,000 square metres it is already larger than the White House or the Élysée Palace. It was approved at 485 million euros; the current estimate is 777 million — almost three hundred million more than authorised, criticised by the Federal Court of Auditors and by the Taxpayers' Association, which points out that the same sum would renovate more than three hundred bridges on the federal highways. A few kilometres away, the general renovation of Schloss Bellevue and the Office of the Federal President begins in 2026, at 601 million euros; the head of state moves into temporary quarters at a rent of some sixteen million euros a year. Two seats of representation, together about one and a half billion euros. The state is building on itself.

II. Not a Slip, a Pattern

One might take these for isolated cases — the usual cost explosions of large public buildings. But they are not a slip; they are a pattern. The state expenditure ratio, the relation of public spending to gross domestic product, stood at 49.5 percent in 2024, a good two points above the long-term average; the public purse spent more than two trillion euros. One is nearing the threshold that Helmut Kohl once marked with the words: At fifty percent state expenditure, socialism begins. Measured against the economy, the state grows steadily larger.

III. The Apparatus Grows at the Top

And it grows not only in area but upward. At the level of the federal ministries the number of posts rose by sixteen percent between 2017 and 2021; from 2021 to 2024 more than eight thousand seven hundred were added — many of them unfilled, so that the Federal Court of Auditors complains that the intended strengthening of tasks is not actually achieved. Growth in posts for its own sake. It shows most clearly at the top: since 2013 the highest pay grades have grown fastest — that of the state secretaries by half, the senior service by about two thirds. The economist William Niskanen described this law as early as the 1970s: bureaucracies do not maximise utility but their own budget and their own size. The apparatus feeds itself first. Some 299,000 people now work in the federal administration, a record; the federal personnel costs exceeded forty-three billion euros in 2024.

IV. The Shrinking Forward

Against this growth inward stands a shrinking forward. The federal financial plan to 2030 lets the defence budget rise from around 83 to 184 billion euros — more than a doubling. In the same plan the budget that gathers education, family, seniors, women and youth falls, from 16.7 to 13.8 billion — not relatively, but in absolute terms. By 2030 the defence budget is about thirteen times the size of the budget in which education sits; the increase in defence alone exceeds sevenfold what is left for education and family. The state grows in its administration, its representation and its fear — and cuts at its future.

V. One Word: verbauen

German has a single, double-edged word for this process: verbauen. One verbaut money and material by sinking it into walls. And one verbaut a prospect by taking away its view — building it shut. The state that builds on itself does both at once: it builds billions into its own seats — and thereby builds shut the future whose ground it cuts to finance the present.

VI. The Right Thing in the Right Place

For that is what is at stake, not more or less state as such. There is a legitimate, indeed indispensable task of the state: to create the ground on which a society builds its future — education, the foundations, the investments that pay off not in the next legislative term but in the next generation. That is the right function in the right place. But an apparatus that enlarges itself and immortalises itself in sandstone while withdrawing precisely that ground does the wrong thing in the place of the right one. The question is never more or less? — it always reads: the right thing, in the right place, in the right way.

VII. The Honesty It Takes

One must stay honest here, or the argument will not hold. Not every euro is waste. After thirty years Schloss Bellevue has real defects — a leaking roof, outdated fire protection — and the seat of the head of state may have dignity. The rise in defence spending is a real answer to a really changed situation; security is the precondition of everything, education included. Whoever castigates every one of these items makes himself vulnerable and misses the point. The point is not that the state builds or defends itself. The point is that it doubles itself and grows upward while it lets the investment in the future shrink. The one does not compel the other. It is a choice — and it is the choice against the future.

VIII. The Descending Society

The journalist Frank Sieren, who has reported from China for over three decades, has named the rule under which such choices fall: descending societies are occupied above all with not losing what they have; they feel the new as a threat, not as an opportunity. Ascending societies invest in what is coming. It is exactly this signature that the German budget bears. It spends on the past — pensions, retirements, the swollen apparatus — on the present — administration, security, representation — and on fear. On the future it spends less.

A society does not build its future by doubling its chancellery. It builds it by forming the people who invent the new that makes it competitive again. A country's seed corn is not its sandstone but what grows in the heads and hands of its next generation. Whoever finances the present out of the seed corn has less to harvest the next year. The state that builds on itself builds shut exactly that.