ReLive: Cutting Red Tape – But How? New Economy Short Cut with Patrick Bernau, Georg Diez and Johanna Sieben

Few topics in Germany spark as much emotion as cutting bureaucracy. Talk of “chainsaws against the monster” abounds, yet despite decades of demands, real progress remains limited. Why is that? And what would be a smarter way to deal with administration and regulation? During the New Economy Short Cut in November, Patrick Bernau (FAZ, author of Bureaucratic Republic of Germany), Johanna Sieben (Director of the Creative Bureaucracy Festival) and Georg Diez (Fellow at Project Together and the Max Planck Institute) discussed these questions.

Bernau opened the discussion with a look at the core issue: bureaucracy is not simply redundant—it is often a symptom of structural overload. In hospitals, for example, employees spend up to 40 percent of their working time on documentation—time that is missing from patient care. This is not an isolated problem but an expression of what he called “policy accumulation”: new regulations layered upon existing ones until no one has a clear overview anymore. The result: laws lose their effectiveness, administrations can hardly implement them, and political decision-making capacity erodes.

At the same time, Bernau argued, moral imperatives—especially in climate or consumer protection—contribute to overregulation because they moralize the debate: “Anyone opposing a measure is quickly seen as selfish.” The purpose of individual rules thus gets lost. Sustainable reform of bureaucracy, he said, must therefore above all mean cleaning up—clarifying responsibilities, simplifying laws, and transforming administrative culture itself.

Johanna Sieben brought in another perspective: instead of merely focusing on reduction, we need above all trust—between the state and citizens, citizens and the state, and within the administration. Distrust leads to endless verification loops and paperwork that paralyze everyone involved. Successful projects, by contrast, emerge where administrations act cooperatively, experimentally, and with courage. One example: a cross-ministerial digital participation platform was implemented in just three months thanks to close cooperation between the Chancellery and the Ministry of Defense—made possible, as Sieben put it, because they “simply picked up the phone.”

For Sieben, discretionary powers and sandboxes—protected spaces for testing new solutions—are key to building trust and enabling a culture that learns from mistakes. Administration needs courageous leaders who empower staff to take responsibility and structures that reward innovation rather than punish it.

Georg Diez then placed the topic in a broader historical and political context. Bureaucracy, he argued, mirrors our understanding of the state—and that understanding remains stuck in the 19th century. For today’s administration to stay capable of acting, we need to redefine our image of the state: away from a hierarchical, detached apparatus and toward a shaping, citizen-centered state that keeps pace with social change. This also, Diez said, requires reforming federalism, which in many places has become “a rational debate trapped in an irrational structure.”

The key to renewal lies in digitalization—and in the intelligent use of artificial intelligence. For Sieben, AI is not an optional tool but a necessity. It can relieve administrative burdens if transparency, ethics, and employee empowerment are ensured. AI can take over routine tasks—but trust and accountability must remain human responsibilities.

At the end of the discussion, one shared insight emerged: cutting bureaucracy is not an end in itself and not a war on rules. It is about the renewal of the state—about how it builds trust, works efficiently, and serves its citizens. Or, as Georg Diez put it: “The state is not the other—the state is us all.”

Questions from the Chat

After the event, Patrick Bernau answered several questions from the chat, offering further insights into his analysis:

Asked about the Ifo chart (Figures 1 and 2) on gross wages, he referred to the ifo Research Report 159 on the integrated social transfer system. The curves shown there illustrate how taxes and social benefits can combine to make additional work hardly worthwhile for certain income groups.

He also shared the source of the study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research: out of 1,500 climate policy measures analyzed, only 63 showed measurable emission reductions—a finding that supports his argument that morally well-intentioned policies often remain ineffective when their impact is not properly evaluated.

Regarding the use of artificial intelligence, Bernau was cautiously optimistic: AI could help make legislation more consistent and identify contradictions. At the same time, he warned of a “ski helmet effect”: the more sophisticated the technical support becomes, the more complex the rules may get—and in the end, people still have to follow them.

On how to deal with interest groups defending existing rules, he said: some will have to be disappointed. Yet, even without hurting anyone, much progress can be achieved simply by improving efficiency and eliminating outdated regulations.

Responding to a comment that cutting bureaucracy primarily serves the wealthy, Bernau disagreed: efficient administration is, on the contrary, more citizen-friendly. He pointed to Berlin, where administrative modernization has led to faster appointments and expanded digital access for citizens.

Bernau also identified the legal dominance in German authorities as a key reason for reform paralysis: “Hardly any administration has as many lawyers as the German one.” Fear of legal consequences and court rulings, he noted, hinders innovation—a point he elaborates further in his book.

Finally, Bernau clarified a widely cited figure from the discussion: according to the Institute for Employment Research (IAB), roughly 300,000 additional workers have been required over the past three years solely to manage new bureaucratic demands—out of about 550,000 newly created social-insurance jobs in total.

These follow-up questions demonstrated the strong public interest in the structures behind bureaucracy—and how much potential lies in taking a more nuanced view of what is so often dismissed as “administrative failure.”