970,000 more in the public service since 2008 – the state is becoming more digital, not leaner

On 30 June 2025, 5,475,100 people were working in the public service in Germany.^[2] In 2008 it was 4,505,100.^[1] That is 970,000 more, an increase of 21.5 per cent. Almost a million additional employees, in the years in which the smartphone, the cloud and artificial intelligence have rebuilt the world of work.

In business the promise of such technology is: the same work with less effort. In the state’s figures there is no sign of it. The number of employees has risen in sixteen of seventeen years since 2008, most recently by 95,100 in a single year.^[1][2]

First a reduction, then the low point in 2008

After reunification it ran the other way. In 1991 the public service excluding the railway and the postal service counted around 5.6 million employees, in 2004 only 4.6 million. The federal interior ministry gave as reasons the strained budget position, the modernisation of administrations and the privatisation of municipal services.^[3] So modernisation then meant fewer staff.

2008 was the low point. Since then the public service has been growing, and in sum digitalisation has reversed nothing about that. Yet the expectation was formulated early. In 2006 the federal interior ministry wrote that the BundOnline 2005 programme had shown that “savings potential from e-government can also be used for budget consolidation”.^[3]

Where the staff were added

Anyone wanting to judge fairly has to look at where the 970,000 work. More than half of the increase is accounted for by four areas in which people do the work and not software: universities with their clinics, municipal day-care centres, schools and the police.^[1]

The four areas account for 569,200 of the 970,000 additional employees, that is 58.7 per cent. 2025 is provisional. Staff in police training in Hesse have been assigned to universities from 2022; that does not change the total for the four areas.^[1]

Teachers, childcare workers and police officers are not the problem. More childcare places and more teachers are politically wanted, and most parents want them too. For the question about digitalisation what counts is the second-to-last row: in all the remaining areas together, 400,800 more people work today than in 2008, an increase of almost 15 per cent.^[1] This remainder contains the offices in which applications, decisions and files are processed, from general administration through tax offices and the justice system to social insurance. That is precisely where digitalisation ought to save work.

Digital and bigger all the same

I run a company. When we invest in software, we expect the same work to cost less time afterwards. If we invest for twenty years and end up needing a fifth more people, then the software has missed its purpose. Or we never switched off the old processes.

My impression is that in the state it is the second: the digital is added, the paper stays. Online application and paper file run side by side, new rules bring new documents, and for new levies new posts arise to collect them. So a tool for saving becomes an additional task. This impression cannot be proved with the staffing statistics, which count heads and not processes. But they do show that in sum no saving has arrived.

Anyone who invests in software for twenty years and then needs a fifth more staff has to explain what the software actually saves.

The federal government keeps planning upwards

For the largest part of this increase the federal government and its ministers are not responsible. Schools, universities and most of the police are a matter for the Länder, and the day-care centres counted here belong to the municipalities. At federal level, though, the finance minister has a say. Lars Klingbeil introduced the draft budget for 2027 in the Bundestag in September.^[4]

According to an analysis by the Initiative Neue Soziale Marktwirtschaft, this draft provides for 310,487 posts in the federal administration, 4,752 more than in 2026 and 12,347 more than in 2024. Staff spending is to rise by 7.5 per cent to 51.62 billion euros.^[5] The initiative is financed by employers’ associations in the metal and electrical industries and calls for a freeze on recruitment; its figures come from the budget plans.

Yet the coalition of the Union and the SPD has set itself the aim of cutting staff numbers in the ministries, the Bundestag administration and certain subordinate authorities by at least eight per cent by 2029.^[6] The draft for 2027 contains a savings requirement of two per cent for this. Customs, the federal police, the federal criminal police office and the armed forces are exempt from it, and newly created posts do not count in the calculation.^[7]

On top of this come new tasks from Klingbeil’s own house. For the planned sugar tax and the plastic tax, papers from the finance ministry provided, according to media reports, for 1,046 new posts in total, most of them at customs.^[8] For the version of the sugar tax that the cabinet adopted on 14 October, the federal government has published no staffing requirement.^[9] Two new taxes for which a thousand new posts are planned to begin with: that is the opposite of an administration becoming leaner through digitalisation. The details are in my commentary Klingbeils indirekte Steuern.

What I expect

I do not want a weak state, and I do not dispute anyone’s work in the public service. But after twenty years of e-government one may expect an account: which processes have become digital, which paper routes have fallen away for them, and how many posts has that saved? As long as that account is missing, no new administrative post should be created without proof of which task it takes on and which old one falls away for it.

For the federal government that means: the coalition’s eight per cent target applies, and it does not begin only in 2028. A budget that opens the promised reduction with 4,752 additional posts does not take its own promise seriously. How staff numbers have grown since 2015 and where to is set out in full in my commentary Der Staat wächst. Die Rechnung zahlen wir.

Andreas W. HerbFounder and CEO MBG Group, Paderborn

What I expressly do not claim

It is not a million but 970,000 more employees. I compare with 2008 because that is where the low point of the official series lies; any other starting point in this series would give a smaller increase, against 2015 around 829,600.^[1] What is counted is heads, not full-time posts; how much of the increase is accounted for by part-time work this series does not show. The largest part of the increase lies with the Länder and the municipalities, not with the federal government. I do not claim that digitalisation caused the increase, nor that without it even more staff would not have been needed. The statistics show only that the number of employees has risen despite digitalisation. The assessment is my opinion.