A 2006 baseline measurement found that German businesses carried about 49 billion euros a year in bureaucracy costs. In August 2006 a law created the Nationaler Normenkontrollrat, the National Regulatory Control Council. It checks the follow-up costs of every bill and regulation drafted by the federal government. In 2015 the federal government committed itself to a rule called “one in, one out”. If a new rule creates a burden for business, an equal relief must in principle be created elsewhere.
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Starting Over on Nuclear Waste
On 22 February 1977 the state government of Lower Saxony named the salt dome at Gorleben as the only site for a nuclear waste repository. Protest grew in the region and beyond. On 3 May 1980 about 5,000 opponents occupied the drilling site and proclaimed the Republik Freies Wendland, the Free Republic of Wendland. In 2013 a law restarted the search from the beginning. A commission of scientists and representatives of social groups worked from 2014 to 2016. The Site Selection Act of 2017 requires a partizipatives, wissenschaftsbasiertes, transparentes, selbsthinterfragendes und lernendes Verfahren, a procedure that is participatory, based on science, transparent, self-questioning and learning. In September 2020 Gorleben dropped out of the search. The law aims for a decision in 2031. In late 2022, documents of the responsible federal company estimated that the search could last until 2046, or in another scenario until 2068.
Permission to Experiment
The German Passenger Transport Act contains an Experimentierklausel, an experimentation clause. Zur praktischen Erprobung neuer Verkehrsarten oder Verkehrsmittel, for the practical testing of new types or means of transport, the licensing authority may allow exceptions to the law on application, for at most five years. Volkswagen’s ride-pooling service MOIA started in Hamburg on 15 April 2019 under this clause. Its permit ran until the end of 2022. In March 2021 the law was reformed, and in September 2022 MOIA received a regular permit for the first time. On 19 May 2025 the federal cabinet adopted a draft law on Reallabore, real-world laboratories. They allow innovations to be tested for a limited time and under official supervision. The law aims to make such tests easier to set up. The Bundestag passed it on 25 June 2026.
A Handbook That Grew to 2,550 Pages
In 1995 the German federal office for information security, the BSI, published its first IT-Grundschutzhandbuch, a handbook of standard security measures for computer systems. It began with 18 modules and 200 measures. At the end it had 58 modules and 720 measures, and it had grown from 150 to 2,550 pages. In 2006 it was split up into standards and catalogues, and in October 2017 the catalogues were replaced by a new compendium. Organizations can be certified on the basis of these written measures.
The Health Card That Took Ten Years
Germany’s electronic health card was meant to be introduced on 1 January 2006. The company responsible, gematik, was founded in 2005 by the umbrella organizations of the health care system. Half of the votes belonged to the health insurers. The other half belonged to the associations of doctors, dentists, hospitals and pharmacists. The introduction was delayed again and again. Critics said that the interest groups made gematik almost unable to decide, because they could not agree on central questions. In 2010 the German Medical Assembly voted to abandon the project in its existing form. Only from 1 January 2015 did the old insurance card stop counting as proof of insurance. In 2019 the federal government took 51 percent of gematik, and decisions since then have been made by simple majority.
Leadership Again
On 11 February 2026 the Commission of Experts for Research and Innovation handed its annual report to Chancellor Friedrich Merz. He said: Wir haben eine hoch innovative Forschungslandschaft in Deutschland. (We have a highly innovative research landscape in Germany.) Damit verbindet sich für uns der Anspruch, wieder Technologieführerschaft zu übernehmen. (With this comes our ambition to take on technology leadership again.) He added: Forschung ist kein Selbstzweck. (Research is not an end in itself.)
The Hamburg Agreement
In Germany, schools are the business of the states. On 28 October 1964 the heads of government of all the states adopted the Hamburger Abkommen, the Hamburg Agreement. It set a common start of the school year on 1 August and a total of 75 working days of school holidays. It also set uniform names for the types of school and for the grades, and a foreign language in all types of school from grade 5. Moving the start of the school year required short school years in many states. After long negotiations the change was complete by 1 August 1967. The agreement stayed in force until 9 February 2021.
The President’s Prize
Since 1997 the Federal President has awarded the Deutscher Zukunftspreis, the German Future Prize for technology and innovation. It carries 250,000 euros, and the public broadcaster ZDF shows the ceremony in its evening program. Under its statutes, the honored work must be one that will with high probability be marketable and so create jobs. On 17 November 2021 the prize went to Uğur Şahin, Özlem Türeci, Christoph Huber and Katalin Karikó of BioNTech, who had developed a vaccine against COVID-19 at unprecedented speed. On 27 November 2024 Frank-Walter Steinmeier gave the 28th prize to a team from ams-OSRAM and a Fraunhofer institute for a new car headlight. It uses more than 25,000 tiny LEDs in a matrix, so that the light can be adapted to each situation.
Sixteen Months Late
Germany’s satellite-based toll for trucks was meant to start on 31 August 2003. The operating consortium, Toll Collect, could not meet the date. Because of various technical problems, the system started only on 1 January 2005, 16 months late and in a reduced form. In July 2005 the federal transport ministry took the consortium before an arbitration tribunal. In May 2018 the parties agreed on a payment of 3.2 billion euros to the Federal Republic. The arbitration ended in July 2018, after 13 years.
No Early Election Without a Procedure
The Bundestag has no right to dissolve itself. An early election is possible only by a defined route. One route is a vote of confidence. If the chancellor loses it, the federal president may dissolve the Bundestag within 21 days, on the chancellor’s proposal, but is not obliged to. This has happened in 1972, 1983, 2005 and 2024. On 16 December 2024, 207 of 707 members who voted expressed confidence in Chancellor Olaf Scholz, with 116 abstentions. On 27 December, Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier cleared the way for a new election, which was held on 23 February 2025.