The Bureaucratic Tumor Killing Europe

By Thomas Kolbe

Bureaucracy is flourishing in Germany and the EU like never before. Budget planning in Berlin and Brussels offers a clear glimpse into the state of the public sector—and at the same time, points toward the end of the economic cycle.

A saying is making the rounds on social media that captures the European relationship with the state: Europeans love to be governed so much, they’ve even installed a government for their governments in Brussels. It’s a reference to the European Union’s bureaucracy—a sprawling administrative apparatus that is gradually disempowering national governments and shifting the burdens of centralization onto the citizenry.

The latest example: a ruling by the European Court of Justice that weakens the definition of a “safe country of origin,” effectively removing any effective legal instrument EU states might use to stop the overwhelming wave of illegal migration.

Brussels’ ideological stubbornness and institutional detachment from reality are part of a relentless drive to subject ever-larger parts of European society to regulatory control. It’s as if an illegitimate stepchild has embedded itself into the family and is now trying to rob the rightful heirs of their inheritance.

The Mega-Budget of Madness

Case in point: the EU Commission recently unveiled its new seven-year budget, now inflated to a whopping €1.8 trillion—a runaway bureaucracy at a time when European economies are suffering a severe productivity crisis and member states are gasping for fiscal air.

Brussels is living proof that bureaucratic structures develop a life of their own from day one. Like all social organisms, they strive for growth, bigger budgets, and expanding regulation as a way of entrenching their power base. Their activity continues even as the host society weakens—until the host’s growth forces collapse entirely.

Argentina clearly reached that point two years ago, when libertarian Javier Milei was handed a literal chainsaw to hack through the jungle of regulations, bureaucracy, and senseless state interference. The result: an economic euphoria that remains completely alien to Germany. Here, bureaucracy continues to bloom in full.

Crushing Bureaucratic Burdens

German businesses groan under a bureaucratic burden that grows year after year. According to calculations by the Ifo Institute, bureaucratism costs the German economy €146 billion annually—wasted just to meet government documentation, compliance, and control mandates.

It’s an economic catastrophe, prescribed by the state to secure its own power. We are deep in the age of bureaucratic overkill.

No craftsman, no mid-sized entrepreneur can survive today without a dedicated admin department or pricey consultants—just to submit the next batch of paperwork or satisfy a new reporting obligation. Millions of working hours—hours that should serve innovation, productivity, and actual labor—are simply incinerated.

In what was once the land of inventors and visionaries, the biggest brake on growth—besides crushing taxes—is the regulatory jungle of forms and mandates. It’s a damning indictment of politics, whose will to control has exceeded all reasonable limits.

Against this backdrop, the Merz government’s bureaucratic-reduction promises are nothing short of an insult to those forced to endure the madness.

America Shows Another Way

But it doesn’t have to be this way. The U.S. is currently showing a radically different path. With the launch of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), AI is being deployed across the board. Its goal: to scrap roughly 100,000 federal regulations—about half of all existing ones—deemed unconstitutional or redundant.

At the heart of this push is the “DOGE AI Deregulation Decision Tool,” which may soon become the global standard for deregulation.

The U.S. government estimates annual savings of up to €1.3 trillion (~$1.5 trillion)—primarily through lower compliance costs for businesses and slashed administrative payrolls. AI is already being used at agencies like the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), where in just two weeks, 1,000 regulations were reviewed and marked for deletion.

The End of the Cycle

Reform is possible—but it demands a long runway. The political will for it must rise from deep societal crisis, build over time, and then strike suddenly to break the bureaucratic fortress.

Bureaucracies evolve in parallel with the society and economy that host them. Everything obeys the laws of growth, maturity, and decay. The question is: where does Germany stand in this cycle when we examine the structure and growth dynamic of its public administration?

Surely, it’s a long way from here to the Milei chainsaw. The end of that path involves severe economic and social turbulence.

Just look at Argentina: two currency collapses, hyperinflation, welfare-state implosion, and economic paralysis—the typical symptoms of a society in collapse.

At that point, political arguments about “more regulation” go silent. People begin to recognize the bureaucratic plunder for what it is. The media can no longer cover up economic reality. It’s the moment when society demands that those who’ve benefited from the labor of others finally pay the price—those who hid from life’s risks in government offices.

At that stage, redundant agencies are shuttered, civil service rights suspended, pensions slashed. In short, the state-private sector relationship is recalibrated.

Signs and Symptoms

So where does Germany currently stand?

The signs are everywhere. From the absurd climate-panic regulations emerged the biggest subsidy machine in European history. Between 2028 and 2034, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen plans to pump €750 billion into this monster of capital destruction.

Hundreds of NGOs feed off this machine, inflating their own activity levels to secure budgets and influence. Think of climate protestors gluing themselves to roads, Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future—the pathological symptoms of a psychologically wounded society that has lost touch with its own values.

At the end of the economic cycle, Germany appears to have exhausted its integrative and stabilizing capacities—and is now stumbling through a process of economic and social disintegration.

German society—and much of Europe—finds it hard to activate the forces of self-healing. Internal conflict seems inevitable. The collapse of the climate narrative is only a matter of time, likely triggered by a United States that peels off its green-socialist mask and returns to its foundational ideals.

As bureaucratization reaches its end stage, the Kafkaesque degeneracy is impossible to ignore. Vast swaths of streets blocked off for cyclists, causing more emissions and fine dust due to induced traffic jams. Urban “green meeting points” in the middle of major roads. Gender-garbled language. Non-binary toilets. This is the grotesque overgrowth of an unhinged bureaucracy intoxicated by ideology.

Visible Decay

These often bizarre bureaucratic mutations point to Germany having entered a late stage of societal and economic decline. Crisis, catharsis, and reorientation are inevitable. The collapse of the economy is already so advanced that even left-wing state-socialists struggle to obscure it with climate hysteria or fairytales of a coming green utopia.

History moves in waves. Bureaucratism eats away at the private sector until it can no longer bear the metastasizing state. When the private sector collapses—as we now visibly see in Germany’s decaying public spaces and dismal economic data—the pressure on the political system intensifies.

At a Crossroads

Society then approaches a fork in the road. One path leads to total collectivism, as seen in the 20th century. The other returns to a bourgeois society grounded in free markets, family, and a lean state.

As Europe’s nations contemplate their future, the fog is lifting in Brussels. The political class has abandoned fiscal consolidation and now bets everything on debt acceleration. The question is no longer if there will be another sovereign debt crisis—but who will trigger it.

Right now, France looks poised to pull the plug on Brussels’ imperial ambitions. With a public debt-to-GDP ratio of 114% and a state share of 57%, it is trapped in its own fiscal nightmare. Political gridlock remains unresolved.

It will likely be Marine Le Pen and the Rassemblement National who, within two years, break the deadlock and send shockwaves through Europe by pivoting away from Brussels.

Whatever happens, every national government in the EU would be wise to have a Plan B when the reckoning in Brussels arrives.

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About the author: Thomas Kolbe is a German graduate economist who has worked for over 25 years as a journalist and media producer for clients from various industries and business associations. As a publicist, he focuses on economic processes and observes geopolitical events from the perspective of the capital markets. His publications follow a philosophy that focuses on the individual and their right to self-determination.