60 million euros more per year
Traffic light ministers want to create 700 new jobs
4/26/2022 7:37 am
The traffic light starts with great ambitions, but initially only generates high additional costs. Additional staff are needed to carry out the projects in the coalition agreement. All in all, according to the budget draft for the current year, there are 700 new jobs, including 128 highly paid civil servants.
According to a media report, the new government wants to create more than 700 new jobs in the federal ministries. According to an evaluation of the 2022 budget draft by the ARD magazine “Report Mainz”, 758 new jobs are to be created and 54 other items are to be cut. The bottom line is that the government apparatus is expected to grow by 704 jobs. All ministries called for new posts.
SPD and Green-led ministries want a particularly large number of additional jobs: According to the report, Chancellor Olaf Scholz is demanding a further 75 jobs for the chancellery. Economics Minister Robert Habeck wants 101 additional jobs for his ministry. The Ministry of the Interior wants a further 103 employees, although a separate ministry is being set up for the area of construction and housing. Construction Minister Klara Geywitz claims 104 new posts.
When asked by “Report Mainz”, the ministries justified the increase in jobs with the management of new tasks that would result from the coalition agreement. According to the personnel overview of the draft budget, the new positions also include 128 highly paid civil servant posts with a monthly salary of up to 15,000 euros. According to the report, additional personnel costs of around 60 million euros per year result from the salary groups of the established posts.
Taxpayers’ Association: Number of new jobs “terrifyingly high”
The ministers also want to appoint many additional state secretaries. Transport Minister Volker Wissing has two additional State Secretaries, making it a total of six. Habeck receives an additional State Secretary through his position as Vice Chancellor. There will be three state secretaries in the new building ministry. With a total of 71 parliamentary and civil servants, the traffic light government wants to employ more than any other government before it. The government of Gerhard Schröder 20 years ago had only 48 employees.
For each parliamentary state secretary, the costs for official salaries, costs for secretarial staff, company cars and drivers amount to around 500,000 euros a year. However, the transfer of political officials to temporary retirement after the change of minister is also expensive, which affects a total of 32 highly paid officials.
The President of the Taxpayers’ Association, Reiner Holznagel, called the number of new jobs at “Report Mainz” “frighteningly high”. The government does not keep what it promises, “namely to set priorities and be frugal.” The budget spokesman for the CDU, Christian Haase, said: “This government has no relation to money at all. Here, staff is financed on debt.”
Even in the last legislative period – still under the leadership of the CDU and SPD – there was an increase in jobs of 2500 jobs. Budget politicians from the Greens and FDP had sharply criticized this at the time