‘A concrete implementation plan with measurability and genuine leverage projects’

The news had already leaked early in the morning, and shortly afterwards Philipp Amthor (CDU) and Dr Heiko Geue (SPD) were sitting on the Plaza Stage at SCCON 2025 and agreed: The modernisation agenda for Germany, which the Federal Cabinet had decided on at its closed-door meeting, is a turning point – and at the same time, it can only be the beginning of a much more far-reaching development.

‘Top priorities that we are now implementing’

‘This is a real milestone,’ said Philipp Amthor, Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Digital and Public Service. Ambitious goals had been set out in the coalition agreement. ‘What was missing was a concrete implementation plan, which we have launched today.’ It is also crucial ‘that we subject ourselves to measurability.’

The aim of the modernisation agenda is to simplify administrative processes. According to the Ministry of Digitalisation, this is a cross-departmental roadmap with deadlines, monitoring, more than 80 measures and 23 ‘lever projects’. These include ‘24-hour company formation’ via a once-only platform that bundles around 6,000 process variants, and the centralisation of vehicle registration via a nationwide online service. ‘These are real lever projects and top priorities for us, and we are now implementing them,’ said Amthor.

Comprehensive administrative digitisation as a historic opportunity

In view of demographic change, skills shortages and the political need to strengthen confidence in the state's ability to act, ‘we must take the digital path,’ added Dr Heiko Geue, Minister of Finance of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. He also said that the federal government's special fund for digital infrastructure was a ‘unique historical opportunity’ for the federal, state and local governments to work together to find digital solutions for modern administration.

For him, clear priorities are register modernisation and the once-only principle, so that state institutions can access data across all levels, Geue continued: "As finance minister, I never want to have to carry out another property tax reform where I have to ask citizens for information because my tax offices are not allowed to request it from the land registries and cadastral offices. I think we all agree: we never want to experience that again."

Agree on a federal modernisation agenda by the end of the year

Amthor announced that the federal government would therefore work with the federal states to agree on an additional federal modernisation agenda by the end of December. There is currently both pressure to act and the political will to implement digitalisation, because ‘it is also a fundamental question of trust in our democracy’ and in the state's ability to act.

Geue saw it exactly the same way, which is why he also advocated an end to the unanimity principle among the federal states on digital issues and the establishment of two-thirds majorities: as finance minister, he proposed setting clear rules for subsidies – ‘then everyone can decide whether or not to get over their ego issues.’