If Germany Let AI Run the Government

Federal Ministry of Finance (BMF)

Germany's economy is crawling. Growth is stuck near zero. The debt brake keeps investment frozen, and citizens still file taxes on a 90s-style portal.

Within the first 48 hours, it would consolidate ten overlapping budget committees into a single real-time dashboard. It would run the numbers on corporate tax rates and find that the current system exists not because it optimizes revenue, but because three separate coalitions refused to agree on simpler math. It would change it anyway.

Startups would stop filing equipment depreciation over seven years and start expensing infrastructure like operating costs. The AI would calculate that GPU servers aren't capital investments but survival in competition with the tech landscape of the US and China. It would also stop pretending that craft businesses and tech companies should follow the same tax logic, introduce progressive rates based on actual economic output, not headcount, and watch productivity move for the first time in a decade.

Most radically, it would stop treating the debt brake like constitutional law and start treating it like a quarterly earnings target. Sometimes you do miss them, but it is the bigger picture that matters. The AI would publish monthly reconciliations instead of annual narratives, show exactly where money goes, and stop letting ministries hide deficit spending in "structural reforms."

Federal Foreign Office (AA)

Germany's diplomacy today is like its train network: polite, slow, and always under maintenance. While other nations weaponize trade, Germany hosts conferences about ethical frameworks for future trade wars. It publishes position papers that nobody reads and sends ambassadors to summits where the real decisions were made in WhatsApp calls three weeks prior.

If AI ran the Foreign Office, it would stop drafting communiqués and start debugging the actual incentive structures that govern international behavior.

It would process every bilateral trade agreement through one lens: what does Germany actually want from this country, and what will it cost? Then it would offer that deal, no theatrics. Negotiations that take eighteen months would compress to eighteen days because the AI wouldn't need to loop through domestic constituencies or wait for committee sign-offs. It would identify which summits are actually negotiations and which are theater, and send the right people to each. It would maintain embassies like API endpoints: clear input, clear output, measurable results. No ceremonies, just throughput.

Most importantly, it would run continuous scenario modeling on sanctions, trade routes, and geopolitical friction points. Instead of reacting to crises by convening working groups, it would update bilateral strategy in real time. Germany would stop being surprised by things it could have predicted.

The one thing it wouldn't do is fake moral leadership. The AI would recognize that Germany's actual comparative advantage is engineering and reliability, not ethical pronouncements. It would make deals accordingly.

Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs & Climate Action (BMWK)

The BMWK produces more PDFs than GDP. Every industrial permit requires three signatures across two ministries, environmental impact assessments for changes that won't change anything, and municipal approvals for projects that the municipal council doesn't actually understand. A factory can be approved in Poland in six weeks. In Germany, it takes two years of paperwork. Meanwhile, manufacturers are leaving. Not dramatically—just constantly, in the quiet way that destroys economies over a decade.

An AI running the BMWK would start by doing something radical: it would approve things. Not recklessly. It would train on fifty years of environmental outcomes, industrial permits, and actual results. It would discover that 40% of the environmental review process generates no information about actual risk. It would stop doing those parts.

It would route every renewable energy application through an automated assessment that checks three things: does it violate ground-level safety? Does it violate environmental law as written (not as interpreted by committees)? Does it connect to the grid? If yes to all three, approval is issued within two weeks. The AI would also identify which industries could move to Germany if permitting was predictable. Not cheap—Germany will never be cheap. But fast. It would publish baseline timelines and hold itself to them.

For existing manufacturers, it would install monitoring systems that flag inefficiency automatically. Not as punishment. As information. A factory running at 78% capacity during peak-demand season would get an alert, then consultation on why. Usually the answer is either market failure or process failure, and both have solutions.

Germany doesn't need another coalition agreement. It needs infrastructure that actually works. The AI would build it.