With more online applications, user-friendly laws and the deletion of paragraphs that have become useless, the federal government wants to make contacts between the population and the state more pleasant in the long term. Benjamin Strasser (FDP), who was appointed four months ago as the federal government's coordinator for better regulation and bureaucracy reduction, also said that before new rules are passed, more thorough consideration must be given to who may be overburdened by them, the German Press Agency .
As an example, the Parliamentary State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Justice cited the ordinance on handling personal data that has been in force since 2018. Strasser emphasized that he was "a big supporter of the General Data Protection Regulation". However, there is no question that the implementation of the regulation in Germany put a particular strain on volunteers. As honorary president of the umbrella organization for amateur music, who sang in a choir and played in an orchestra for years, he noticed that the federal government at the time "didn't think enough about the perspective of the clubs".
According to Strasser, the State Secretaries' Committee, in which each individual department will define its goals for reducing bureaucracy, will be constituted in a few weeks. There are also plans to set up a center "for practice-oriented qualification in contemporary legislation". This is urgently needed to make laws "user-friendly". "It must give us food for thought when even experts such as lawyers or tax consultants say about more and more laws: we can't work with the texts, there is more ambiguity than clarity."
It also cannot be in the interest of the state "to make it so complicated that people no longer become active and shape our society because they are afraid of having one foot in prison," said Strasser. His conclusion was: "We need fewer rules, which are then actually controlled and enforced."
One building block in improving communication between citizens and the state is digitization, emphasized the FDP politicians. States and municipalities are also required here.
