Efficiency Is Not a Savings Programme: Why This Misconception Paralyses Public Administration

When public administration talks about efficiency, it almost always means cutting costs. This misconception is exactly why so many reform efforts fail to achieve anything.

Public authorities have found themselves in a state of permanent overload for years. This is not a short-term phenomenon, not the result of economic cycles, and not the outcome of individual bad decisions. The overload has structural causes that show up in a similar pattern across almost every level of administration: a steady rise in tasks, growing regulatory requirements and rising expectations from politics and the public meet limited staff, financial and time resources. What stands out is not that these pressures exist, but that they persist. They now shape day-to-day administrative work permanently, and it is precisely this permanence that changes how solutions need to be thought through.

Overload as the New Normal

In my book I describe this state as follows: overload is no longer an exceptional condition affecting a few public bodies, it is the normal mode of day-to-day administrative work. That phrase touches a sore point, because it shifts the perspective on the problem. As long as overload is treated as a temporary exception, cost-cutting measures seem plausible. You tighten the belt until the peak has passed, and wait for calmer times. But when the overload is permanent, that same logic leads into a dead end. Cutting resources or superficially streamlining processes solves nothing. It worsens the situation in a different form, because the real cause remains untouched and simply resurfaces elsewhere.

Under this pressure, task prioritisation is often implicit, situational and reactive. Strategic steering takes a back seat to short-term problem solving, because there is rarely capacity for both at once. Administrations work hard on relief measures without gaining any noticeable improvement in their capacity to act. For senior managers this creates a wearing pattern: every new relief measure first demands its own attention, training and steering before it can have any effect at all. Anyone caught in this situation often experiences change as an additional burden rather than relief, paradoxical as that may sound.

Plenty of Activity, Little Relief

This cannot be attributed to a lack of willingness to reform, or to standstill. Few sectors have faced as many change initiatives in recent years as public administration. Digitalisation projects, organisational reviews, process management, programmes to cut red tape, recruitment and retention projects, new steering instruments, reporting obligations and funding programmes shape daily life in many public authorities. The public sector is clearly in motion. And yet the impression remains that little changes about the structural overload itself.

This coexistence of reform activity and persistent overload deserves closer attention. It points to a tension in which administrations change a great deal without that change producing lasting structural improvement. Considerable energy flows into improvement projects, yet noticeable relief fails to materialise. The real question, then, is not why administrations do nothing. The question is why so many activities so rarely lead to lasting relief. This is exactly where a fundamental misconception about the term efficiency comes in, one that runs through many reform projects without ever being named.

Efficiency Misunderstood as a Technical Problem

Part of the answer lies in the term efficiency itself. When efficiency is understood as a savings instrument or as a purely technical optimisation problem, it stays on the surface. Processes get streamlined, forms get digitalised, responsibilities get reassigned, yet the causes of the overload remain untouched. Anyone who fails to systematically question the causes of this overload cycle inevitably develops solutions without lasting effect, solutions that generate additional work instead of providing relief.

This creates a cycle that will sound familiar to many senior managers. A new measure is meant to relieve pressure, but its introduction, training and follow-up steering first create additional pressure of their own, and in the end the hoped-for relief fails to appear. Those involved experience this as reform fatigue, when the real fault lies in the starting question. Anyone who asks where savings can be made gets answers to that question, not answers that address the structural problem of overload. The measure may even be formally completed as a success, without anything noticeably changing in day-to-day work.

Efficiency as a Leadership Decision

For heads of administration, a clear consequence follows. Efficiency does not start with the question of where something more can be saved. It starts with the question of which tasks, processes and structures actually produce the overload in the first place. That is a steering decision, not a task that can simply be delegated to specialist departments. It requires an honest review of existing task portfolios, setting priorities deliberately rather than situationally, and consistently measuring change projects by whether they reduce structural overload or merely shift its outward form.

Anyone who understands efficiency this way lets go of the idea that fewer staff or leaner forms alone will solve the problem. The task for senior managers in public administration is to open up the thinking space needed to identify the real drivers of overload before deciding on concrete measures. That also changes the order of things within one’s own organisation: understand the structural cause first, then discuss instruments, not the other way round. This order sounds obvious, yet in day-to-day administrative work it is regularly reversed, because the pressure to act demands quick solutions. In my book Effiziente Verwaltung (Efficient public administration) I develop this approach further and show how efficiency can be anchored in practice as a leadership and steering decision.