Four in Five Believe the State Is Overwhelmed
17 per cent of German citizens currently believe the state is able to fulfil its tasks. 79 per cent see it as overwhelmed. This is the lowest value ever recorded since the dbb citizen survey first asked the question in 2019.
The finding that lands
In 2019, 34 per cent of the population still believed the state was capable of acting. In 2026, it is 17 per cent — half of that figure. Over the same period, the share of those who consider the state overwhelmed has risen from 61 to 79 per cent. This is shown by the dbb Citizen Survey on the Public Service 2026, which forsa has conducted annually since 2019 on behalf of the dbb beamtenbund und tarifunion.
A figure that falls is part of everyday polling. A figure that halves over seven years is not. Anyone working in public administration knows from their own experience the feeling of being caught between growing tasks and shrinking resources. The citizen survey shows that this feeling does not stay internal. It reaches the public — and is read as an inability of the state to act, not as an overload of its staff.
What this document is — and what it is not
The dbb Citizen Survey on the Public Service 2026 is an annual survey conducted by forsa Gesellschaft für Sozialforschung und statistische Analysen on behalf of the dbb beamtenbund und tarifunion since 2019. In July 2026, 2,018 representatively selected citizens were surveyed online via the forsa.omninet panel. The margin of error is plus/minus 2.5 percentage points.
This document is an opinion survey, not an administrative statistic. It measures perception, not performance — what citizens think about the state, not what the state actually delivers. The two are related but not identical. An administration may perform better in individual areas than the survey reflects, if that improvement remains invisible. And it may appear worse than the figures suggest, if media coverage distorts individual cases. The survey therefore provides the external perspective of the population — not the objective state of the administration, but what reaches people from it.
Five key findings
First: trust in the state’s ability to act has reached a historic low. “79 per cent of German citizens now believe that the state is overwhelmed given the sheer number of its tasks and problems.” (p. 3) The negative trend runs through the entire time series since 2019 — with the exception of 2020, the only year in which trust briefly rose (p. 4).
Second: the biggest problem areas have shifted markedly. Those who consider the state overwhelmed today see the cause above all in social security systems and pensions (26 per cent, up 10 percentage points on the previous year) and in tax and financial policy (18 per cent, up 5 points). Asylum and refugee policy, which topped the list with 30 per cent in each of the previous two years, has fallen to 16 per cent (pp. 5-6). A topic that dominated public debate for two years is losing weight in citizens’ perception — while a topic long considered settled, or at least stable, is gaining renewed significance.
Third: the performance of the public service itself is also judged more critically than in previous years. Only 10 per cent of respondents believe performance has increased in recent years. 51 per cent — more than half — see a decline (p. 7). This assessment has grown continuously since 2019, from 34 per cent who saw a decline in that year to 51 per cent now.
Fourth: digitalisation is seen as a source of hope, yet its current state is rated poorly. 54 per cent of citizens expect that increasing digitalisation will improve the state’s performance a great deal or quite a lot (p. 9). At the same time, the same respondents give the current state of digitalisation in public administration a school grade of 4.0 on the German six-point scale, where 1 is best (pp. 13-14). Only 21 per cent trust the new Federal Ministry for Digitalisation and State Modernisation to make noticeable progress over the next three years; 62 per cent do not trust it to do so (p. 17).
Fifth: the share of people who believe the public service costs taxpayers too much money has reached a new high. 54 per cent believe the public service costs taxpayers too much — the highest figure since this time series began in 2016, when it stood at 31 per cent (pp. 18-19). Notably, within the public service itself, only 32 per cent of staff and 28 per cent of civil servants share this view (p. 19) — the gap between the internal and external perception is considerable.
Two further findings add to the picture. The assessment of individual public institutions shows a striking pattern: street cleaning and refuse collection (grade 1.9), libraries (2.0) and museums (2.1) continue to perform best — visible, everyday services, in other words. Federal ministries are rated worst, with a grade of 4.2, a decline of 0.3 grade points on the previous year and the sharpest drop of any institution surveyed (p. 20). The more abstract and distant from ministries a service appears, the worse its rating — and the faster that rating deteriorates.
The image of civil servants themselves is also clouding over: attributes such as responsible (59 per cent, down 2 points), conscientious (57 per cent, down 2) and reliable (51 per cent, down 2) have all declined compared with the previous year, while negative attributes such as arrogant (31 per cent, up 2) and superfluous (18 per cent, up 2) have increased (p. 21). The general loss of trust in the state’s ability to act is thus also affecting the image of the people who carry that state — although the survey itself offers at least a partial explanation: the further removed an institution is from citizens’ direct experience, the more strongly a general sense of crisis affects its rating.
What is new about this
Two things are new in the 2026 citizen survey. First, the sheer duration and direction of the trend: seven years of time-series data show not a one-off deterioration but an almost unbroken downward movement that continues into 2026 rather than stabilising. Individual poor survey results can be explained by current events. A line that points in the same direction for seven years cannot.
Second, this document provides a perspective often missing from the debate on administrative reform: that of citizens themselves. What has been described for years in expert circles and from the internal perspective of staff as structural overload appears here as an external perception — regardless of whether those affected are familiar with administrative language or organisational theory. Citizens do not name process deficits or governance problems. They simply say: the state is no longer coping.
The shift in problem areas is also instructive. The fact that social security systems and pensions gain 10 percentage points within a single year, while asylum and refugee policy falls by 14 points, shows that the sense of being overwhelmed is not tied to a single policy field. It moves to wherever political uncertainty is currently greatest. This argues against the common claim that the loss of trust is essentially a migration issue — and for the alternative view that it is a fundamental pattern that ignites around shifting topics.
The survey’s own priority analysis provides a further clue here: for the three tasks citizens consider most important — reforming social security systems (55 per cent “very important”), securing economic growth and jobs (54 per cent) and improving infrastructure and transport (53 per cent) — the gap to perceived performance is widest. In each case, only 11 to 15 per cent believe the state is managing these tasks well. The gap between expectation and perceived performance is therefore not a vague feeling but can be pinned to specific policy fields — and it affects precisely the tasks that matter most to citizens, not peripheral issues.
My position on this
The loss of trust these figures show is not a communication problem. Nor is it primarily an expression of excessive citizen expectations, as it is often read within parts of the administration. It is the logical consequence of an administration that adds new tasks, year after year, onto existing structures rather than systematically reviewing which tasks still need to be delivered in their current scope and form at all.
I have so far described this structural overload mainly from the internal perspective — from the viewpoint of senior managers and staff who experience standards being raised, responsibilities being expanded and digitalisation projects being launched, without first clarifying which tasks could be dropped or simplified as a result. This citizen survey provides, for the first time with this degree of clarity, the external perspective. What administrative staff experience as daily overload, the population experiences as the state’s overall inability to act. Both are two views of the same problem.
I find the finding on digitalisation particularly revealing. A narrow majority of citizens trust digitalisation to improve the state’s performance — yet the same people rate its current state with a grade of 4.0. This is not a contradiction but a precise diagnosis: hope in the technology remains intact, but the implementation so far does not convince. This is exactly what I observe in my consulting practice year after year: digitalisation projects that transfer existing, often overly complicated processes one-to-one into digital form, instead of first asking whether the process still makes sense in that form at all. If an overly complicated analogue procedure is digitalised, the result is an overly complicated digital procedure — only faster and still wrong.
Where I explicitly disagree with the common reading: the answer to declining trust is not to run more communication campaigns about what the state delivers. Trust is not built through better explanations of existing structures, but through visibly changed structures. A population that has perceived a decline for seven years will not be won over by a more convincing portrayal of the status quo. It needs a status quo that actually changes.
What this means in practice
For an administration that wants to do more than simply take note of these figures, I see four consequences.
First: task review before digitalisation. Before a process is digitalised, it must be established whether the task still needs to be delivered in its previous form, depth and frequency at all. Digitalisation without a prior task review reinforces existing complexity instead of reducing it — and explains why a majority of citizens, despite high expectations of digitalisation, rate its implementation so far poorly.
Second: set priorities where the gap between importance and delivery is greatest. The survey itself shows where the greatest pressure to act lies: for reforming social security systems and securing economic growth and jobs, the gap between what citizens consider very important and what they believe the state is managing well is widest. An administration that deliberately directs its scarce resources to where expectation and perceived performance diverge most strongly sets priorities where they have the greatest effect.
Third: simplification before speed. 86 per cent of citizens consider a significant reduction and simplification of regulations the most important improvement public authorities can make — ahead of shorter processing times. This is a clear order of priority: citizens do not want faster handling of complicated procedures, but less complicated procedures. Anyone working on process optimisation in public administration should take this order seriously rather than reversing it.
Fourth: bring the internal perspective of staff and the external perspective of citizens together. The striking difference on the cost question — 54 per cent of the population, but only 32 per cent of public service staff, believe the public service costs too much — shows how differently the two groups perceive the same administration. An organisation that does not actively address this gap risks communicating internally in ways that diverge from how it is perceived externally. Anyone who wants to rebuild trust must understand both perspectives, not only their own.
These four consequences share a common denominator: they require an administration willing to first decide what it no longer wants to do in its current form, before deciding how to handle what remains more quickly or digitally. This exact order — task review first, then process optimisation, only then technology — is rarely the order actually followed in practice. Reform processes usually start with technology, because it is visible, budgetable and politically easy to communicate. The citizen survey shows where that leads: to a population that continues to place hope in digitalisation while rating its implementation so far with a grade of 4.0.
The dbb Citizen Survey 2026 offers no new diagnosis. What it does offer is something often missing from the debate on administrative modernisation: a figure, robust across several years, showing that the structural overload of public administration is not merely a feeling among staff but reaches the public — as a loss of trust in the state’s own ability to act.
Source
dbb beamtenbund und tarifunion / forsa Gesellschaft für Sozialforschung und statistische Analysen mbH: dbb Bürgerbefragung Öffentlicher Dienst 2026 — Einschätzungen, Erfahrungen und Erwartungen der Bürger (dbb Citizen Survey on the Public Service 2026 — Assessments, Experiences and Expectations of Citizens), dated 17 July 2026, 32 pages, 2,018 respondents, margin of error ±2.5 percentage points. Further reading