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It is often said that bureaucracy always tends to grow on its own. And right now, Europe seems to be once again in the crosshairs of accusations of excessive bureaucracy. And there seem to be two different types of bureaucracy. First, we have the old bureaucracy. The one that came about because authorities distrusted the honest intentions of citizens and did everything they could to make fraud, cheating and crime more difficult. But we also have a new bureaucracy. It seems to be the result of an ideological effort to control public activities as much as possible in accordance with certain ideologically colored goals.
It was primarily this new bureaucracy that was criticized in the well-known strategy document for American national security that the White House presented in November 2025.
It firmly claimed that EU bureaucracy is one of the factors currently driving Europe’s decline. And it was primarily referring to rules and regulations aimed at reducing climate emissions. The document was not received with much enthusiasm in Europe, as is well known. Few have objected to the observation that regulations and bureaucracy can constitute an obstacle to growth and creativity.
But the old bureaucracy is still alive. For example, in Germany.
In an article published in ECIPE (European Centre for International Political Economy) – Europe’s Misguided Obsession with Bureaucracy – the director of the center, Matthias Bauer, gives a sharp overview of the problems he sees with a traditional German bureaucracy that is unable to modernize.
For example, he points out that registering property in Germany requires six bureaucratic steps. It takes 52 hours to complete the registration. He compares this with Sweden where one step is enough and where registration takes seven hours.
Bauer also claims that German companies spend an average of 218 hours per year on tax compliance. He compares this again with Sweden where the equivalent work is said to take up 122 hours of the business owners’ working time. Bauer further complains that it takes too long to obtain both building permits and energy transition approvals. He is also surprised that guests in German hotels are still asked to fill in physical registration forms, “an outdated and unnecessary practice”.
Anyone who wants to import or export something to Germany still must spend time on extensive paperwork to keep German customs satisfied. And he says that Germany’s federal social organization creates a lot of formal problems that arise due to both overlapping and conflicting regulations between national and state levels.
Bauer compares it to Sweden several times. But even in the country in the north, a debate has begun to flare up again about bureaucracy and over-organization. Sweden’s over-bureaucracy is perhaps less about a desire to combat fraud and crime and more about a tendency to simply want to over-organize everything. This is what we can call the new bureaucracy.
In 2025, the Swedish professor of political science, Patrik Hall, published a well-received book entitled “Why is public bureaucracy increasing in Sweden?”
The interesting thing about Sweden here is that there has long been an awareness of the benefits of reducing bureaucracy for both entrepreneurs and ordinary citizens. And since Sweden has been far ahead in the digitalization of public services, this has also been practically possible. Perhaps that is why the German Matthias Brauer compared German conditions with Swedish ones.
But the problem in Sweden is the high ideological ambitions that are often found in public services.
It is not enough to have schools, healthcare and the military. Swedes are very keen to ensure that the various public services function optimally. Hence the tendency to want to target the work, to want to streamline the work, to want to mix ideological components such as climate considerations and gender equality into the work.
The result has been, as has been known for a long time in Sweden, that teachers spend less and less time meeting pupils and students and that doctors spend less and less time meeting patients. In addition, the number of people who are supposed to manage and administer the service is constantly increasing, while the proportion of teachers and doctors, for example, is decreasing.
So, it is not certain that we will succeed in getting rid of bureaucracy just because we simplify the regulations for citizens and companies that turn to authorities. Bureaucracy will return when the core activities of public services are targeted towards ideological goals. And that is what we see at the aggregate EU level today. When the EU is not just a free trade zone but also a tool for overarching ideological projects, bureaucracy will look ahead again. The price risks being that the economy and development will be hampered.