The state government has ten officers. Even with green-black there is internal talk of wild growth. The technology officer has been out of office since February because of his role in the Expo affair. The SPD finds that nobody missed him.
Stuttgart (dpa / lsw) – The SPD parliamentary group is calling for the abolition of the technology officer in the Ministry of Economic Affairs as a cost-cutting measure in the next double budget. The post was superfluous from the start, said the SPD economic expert Boris Weirauch of the German Press Agency. Commissioner Wilhelm Bauer has been out of office since February because of his involvement in the Expo Pavilion affair. Weirauch said nobody had missed Bauer since then, so it was finally clear: “The funds can be canceled.” This Thursday, Economics Minister Nicole Hoffmeister-Kraut (CDU) will discuss the budget in the Finance Committee.
The state made 1.67 million euros available for the work of the technology officer, which is 700,000 euros more than in the previous legislative period. However, Bauer worked on a voluntary basis and only received an expense allowance of 1,000 euros per month. Bauer is head of the Fraunhofer Institute for Labor Economics and Organization in Stuttgart, which, together with the Chamber of Engineers and the Freiburg Wirtschaft Touristik und Messe GmbH (FTWM), is at the center of the debacle surrounding the cost explosion for the pavilion in Dubai. The Ministry of Economics wants to assert claims for reimbursement of costs in an unknown amount against those involved.
The SPD man Weirauch is of the opinion that technology policy is a core task of the ministry anyway. “It remains a complete mystery why Hoffmeister-Kraut is desperately clinging to the technology officer.” He thinks that in these times of crisis, people need relief and “not a bloated government apparatus”. He recalled that Prime Minister Winfried Kretschmann’s State Ministry wanted to abolish this post after the 2021 election. “That didn’t prevent the Economics Minister from slowing down Kretschmann and simply creating the post in her company.”
In the last legislative period, Bauer was still the state government’s technology officer, but the post was abolished for reasons of economy. When Hoffmeister-Kraut then registered funds for his own commissioner in the supplementary budget, Kretschmann expressed a sniffle about it. “In fact, that’s not quite what the inventor intended,” explained Kretschmann. The responsible ministries should actually take on the issues themselves and do it from their own resources.
The green-black state government was heavily criticized at the start because of the creation of a new ministry and the appointment of additional state secretaries. The government consists of 29 people – that’s one more minister and four more state secretaries than in the last legislative period. As a result, the Greens and the CDU pointed out that in return state officers would be saved. The demographics and noise officers have been eliminated. There are currently ten – for example for anti-Semitism or people with disabilities. But compared to the last election period, the costs rose by 3.5 million euros to 15 million euros.
