Berlin. The reserves of the large research institutions must be liquidated. The housekeepers agreed on this on Friday night. The new regulation will affect the Helmholtz Association, the Fraunhofer and Max Planck Society and the Leibniz Association. It is said that those who do not liquidate their reserves will receive less money from the state in the future.
The budget deliberations this year are tough. Despite record debts of more than 200 billion euros and the reallocation of tasks from the regular budget to the debt pots, the Research Ministry also has to make savings. In the next financial year alone it will be around 800 million euros with a planned volume of 22 billion. By 2028 there should be 1.3 billion.
The budget deliberations scraped together a good 120 million euros for around 70 individual items. In most cases the money was more generous than needed. And the rest? It has to come together somehow in 2027.
Given this initial situation, research institutions now came into focus. Because they live comparatively well financially well-equipped thanks to the so-called “Pact for Research and Innovation”, which was concluded by the federal and state governments. Helmholtz and Co. will therefore receive secure money for ten years with the option of three percent more annually. It is now a good nine billion euros. This means that the pact has long been the largest item in the Federal Research Ministry's budget.
But now the institutions will have to do their part to save money. Specifically, it is about the so-called means of self-management. While federal companies such as Deutsche Bahn AG or Autobahn GmbH have to plan, tender and implement their major projects with annual budget funds, the federal government's large research institutions receive money that they can use as they wish.
The money is reserved for investments, but also for working capital, and remains in an account even if it is not needed in the current year. As a consequence, other urgent projects in the Ministry of Research are losing out in the current austerity period.
But the budget holders have now also stipulated that the red pencil will not be applied to individual important political projects: These include, for example, the 1000-head program, the planned chip design center, the promotion of industrial AI, but also projects on women's health and cancer research as well as research into post-infectious diseases. In contrast, research institutions should operate better.
They had previously assured several times that they would liquidate their ever-growing reserves - most recently in a report in the spring. But the trust that this will actually happen seems to have been exhausted. The budget holders have therefore decided in template 5556: “Particularly with a view to the effective and responsible use of public resources, the Budget Committee considers the reduction path set out in the aforementioned report to be binding.”
Specifically, this means: If the institutions do not reduce the reserves of 1.8 billion euros year after year to 375 million by 2030 as planned, the householders will reduce their subsidies accordingly year after year.
The Federal Audit Office should like this. The auditors are advocating for new grants to be cut in view of the high reserves. They have been complaining about the ever-increasing funding for years. The self-service funds have increased fivefold since 2012: to more than one billion euros since 2021. “From the perspective of the Federal Audit Office, the high self-service funds are largely due to the budgeting of funds being too early or too high,” says the report on the planned budget for 2027.
The “steady, needs-independent increase in funds” in the pact for research and innovation contributes to this. The auditors are therefore also advocating agreeing on “ambitious reduction paths” and, above all, setting up the budget in line with needs. Self-service funds can only be justified “if they demonstrably promote economical management”.
But there can be no question of this - not even with the 1,000 people program, with which the coalition wants to recruit scientists from all over the world. Self-service funds have already been given for this, which will remain almost completely untouched in 2025.
SPD politician Svenja Schulze told the Handelsblatt: “The austerity pressure in the federal budget must not lead to the elimination of innovations, otherwise we will endanger Germany’s future economic growth.” The budget holders obviously didn't want to have to cut back on a number of funding programs.
“760 million euros in global underspending is a heavy burden on the research budget,” said CDU budget keeper Carsten Körber. “Anyone who wants to meet this savings requirement solely through project funding is saving on the future technologies that we urgently need to advance.” Therefore, the agreed reduction in the self-management resources of the large research organizations will be made “binding”. “This is painful, but necessary: We want to shape research – not just manage austerity requirements.”
“As the SPD parliamentary group, it was important to us to avert some of the planned cuts,” explained Schulze. One example is the DATIpilot funding program, “which is intended to bring good ideas from science and research directly into our everyday lives as new products, services or social projects”.
