Finance
Ministry circles: No spending freeze in the 2023 budget
The traffic light coalition continues to struggle with how to deal with the Federal Constitutional Court’s ruling. photo
© Michael Kappeler/dpa/archive
According to the Ministry of Finance, the blocking of items in the 2023 budget does not constitute a block on spending. The funds for 2023 can flow regularly, while the blocking relates to obligations for future years.
According to the Ministry of Finance, there is no blocking of items in the budget for the current year Spending freeze.
The funds set aside for 2023 could flow regularly, it was said in ministry circles on Tuesday morning. It is simply a blocking of obligations for the coming years. These would be stopped as a precautionary measure in the event that the Karlsruhe budget ruling also applies to older reserves in special funds.
The Ministry of Finance had blocked the commitment authorizations from the 2023 budget. These are financial commitments for the coming years that can be used for multi-year projects. The background is the ruling of the Federal Constitutional Court, which declared the reallocation of loans amounting to 60 billion euros in the 2021 budget to be null and void. At the same time, the judges decided that the state was not allowed to set aside emergency loans for later years. Therefore, other federal budgets beyond the Climate and Transformation Fund could be affected.