One year after the controversial Special Infrastructure and Climate Neutrality Fund (SVIK) was passed, the Ifo Institute has delivered a damning assessment of how the money has been spent. The government used the new debt taken on last year "95 percent not for additional infrastructure investments," the Munich-based economic research institute said on Tuesday, based on its own calculations. Instead, the funds had been "used to plug budget holes."
The €500 billion fund was passed by the outgoing Bundestag with the support of the Greens and is structured to run over a period of twelve years. According to Ifo, borrowing under the special fund increased by €24.3 billion in the past year, yet actual federal investment was only €1.3 billion higher than in the previous year.
The resulting gap of €23 billion had "not flowed into additional investments," the institute said. "That is a big problem," said Ifo President Clemens Fuest. "The additionally borrowed funds should be used for additional investments that support economic growth over the long term."
The institute identifies the misuse of funds in the fact that the government reduced its investment total in the 2025 core budget compared with the previous year, leading to "shifts of individual budget items from the core budget into the debt-financed SVIK." This applied particularly to the transport sector. Additional investments could only be said to exist, the institute argued, if investment expenditure in the core budget was increased, not merely relocated.
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