A digital minister without a ministry has no power

In September 2018, four industry organisations jointly argued that information policy and digitalisation need their own portfolio minister in the next government. Rasmus Roiha of Ohjelmistoyrittäjät (the Software Entrepreneurs of Finland) said at the time that Finland needed a digital minister urgently. In July 2026, the ICT professionals’ association TIVIA made essentially the same request, arguing that each branch of government looks at digitalisation from its own angle, leaving the overall picture incomplete.

In between, there have been two parliamentary elections and several governments. And not a single digital minister.

Without officials or a budget, a minister renegotiates every time

The 2018 proposal placed the digital minister within the valtioneuvoston kanslia (the Prime Minister’s Office), and the organisations stressed that the aim was to avoid creating a new administrative silo. The intention is sound. Nobody needs another silo.

But that is also one of the proposal’s stumbling blocks. In Finland, a minister’s power comes from their ministry. A ministry has officials, drafts legislation, and has its own budget. When a minister has no ministry of their own, they must renegotiate resources for every single action.

A digital minister therefore needs a digital ministry. I propose creating one. That sounds like new money and new bureaucracy. It requires neither, however, if the ministry is built out of what already exists.

Split the Ministry of Transport and Communications in two

As its name suggests, the liikenne- ja viestintäministeriö (Ministry of Transport and Communications) handles two very different portfolios. One is roads, railways, ports and public transport. The other is telecommunications networks, communications policy and much of the state’s digitalisation. About the only thing the two have in common is that both involve moving something.

A digital ministry could be built fairly easily: transport would move to the ympäristöministeriö (Ministry of the Environment), and the remaining communications and digital side would become the digital ministry. Neither half would be left orphaned. Both would end up where they naturally belong, and the number of ministries would stay the same.

Land use, housing and transport belong in the same ministry

Placing transport in the Ministry of the Environment is, in practice, already half done. The ministry’s remit covers zoning, land use, construction and housing policy. The state has also tied these together with transport through its own contractual instrument. Under the MAL-sopimukset (land use, housing and transport agreements), the state and Finland’s seven largest urban regions agree, in a single document, on where to build, at what cost people will live, and how they will get there.

That is the whole problem in miniature. The state itself has, correctly, decided that these three matters need to be resolved together, and yet it still administers them from two ministries: monitoring their impact is a shared responsibility of, among others, the Ministry of the Environment and the Ministry of Transport and Communications.

For transport, the move would be an improvement, not just an administrative reshuffle. When the rail alignment, the station area’s zoning and the housing production target were prepared within the same organisation, the cost of housing and transport emissions would stop competing against each other inside two separate ministries’ budget frameworks.

Bring the scattered authority under one portfolio

Splitting the Ministry of Transport and Communications would solve one-third of the problem. The other two-thirds sit in the työ- ja elinkeinoministeriö (Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment) and the valtiovarainministeriö (Ministry of Finance): the former’s remit covers enterprise, innovation and entrepreneurship policy, while the latter sets the direction for the digitalisation of public administration. A digital ministry would bring these under the same portfolio. Without that, the reform would fix only the one-third that happens to be easiest to move.

This fragmentation rarely shows up directly for citizens. It shows up in how long things take. When a question involving artificial intelligence lands at the interface of three ministries, preparation starts with a negotiation over whose desk it belongs on, and the same negotiation repeats after every change of government. For a company, that means the predictability of the regulatory environment depends on who happens to be sitting in the same government. In an investment decision, predictability is often more important than the precise content of the regulation.

Germany has carried out exactly this kind of consolidation. Germany’s Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernisation began operating in May 2025, and it drew together responsibilities from six different ministries. One of these was the former ministry for digital affairs and transport, whose digital infrastructure remit moved to the new house. Germany separated networks from their transport connection. Telecommunications belongs closer to the rest of digital policy than to roads and railways.

Ministry boundaries have been redrawn before

This same move has been made in Finland before, on similar grounds. The Ministry of the Environment began operating on 1 October 1983 by decision of the eduskunta (Finland’s Parliament), assembled from tasks that had until then been scattered across other ministries, above all the Ministry of the Interior. At the time, the environment was a new and growing concern with no home of its own in government. Digitalisation, and above all artificial intelligence, is in that same position now.

What would the digital ministry do?

The ministry would host two structures that Finland currently lacks. The first would be a permanent technology committee in Parliament. Parliament already has the tulevaisuusvaliokunta (the Committee for the Future), which assesses technological development from the perspective of its social impact, but unlike the other committees, it does not take part in day-to-day legislative work. That is exactly where the gap lies. When a bill comes up for consideration, the assessment of what the proposed regulation technically means and what complying with it would cost businesses is obtained through case-by-case expert hearings, often from the very actors the regulation concerns. A technology committee would give Parliament its own capacity, independent of the government, to make that assessment.

The second structure the digital ministry would host would be a national assessment body auditing the most advanced AI models. Its mandate would be bounded by a threshold written into law: training compute above 10²⁵ FLOP for the model in question, the same threshold at which the EU’s AI Act presumes a model poses a systemic risk. Parameter count or company revenue would not be used as the threshold, because either would pull ordinary Finnish companies into the scope of regulation.

The threshold would be set so that it caught the world’s largest AI companies while leaving small and medium-sized AI companies outside unnecessarily heavy regulation. If the European Commission changed the threshold through a delegated act, the national threshold would follow suit; any other update would require a decision of Parliament rather than administrative discretion, and small companies would be given a two-year transition period before an update applied to them.

Reorganisation is not free, but divided responsibility costs more

The move would take up civil-service work, blur responsibilities for the transition year, and open its own dispute in government negotiations, where portfolios are divided up among parties.

The scale is still worth keeping in mind. The reform would not establish a new agency or open a new budget line. It would move authority, and the officials who administer it, from one house to another, with costs limited to the transition period’s administrative work.

The opportunity cost is greater. It would mean Finland going through the AI age with a structure in which three ministries prepare the same matter and none of them is accountable for what finally results. A company does not know who to negotiate with. A civil servant does not know whose decision to wait for. A voter does not know who to ask.

What do you think of the proposal?