How (not) to make the best use of European money

Every year the EU seems to be faced by a new, near-existential, economic or geopolitical challenge that requires joint action.

The resources it has at its disposal seem like a meagre match to the scale of these challenges.

Given the way political stars are aligning, this is what it has to make do with in the foreseeable future. The question then becomes, how can Europe squeeze the maximum effectiveness out of its limited resources.

The Union’s track record of spending effectiveness leaves a lot to be desired. Its traditional agricultural and cohesion spending have a mediocre reputation at best.

And as we argue in our recent book , Ursula von der Leyen’s flagship the NextGenerationEU (NGEU) programme, despite its promise of greater efficiency and better alignment with European objectives, seems to have resulted mostly in scattered spending without clear direction or obvious link to EU policies, while leaving the EU with a sizeable debt overhang that makes it all the more difficult to muster the resources to address the newest round of existential challenges.

In its proposals for the next EU budget (the 2028-34 multi-annual financial framework, MFF), the commission puts forward a new architecture, largely modelled after the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) , which it purports can better promote European added value.

Whether it does so in practice hinges again on the commission’s ability to persuade member states to incorporate European interest in their National Regional Partnership Plans .

When reorganising much of EU funding under a handful of wide umbrellas, as the commission suggests, the detailed facility-specific rules tend to disappear and get replaced by the commission’s discretion which, in practice, is only constrained by the high-level objectives and requirements in the legislation.

These objectives are so wide and fluffy that everything and nothing is an EU priority. The commission calls this flexibility and considers it desirable. The flip side of the coin is the diminution of the co-legislators, which are asked to give up the right to provide meaningful guidance for implementation and to sign off the money without a workable basis for accountability.

So, should we trust the commission to stand up for Europe? Based on the RRF experience, the perseverance of the commission in guiding and, if necessary, confronting member states where European interest so requires, and its willingness to face the negative publicity that comes with that, are in doubt.

Experience in the final stretch of the RRF only reinforces that conclusion.

It is abundantly clear that, in the run-up to the closure of the RRF, the primary concern for the commission has been to have the remaining funds in national envelopes fully disbursed before the window closes.

A precondition for that was to have all the necessary boxes ticked by 31 August 2026, by which 'envisaged milestones, targets and an indicative timetable for the implementation of the reforms, and investments [are] to be completed' under Article 18(4)(i) of the RRF Regulation .

In public, the commission has never voiced any self-doubts about the quality of spending under the RRF.

Instead, it has been very loud about its concerns that some of the RRF funds might be left unspent. It has actively encouraged member states to make use of Article 21 to amend their RRPs if the old one looks unattainable.

This option is available when some milestones or targets are no longer achievable due to ‘objective circumstances’.

In its related guidance , the commission specifies that an existing measure can be replaced by "a better alternative to implement a measure in a way that reduces the administrative burden linked to the implementation of that measure and without lowering the ambition of the plan".

In June 2025, the commission published a communication further encouraging member states to "review the wording of measures, milestones and targets to ensure that they focus on essential elements only. The goal should be to facilitate the implementation and assessment of the implementation of the RRPs, and reduce administrative burden, while preserving the ambition of the plan and continuing complying with the requirements of the RRF Regulation."

An analysis by the European Parliament Services published in February 2026 notes that this had, by their January 2026 cut-off date, led to 24 member states revising their NRRPs to varying degrees.

Most of the revisions were approved in December 2025 and January 2026, leading to a total of 2,344 measures being amended due to objective circumstances. 57 percent of revised measures were amended to reduce the administrative burden while the share of measures amended to implement a "better alternative" increased from less than half to over two-thirds.

As late as the end of July 2026, Portugal was reported to have submitted the final request to Brussels for the revision of its plan, the seventh request of this kind, an "option [that] stems from a suggestion by the European Commission itself, aiming to avoid the need to return funds due to non-compliance over targets and milestones."

A search in the Eur-lex shows that during the final three months before the expiry of the deadline, June-August 2026, the commission made 26 proposals for the amendment of national plans.

These included those for Luxembourg, Ireland, Germany, Estonia, Finland, Malta, the Netherlands, Latvia (twice), Cyprus (twice), Slovenia, Lithuania, France, Bulgaria, Hungary (twice), Belgium, Portugal, Greece, Czechia, Croatia, Poland, Romania, Spain, and Italy.

Just in August, the council approved - in a written procedure - 17 of these modifications, only a couple of weeks before the implementation deadline.

Obviously, this was not about incentivising member states into heroic last-minute efforts but rather about bending the yardstick to match whatever the member states had managed to do.

It is not clear why one should expect the commission to be tougher in the implementation of the next MFF.

On the contrary, the commission’s willingness to accommodate any shortfalls in the execution of the NRRPs should make it blatantly clear to the member states that the achievement of the milestones and targets in mostly optional.

To make best use of the limited funds the EU has available, Europe does not need a commission that measures its success by the amount of money it has been able to spend. It needs a Commission that is willing and able to prioritise and focus EU intervention where it does the most good and is then willing to stand up and defend those priorities against member states’ national interests.

In the case of the RRF, the commission seems to have surrendered without a fight.

Päivi Leino-Sandberg is professor of transnational European law at the University of Helsinki.