>Yet...How can the same organization be behind this?
Very easy. The organisation is huge and composed from 100000s of people working on different goals. They don't have any supervision, no democratic vote and if they decided they want to grow 400% in one year, they simply could and would, because no one feels like EU is "their government" they could easily protest against. If they want to create EU-Online-Child-Safety-Agency, they would just take our tax money and create it. What could you do against it? Shitpost online that you don't like it? It's too big and broad to control by citizens.
I'm afraid all of this comment is essentially nonsense. For starters, the EU system (including the Commission, all the various agencies across the Union, all courts, etc.) employs around 60,000 people.
The government of Sweden alone employs more people for a population of only 10M. The EU is in fact fairly lean given its scope and the number of languages. National governments are responsible for implementing almost everything agreed by the Union members.
Also, they can not grow by 400%. There are rules in place that limit the budget and the maximum change per budget chapter that can be executed at once. These rules are made and by member countries.
BTW, EU budget was available in XML format for a while. Easy to parse. The first years they did not publish it, a FOI request would get you an electronic copy rather quickly.
IIRC, there was little interest in the machine-readable budget because the published version does not go too far into the details of budget lines and one has to have specialized knowledge to read it.
Still, one could make some interesting conclusions, e.g. that the Ombudsman had much higher HR budget per head that the rest of the pack, the Commission included.
This created internal tensions, but no substantial change in the follow-up.
It's a pity there is so little interest in EU Budget that they can just stop publishing machine-readable copy and get away with it.
The EU budget in theory is funded by money allocated by member states and can't go beyond that level. This is fixed law by treaty, Article 310:
"The revenue and expenditure shown in the budget shall be in balance."
But nothing about EU treaties means anything in practice. This article holds back the EU's power and they can't be having that, so what actually happens is ...
"First half of 2023: Commission to issue up to €80 billion to finance economic recovery and support for Ukraine"
The money isn't even being spent on EU member states! Raising money via debt this way is illegal but the EU is not a system of laws, it's a system that does whatever it can get away with politically. That's why it's dangerous: it is a dictatorship that's rapidly growing in power, and it's on track to completely destroy European democracy.
It's written by a self proclaimed EU fan who says:
"When the COVID-19 crisis hit the Union, the Treaties did not change, but the political circumstances surrounding them did. Building on a Franco-German plan, the Commission came forward with a proposal for Next Generation EU (NGEU), to be financed through borrowing € 750 billion on the financial markets and primarily used as grants to Member States. In other words, the EU issues debt on a massive scale to finance itself. It does exactly what we thought it was prevented by the Treaties from doing.
I do not question the need of solidarity, but rather the legal techniques applied to deliver this solidarity.
Soon after the adoption of the Commission proposal, the Council website was updated and the reference to the prohibition of debt financing was removed. Apparently, constitutional change was about to take place, however, without a formal constitutional change."
Here, "legal techniques" is a euphemism for ignoring the law. Give it 20 years and Brexit will seem like a genius move, assuming EU loyalists haven't managed to undo it by then.
Is it? I would rather say it is maybe too democratic. For an EU law to pass, both the EU parliament and EU council need to approve. So that means people vote for parties, that in turn are the EU parliament. Plus the EU council, which consists of the heads all the EU countries. That is a double layer of democracy.
The only real difference is that EU gets very little media attention.
The EU has a language problem though. If there's a problem affecting Lithuania there's very little that voting can do to solve it. Lithuanians don't have an impact on the politicians voted in from other countries, because the politics don't overlap due to language. Lithuanian voters would have to convince German politicians, that campaign in the German language to German people, about Lithuania's issue. How likely do you think that is going to work?
How does it work in the United States? Let's say there's a problem affecting South Carolina. How would South Carolina voters convince Californian politicians about South Carolina problems? If convinced, what actions would Californian politicians take?
Problems that are affecting South Carolina will be spoken about in English. Californians will hear about it here and there. They can be seen as national problems.
Something like that doesn't happen in the EU. Every language is like an entirely different political sphere.
US presidential elections (and the party system) add another reason for politicians to care about what the voters in another state think. If Democrats look bad when handling an issue in South Carolina then it can end up costing them votes in other states too.
Well, ok. Let's consider the total number of employed people in the EU, around 190 million.
In the entire Union, about 16% of all employees work for the governments. That's 30.4 million people.
60,000 people work for the EU directly, which is 0.2% of the total. To put it another way, there are 500 national government employees for each one EU worker. Is this the tail wagging the dog? 0.2% is not even the dog's tail, it's a piece of hair on its back.
Every month, the whole parliament is moving fron Straßbourg to Bruessel and then back. That is not a sign of an efficient organisation, despite the fact that the numbers could be worse.
"To put it another way, there are 500 national government employees for each one EU worker."
And they simply don't have the same scope at all, so any direct comparison doesn not make much sense.
The actual work is done at the national level. They work on coordination, which is important, but very vague.
> The EU is in fact fairly lean given its scope and the number of languages.
Any reference on that? I used to work for EU and I never had this impression while there or never read about how lean the EU is.. would be interesting to know more about it.
I'm not saying there isn't waste. It develops in every large organization, public or private. (I sometimes wonder about people — Americans mostly — who want the government to vanish, but also complain loudly about how their phone operator, insurance company, etc. are the worst. What do they expect to happen if the private sector took over everything?)
The relative leanness of the EU is a result of its unique structure. It has almost no executive authority on its own except in specific transnational cases like antitrust where it can fine large corporations. On the level that citizens interact, everything is delegated to national institutions. It's nothing like the federal states that exist elsewhere. For example the US federal government employs almost 50 times more people than the entire EU system, yet EU population is 30% larger.
> For example the US federal government employs almost 50 times more people than the entire EU system, yet EU population is 30% larger.
but is that comparison not like comparing apples to oranges? You should add EU system + Federal System from all countries together, to get a better picture, no?
But the EU is not a government. It only does funding, almost nothing else. They are all administrators, members of committees, managers of members of committees and so on and forth. The EU won't put out the fire in your house or send you a doctor. What's the purpose of comparing it to sweden?
It is a different kind of organization, and there is no mechanism for EU citizens to assign blame to the EU politicians. Practical example: the EU handling of vaccines, with the EU leader still refusing to make public their messaging with Pfizer.
The 60000 people of the EU manages a 1 trillion budget. The budget for the 60000 people is 11 Billion/year. That's average spending 183333/person per year
183_333 per head is a lot in Romania, but pretty much in line public administration spending in Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany and France where the bulk of the staff works.
This is not just salaries, but cost, including building, services schools, pensions and god knows what.
P.S. As I noted elsewhere, if you want to voice your concern about eurocrats' pay, start with Ombudsman office. They spend much more per head.
No the national governments choose the commissioner to send to the commission. A nation in the EU can recall its commissioner. The commissioner acts in the interests of the Government of the nation that sent them to the EU commission. The national governments of EU nations are all elected by their citizens so the commission is indirectly democratic. It is arranged like this because individual countries in the EU don't want to give up sovereignty to the EU parliament.
Very easy. The organisation is huge and composed from 100000s of people working on different goals. They don't have any supervision, no democratic vote and if they decided they want to grow 400% in one year, they simply could and would, because no one feels like EU is "their government" they could easily protest against. If they want to create EU-Online-Child-Safety-Agency, they would just take our tax money and create it. What could you do against it? Shitpost online that you don't like it? It's too big and broad to control by citizens.