While Ursula von der Leyen’s EU Commission promotes a sweeping deregulatory agenda — rolling back environmental, digital, and corporate accountability frameworks in the name of “competitiveness” — a quieter but equally consequential transformation is unfolding inside the institution itself.
EU budget commissioner Piotr Serafin has appointed Catherine Day, former secretary-general and chief architect of the commission’s 2004 and 2014 austerity reforms, to lead a “Large Scale Review” of the 32,000-staff commission’s administrative structure.
Taken together, these moves reveal an under-recognised phenomenon: the Dogeization of the EU, a hollowing of supranational authority akin to attempts in the United States to dismantle the federal administrative state.
The downsizing of the commission as an administration mirrors its deliberate shrinking as an institution, marking a long-term reassertion of intergovernmental control by national capitals and the Council.
Past reforms expose the gap between rhetoric and reality.
The 2004 “Kinnock Reform,” marketed as modernisation, instead produced a two-tier workforce in which contract agents earn roughly 28 percent less than permanent officials — despite identical qualifications.
The 2014 reform went even further, generating €4.2bn in savings – far exceeding what member states demanded — while the European Court of Auditors found that it “negatively impacted the commission’s attractiveness as an employer” and delivered only “rather limited” managerial improvements.
This last reform exacerbated trends begun in 2004: an ageing workforce (average age 48, rising six months annually), recruitment halved between 2013 and 2017, contract agents now comprising nearly a quarter of staff, and six percent earning below the minimum official salary.
Day’s return therefore signals continuity with this austerity logic.
Staff unions warn that previous proposals were consistently “diverted and aggravated by member states increasingly greedy for savings."
What distinguishes the current review is its conceptual ambition. Day has floated ending lifelong civil-service status for new hires, a move that, if extended to the whole institution, would fundamentally alter its nature.
This signals a shift from a permanent, independent bureaucracy to a flexible, temporary workforce aligned with shifting political priorities.
And for the first time, a major downsizing is driven by a reduction in political standing, and a deliberate demotion of the commission within the EU’s institutional balance.
New justifications are already emerging.
Pressure on the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) provides a convenient pretext: rather than asking member states to fund Europe’s expanding strategic responsibilities, institutional resizing is presented as fiscal prudence.
Artificial intelligence offers a second alibi, with ‘efficiency gains’ invoked to rationalise staff cuts even though no algorithm can replace — all the more so when owned by non-EU companies — the political, legal, and diplomatic judgment the commission’s work requires.
The European External Action Service (EEAS) may pay the highest price, with possible delegation closures that would curtail Europe’s diplomatic reach and soft power just as global influence depends on visible, sustained presence.
This administrative hollowing accompanies von der Leyen’s broader deregulatory turn.
Since stating in October 2024 that “we need simplification and deregulation,” the commission has held over 600 lobbyist meetings on “simplification,” and her 'Mission Letters' introduced more than 15 deregulatory mechanisms.
Why would talented graduates join — or experienced officials remain in — an institution whose purpose is to constrain rather than advance the European project?
The 2025 Competitiveness Compass formalised corporate competitiveness as the commission’s overriding objective.
This reverses the internal incentive structure.
Where careers once rewarded constructing the internal market through legislation, they will now reward dismantling and simplifying existing rules.
Why would talented graduates join — or experienced officials remain in — an institution whose purpose is to constrain rather than advance the European project?
Europe faces its most precarious strategic environment since the end of the Cold War: an assertive China, a destabilising second Trump administration, and ongoing Russian aggression.
At such a moment, Europe needs what only the commission can provide: the capacity to articulate and defend a common European interest that transcends the competing imperatives of 27 national governments.
Only the commission possesses both the mandate and machinery to distill a shared European strategy rather than default to a lowest-common-denominator compromise.
European strategic autonomy, whether in defence, technology, trade, or economic resilience, depends on an institution capable of formulating what Europe needs, independent of national capitals and external powers.
Depleting institutional memory
Yet instead of strengthening this capacity, member states are systematically weakening the one body designed to imagine and defend the European common interest.
A commission unable to attract (and retain) mission-driven talent, depleted of institutional memory, and incentivised to dismantle rather than build cannot guide Europe. It can only administer Europe’s managed decline.
Under a commission increasingly responsive to national government pressures, this dynamic is already apparent.
Under the banner of ‘efficiency’, Europe is witnessing a transfer of power from its only supranational institution back to intergovernmental control, and a reorientation of its purpose from member states’ integration to member states’ accomodation.
EU national leaders face a choice: an EU with an independent, capable commission that defends their common interest and builds an integrated, autonomous Europe, or an EU reduced to an intergovernmental forum where the strongest — or most rebellious — member states prevail and the European project itself is subject to downsizing.
The Large Scale Review is not about administrative modernisation. It is about whether Europe will preserve the institutional capacity and political autonomy to trace the path forward for a Union grounded in shared sovereignty rather than the shifting preferences of 27 national governments.
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