Briefing - Transparency and oversight in the Commission’s MFF proposals on a performance-based EU budget: lessons learned from the RRF - 22-01-2026
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The RRF has promoted investments and reforms in nearly any area of domestic policy. The legal framework governing the RRF is broad and undefined, with little practical guidance, leaving the Commission wide discretion to negotiate fund allocation with nationaBriefing - Transparency and oversight in the Commission’s MFF proposals on a performance-based EU budget: lessons learned from the RRF - 22-01-2026
The RRF has promoted investments and reforms in nearly any area of domestic policy. The legal framework governing the RRF is broad and undefined, with little practical guidance, leaving the Commission wide discretion to negotiate fund allocation with national governments. In practice, this has led to large amounts of EU funding being directed to national projects without clear EU-level impact. The RRF’s wide scope and strict confidentiality regime, combined with the performance-based delivery mode, enable its implementation to escape scrutiny and make rigorous assessment of value for money nearly impossible. The main risk to the financial interests of Union is not fraud or irregularities, but EU money financing projects that have little relevance for European priorities. - The implementation of the RRF relies on the ability to define milestones and targets and measure performance in a sensible manner. This is particularly hard for reforms, which are difficult to pin down to milestones and targets. Funds have often been disbursed on the basis of procedural milestones that bear little relation to actual performance. - Based on the RRF experience, 27 national plans are not an efficient tool for promoting European priorities that are global and Europe-wide. EU priorities need to be incorporated in the forthcoming legal framework in a clear and operational manner, so as to effectively limit and frame Commission and Member State discretion in drawing up the plan. - The Commission’s MFF package fails to address the core problems of the RRF model. It does not define EU priorities. The legislative framework provides no actual ‘requirements’ that would effectively steer national plans. It leaves too much discretion for the national governments to propose, and the Commission to approve, in a confidential setting, nearly any national project that in their determination seems worthy of funding. - The shift to performance-based funding fundamentally alters what ‘management’ of EU funds consists of, creating new risks to the financial interests of the Union Measured error rates may go down because what constitutes ‘management’ in the new system is less demanding. Costing/pricing takes place at a point where only the outlines of the measures are known. At the point of disbursement, the value of each milestone is calculated with a methodology that bears little connection either to real or estimated costs. The eventual actual national cofinancing rates may end up being far from the numbers required in the regulation. - Trying to make up for these problems through oversight arrangements in the Parliament or Council is unlikely to succeed. Instead, EU legislators need to maintain control over EU priorities and set clearer limits on what EU funding can be spent on, reconsider the central status given to national plans, and address the deep information asymmetries built into the RRF model. Using EU funds requires appropriate accountability structures at EU level, aimed at ensuring that money is effectively steered to policies with EU-wide interest. Funding national policy measures requires strong involvement of national parliaments and civil society. Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP
