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.
