Giving the Commission’s Secretariat-General a greater role in deciding whether new legislation is needed, reviewing how the EU’s decentralised agencies operate and even whether they are still needed, and fostering a sense of belonging and collective collaboration among European officials to deliver tangible results for European citizens...
These are among the nine recommendations submitted, on Monday 26 October, by the High-Level Group reviewing the work of European Commission officials to the Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, and to Piotr Serafin, the Commissioner for Budget, Anti-Fraud and Public Administration.
Mr Serafin will be tasked with drawing up proposals based on this report in the coming months.
Led by Catherine Day, the Commission’s former and influential Secretary-General from 2005 to 2015, this report on the ‘large-scale review’ of how the institution operates was commissioned by the institution’s President in 2025 and drew on more than 2,000 responses.
It sets out ways for the Commission to improve its ability to adapt, including by getting its Directorates-General to work together more effectively, using AI rather than commissioning thousands of reports for tasks considered less important, and making officials’ work more effective in delivering concrete results for citizens.
“This exercise aims to make the Commission stronger, more agile, and better equipped to serve Europeans in a rapidly changing world”, the Commission said in a press release.
The report, entitled ‘The Future of the Commission’s Civil Service’, was coordinated by eight other experts. It does not recommend changing the organisation of the Directorates-General or Commissioners’ portfolios before the end of Ursula von der Leyen’s second term, but suggests possible changes for the next Commission.
Major obstacle. “The EU has always adapted to meet the needs of the present but the Commission’s structures have not adapted at the same pace as its evolving role”, the report explains.
“The current structure of 42 Directorates-General (DGs), with limited mechanisms to enable effective, cross-DG collaboration is a major barrier to the kind of integrated, rapid response policy work the Commission now needs. It locks resources in place and fosters a culture of ownership rather than collaboration and coordination”. “It leads many officials to identify more with their DG than with the Commission as a whole. It can create duplication and complexity in procedures and cause confusion with external partners”.
The first recommendation is therefore to bring officials together “around a statement of purpose setting out the Commission’s values. It should be designed to foster a shared organisational culture anchored in collaboration, flexibility by design, and focused on outcomes over process. This should provide the political and administrative levels with a shared sense of working in the service of the EU”.
The Secretariat-General should also be given a clear mandate to become a strategic decision-making centre where the challenges faced by the different Directorates-General can be brought together.
“In light of today’s demands, the role of the Secretariat-General should be updated. In addition to its necessary procedural co-ordination functions, the Secretariat-General should be responsible for two core roles that involve coordinating the work between the political/administrative levels: (i) driving cross-DG collaboration (beyond procedural coordination) and (ii) acting as the strategic centre, translating the Commission’s political priorities into coordinated cross-DG action and ensuring high quality and on-time delivery”.
Moratorium on new agencies. As for the approximately 50 decentralised EU agencies and bodies, it is necessary to “see whether these agencies’ mandates remain relevant and whether some of these entities should be merged”, a European source explained. For now, the experts therefore recommend a moratorium on the creation of any new agencies until the end of the von der Leyen Commission’s second term.
Link to the report: https://aeur.eu/f/o40 (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)