The negotiations on the next EU budget, the Multiannual Financial Framework for 2028-2034, have become the single biggest concern for the future of our careers. Administration is squarely a target for savings, and the ceiling on what the Commission can spend on its own staff is about to be set, lower. This is the story behind the uncertainty so many colleagues now feel.
What is on the table
The 2028-2034 Multiannual Financial Framework [1] is being negotiated now. The Irish Council presidency’s negotiating box trims the Commission’s proposal by about 8% overall, and administration, the heading that pays for salaries, pensions and the running of the institutions, is reduced by about 8.8%, to roughly 95 billion euro over the seven years. A majority of Member States have named administration as a place to cut, and several have openly challenged the Commission’s plan to add around 2,500 posts, pointing to the headcount freezes in their own national services. The European Council is pushing for agreement. In short, the limit on what the Commission may spend on its people is being set, and it is being set lower.
Why a budget line becomes your problem
A figure in a negotiating box does not stay abstract for long. A tighter administrative ceiling turns, inside the institution into pressure to hold or cut the number of posts, to lean harder on cheaper non-permanent contracts, to leave vacancies unfilled, and to not renew colleagues even where the work continues. It slows recruitment, it slows promotions, and it makes every establishment post something services have to fight over. None of this needs a dramatic decision. It happens quietly, through a hundred ordinary choices made under a budget that no longer stretches, and it lands first on the colleagues with the least protection, already under pressure suffering from a high workload and with the risk to increase the psychosocial risks that might lead to burnout and mental health degradation.
Careers and competitions, squeezed from both sides
This is where the budget meets the Large-Scale Review. Internal competitions and change-of-status routes are how colleagues who entered as assistants, or as contract and temporary agents, build a career and have their experience recognised. But those routes only work if there are posts behind them. If the budget reduces the posts while the review standardises and narrows the competitions, and proposes to phase out certification, the two pressures multiply: the door narrows at the same moment as the room behind it shrinks. The question with no answer yet is whether a genuine route to progress will survive the next budget at all.
The seven-year rule: the quiet risk
Budget pressure also makes blunt instruments more tempting, and the seven-year rule [2] is one of them. The idea of a forced cooling-off, a break imposed on a colleague’s career, looks like a technical limit on how long a contract can run. In practice a forced break ends the continuity of a career, and continuity is what protects a colleague’s pension: the Court confirmed in the Picard case [3] that an uninterrupted career keeps the more favorable pre-2014 pension regime. Used as a way to contain the administrative budget, the seven-year rule can cost experienced colleagues their grade, their continuity and, in the end, part of their pension.
Uncertainty is already a cost
Perhaps the most damaging effect is the hardest to put on a budget line. The decisions being set in motion now run to the end of the decade, while the answers that matter most to staff, on competitions, on the seven-year rule, on which posts survive, remain open. People cannot plan a career, a mortgage or a family around a question mark. The predictable result is that colleagues with options leave, motivation falls, and the institution lose exactly the experience and continuity it says it wants to keep.
What we ask
Our message is simple, and it is about the budget. Administration is only about 6% of the EU budget, and salaries are a fraction of that: cutting there saves little and costs a great deal in delivery. If savings must be found, find them in structures and genuine waste, not in the posts and the people. A budget meant to defend the Union over the next decade must fund the people who deliver it.
Generation 2004 will press, in budget negotiations and in social dialogue, to protect the posts, the career routes and the acquired rights that a smaller administrative ceiling now puts at risk. Generation 2004 will also advocate for better managed psychosocial risks, especially considering the general policy line of doing more with less, ultimately at the cost of staff’s health.
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