Euroviews. The European Commission needs a policy entrepreneur-in-chief

Back in 1952, five years before the Treaty of Rome and the founding of the European Economic Community, Jan Tinbergen, a Dutch Nobel Prize-winning economist, coined a simple but often-overlooked rule for policymakers: the number of achievable policy goals cannot exceed the number of policy instruments.

Put differently, an organisation's skills and resources need to be proportionate to its objectives. Seventy years later, this rule is broken within the institutions of the European Union.

Some basic institutional math reveals an impossible mismatch between aspirations and capabilities. According to official sources, today the European Commission has around 32,000 employees. That’s the same number as in 2016. Yet, the scope and complexity of the portfolios has increased.

This trend is not exclusive to EU Institutions. A global survey of civil servants reports that the majority of government staffers find that climate change is impacting their work. Still, they have not received specialised training to handle the related additional complexity and demands.

Nowhere is this more evident than in digital policy. In the past decade, Brussels has made its name globally by passing several comprehensive regulations on data protection, online platforms, AI, and interoperability.

However, the hiring of specialised talent has not come alongside this explosion of legislative activities in often incredibly technical domains.

All this technology policy has not resulted in more technologists among public servants. In fact, the share of staff in the responsible Directorates has, shockingly, actually shrunk between 2016 and 2024.

The European AI Office was supposed to reverse this trend. Yet, thus far, it has limited itself to a remix of the