Almost €50 billion from the EU’s main COVID fund – the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) – has done little to resolve longstanding weaknesses in public administrations in the member states, according to a new report by the European Court of Auditors (ECA). The reforms and investments funded through the RRF only partly tackled challenges related to administrative capacity, coordination and governance, and focused mainly on digitalisation rather than on structural reforms. Just over a third have achieved significant results and, in some cases, their sustainability beyond 2026 may be at risk, the auditors warn.

The COVID-19 crisis highlighted the need for efficient public administration in EU countries. In response, the EU provided member states with €49.1 billion from the RRF for public administration measures, equivalent to 8.5 % of the RRF’s total funding of €577 billion. These measures covered areas such as digital transformation, e-government, public procurement, and competition. To receive the money, EU countries had to set out reforms and investments linked to the recommendations issued as part of the European Semester, the EU’s framework for coordinating their economic policies.

"The RRF could have been used more strategically to make public administrations in the member states stronger. The opportunity to address longstanding structural challenges was largely missed,” said Ivana Maletić, the ECA Member leading the audit. “With the EU now preparing its next long-term budget, it has a chance to learn from these shortcomings and focus more clearly on measuring results."

The auditors looked at the way the RRF measures included in the national plans addressed the EU’s 2019 and 2020 country-specific recommendations on public administration. They found that none of the recommendations had been addressed in full. Just over a third of the recommendations had been addressed to a large extent, more than half only marginally, and some not at all. If previous audits of labour market and business environment reforms are also taken into account, the RRF has only partly met one of its key goals: addressing the challenges identified in the country-specific recommendations in these areas.

The audit also showed that governments were more likely to tackle some public administration challenges than others. They tended to favour measures that could be implemented quickly, such as investment in digitalisation. As a result, many other structural challenges remain largely unresolved. For instance, only 14 % of the recommendations on governance – an area which often entails more structural reforms – were largely addressed. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the RRF measures helped the countries to progress only slightly on implementing their European Semester recommendations related to public administration.

So far, only 36 % of the public administration measures that were examined have achieved significant results. For the remaining two thirds, the auditors found only limited results, or no evidence of results at all. Moreover, fewer than half of the measures checked (43 %) had proper result indicators. Without them, it is impossible to say whether reforms have led to faster procedures, lower administrative costs, improved solutions for users, or better governance. These issues are likely to persist in the years to come, as the performance monitoring proposed for the EU’s next long-term budget only partially addresses the weaknesses in assessing the results that were identified in several of the ECA’s audits.

The auditors also checked the EU’s Technical Support Instrument (TSI), which provides EU countries with support in designing and implementing reforms. Here too, they found a mixed picture: the programme had only a marginal impact on supporting implementation of specific RRF reforms, as the TSI project was mostly general in scope. The practical arrangements for the RRF and the TSI – in particular the timelines – were not sufficiently aligned to allow the synergies between the instruments to unfold in practice. When selecting TSI projects, the Commission did not prioritise those linked to delays in implementing reforms in the member states’ national plans, something which could have helped to reduce the risk of delays in achieving upcoming milestones and targets.

Background information

According to the Commission’s database, EU member states assigned a total of 400 RRF measures to 48 country-specific recommendations linked to “public administration” and the “digitalisation of public administration and public services”. The audit focused on the 2019 and 2020 recommendations, which were most relevant to the design of the national recovery plans. It covered public administration reforms and investments in 15 member states, assessing four of them more closely: Czechia, Germany, Greece, and Spain.

ECA special report 29/2026 “Use of RRF support in public administration: some results achieved, but progress in addressing country-specific recommendations remains limited” is available in English on the ECA website; other languages will be added in due course. ECA publications about the RRF can be found here.