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August 9, 2026

Newsletter

The European Post

Policy • Diplomacy • Strategic Insight

LATEST
New EU Gas Market Rules Take Effect With Consumer SafeguardsDeforestation Regulation Holds Its December Deadline Despite CutsDigital Omnibus Delays Europe’s High-Risk AI Deadline to 2027Europe’s Schools Confront a Widening Basic Skills GapRule of Law Report Finds Progress but Trust Still LagsIRIS2 Gains 66 Satellites as Brussels Signs the Rollout DealNature Restoration Plans Come Due as Member States Race a DeadlineECB Rates Hold at 2.25 Percent as Frankfurt Waits on the DataEU Budget Talks Turn to Cohesion as Ireland Takes OverWildfire Response Stretches Europe’s Emergency Fleet ThinCan Europe’s Quantum Plan Match Its Big Ambitions?Armenia Edges West as Moscow’s Grip Slips AwayEurope Inherits the World’s Aid Bill It Cannot Fully PayAir Passenger Rights Get Their First Overhaul in Two DecadesErasmus Opens a 5 Billion Euro Round for Skills and MobilityCeuta Crisis Pushes the EU Toward Faster Migrant ReturnsBulky Parcels Face a Packaging Crackdown From August 12Can Europe Build Its Drone Wall Before 2030 Arrives?Indonesia’s Trade Deal With Europe Nears Its Final SignatureEurope Leans on Beijing to Keep Climate Talks Alive Before AntalyaNew EU Gas Market Rules Take Effect With Consumer SafeguardsDeforestation Regulation Holds Its December Deadline Despite CutsDigital Omnibus Delays Europe’s High-Risk AI Deadline to 2027Europe’s Schools Confront a Widening Basic Skills GapRule of Law Report Finds Progress but Trust Still LagsIRIS2 Gains 66 Satellites as Brussels Signs the Rollout DealNature Restoration Plans Come Due as Member States Race a DeadlineECB Rates Hold at 2.25 Percent as Frankfurt Waits on the DataEU Budget Talks Turn to Cohesion as Ireland Takes OverWildfire Response Stretches Europe’s Emergency Fleet ThinCan Europe’s Quantum Plan Match Its Big Ambitions?Armenia Edges West as Moscow’s Grip Slips AwayEurope Inherits the World’s Aid Bill It Cannot Fully PayAir Passenger Rights Get Their First Overhaul in Two DecadesErasmus Opens a 5 Billion Euro Round for Skills and MobilityCeuta Crisis Pushes the EU Toward Faster Migrant ReturnsBulky Parcels Face a Packaging Crackdown From August 12Can Europe Build Its Drone Wall Before 2030 Arrives?Indonesia’s Trade Deal With Europe Nears Its Final SignatureEurope Leans on Beijing to Keep Climate Talks Alive Before Antalya

Is A 175 Billion Research Budget Safe Inside A Bigger Fund

Guntis Ulmanis
Lead Analyst, Research and Innovation

Strasbourg: On paper, European research has rarely looked better funded. The Commission’s proposal for the next framework programme carries a headline figure of 175 billion euros for the 2028 to 2034 period, nearly double the 93.5 billion that Horizon Europe commands today. If adopted as proposed, it would be the largest publicly financed research and innovation programme anywhere in the world. Yet across universities, learned societies and industry consortia, the dominant mood is not celebration but unease, and the reason lies less in the number than in where that number sits.

The headline conceals a structural change. The successor programme, provisionally branded Horizon Europe 2028 to 2034, would no longer stand entirely on its own. Part of its architecture is bound up with a wider European Competitiveness Fund that pools several instruments under a single roof, the aim being to align research spending more tightly with industrial and strategic priorities. To the Commission this is coherence, an end to fragmented pots that pull in different directions. To much of the research community it is a warning sign, because money that is easy to combine is also money that is easy to redirect.

That fear is grounded in recent memory. Horizon Europe was repeatedly raided during its own lifetime, with funds shifted to other priorities when budgets came under strain. A programme embedded inside a larger competitiveness vehicle, critics argue, is more exposed to exactly that kind of diversion, and the prized autonomy of bottom-up, curiosity-driven science could be squeezed by the gravitational pull of nearer-term industrial goals. The structure itself, not any single line, is what worries them.

The proposed pillars sharpen the question. Around 44 billion euros is earmarked for the part that funds excellent science, including the European Research Council and the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions that support individual researchers and mobility. Close to 39 billion is set aside for the innovation pillar that backs new products, services and business models. The balance between these tells a story about intent. Defenders of fundamental research want guarantees that the ERC’s grants, awarded purely on scientific merit, will not be diluted by pressure to demonstrate immediate commercial payoff.

There is a genuine policy argument on the other side, and it deserves to be stated plainly. Europe has long been accused of excelling at discovery while failing to convert it into companies, jobs and market leaders, ceding that ground to the United States and China. Tying research funding more closely to competitiveness is an attempt to fix that translation gap, to ensure that public money produces not only papers but industries. From this vantage point, ring-fencing science from strategic direction is precisely the habit that has left Europe a generator of breakthroughs it does not capitalise on.

The criticism that unites both camps is a different one: vagueness. Even observers who welcomed the ambition of the proposal complained that key details about governance, allocation and the firewalls protecting basic research were left unclear. That ambiguity matters because the figure is only an opening bid. The proposal must now pass through the ordinary legislative procedure, with the European Parliament and the member states negotiating jointly, and a final agreement is not expected until late in 2027. Headline numbers tend to shrink in that process, and the 175 billion will be tested against every competing demand in the Union’s next long-term budget.

The outcome will shape European science for the better part of a decade. The contest is not really between more money and less, since few argue for cutting research outright. It is between two philosophies of what research funding is for, whether it should protect the open-ended inquiry that produces unexpected breakthroughs, or whether it should be steered toward the strategic autonomy that policymakers now prize above almost everything. The number at the top of the page suggests generosity. The structure beneath it suggests that the real negotiation is about control.

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