Brno: Public administration reform financed by the Recovery and Resilience Facility produced plenty of outputs but few lasting results, the European Court of Auditors concluded in a special report published on 20 October 2026. Member states devoted €49.1 billion, or 8.5% of the facility’s €577 billion in commitments, to modernising their state machinery.

The auditors sampled 235 measures across 15 member states and examined Czechia, Germany, Greece and Spain in depth. Digital and e-government projects dominated, making up 53% of the sample and 71% of its estimated cost. Governments, the Court found, chose measures they could deliver quickly over harder structural change.

The link to the EU’s own advice is weak. None of the 2019 and 2020 country-specific recommendations on public administration reform was fully addressed. The auditors judged 35% substantially addressed, 58% marginally addressed and 7% not addressed at all, while only 14% of governance recommendations saw substantial progress.

The pattern matters because the Commission had flagged these weaknesses for years. Slow courts, fragmented ministries and outdated civil service rules featured in recommendations long before the pandemic, and the facility offered the money to fix them. Public administration reform, however, demands political capital that many governments preferred to spend elsewhere.

The in-depth checks paint a similar picture. All 14 measures examined delivered their promised outputs. Only five broadly met their objectives, eight produced limited results and one showed no evidence of results.

Monitoring explains part of the problem, and it affects public administration reform more than other policy areas. Payments depend on milestones and targets, which say little about processing times, costs or service quality for citizens. Only half of the measures examined had proper result indicators, and some effects may fade once funding ends in 2026.

Ivana Maletić, the ECA member who led the audit, called the outcome a missed opportunity. She said the facility could have been used more strategically and that the chance to tackle long-standing structural challenges was largely squandered. The Court also found that the Technical Support Instrument had only marginal influence on specific reforms.

The Commission rejects the harshest reading. It notes that the facility required member states to address all or a significant part of their recommendations, not every issue. It argues that weak results reflect missing data at this stage, that structural change takes time, and that implementation coincided with war in Ukraine, an energy crisis and high inflation.

The findings matter beyond the recovery fund. The Commission wants performance-based financing to anchor the next long-term budget, and the auditors say its proposed monitoring only partly fixes the gaps. For governments in Prague and elsewhere, the lesson is that public administration reform needs measurable results, not just new software and completed milestones.