Making the Most out of a Crisis? Analysing the role of the European Commission as a competence maximiser in the context of the new expenditure policies created within the 2021/2027 MFF/NGEU

This paper studies the role of the European Commission as a competence maximiser in the context of the new expenditure policies created within the 2021-2027 MFF/NGEU. Neo-functionalists argue that the Commission will strive to maximise the transfer of competencies from the Member States to the European level and thus empower itself and other supranational institutions. This role of the Commission as promoter of integration has been identified by the neo-functionalist literature with the concept of ‘cultivated spillover’. As the 2021-2027 MFF/NGEU was a crisis budget negotiated during and partly in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper is going to assess if the Commission exploited this situation to expand its competencies. This paper focuses on the three main parts of the policy process where the Commission could have acted as a competence maximiser: the conferral of delegated and implementing powers, the typology of Member States’ oversight of the Commission’s use of delegated and implementing powers, and the typology of management of the policy. Thus, this paper aims to test three hypotheses: H1) the Commission acted as a competence maximiser by pushing for being conferred delegated and implementing powers; H2) the Commission strived to minimise the degree of oversight by the Member States over its use of delegated and implementing powers; and H3) the Commission pushed for the new policies to be implemented under direct management. This paper aims to test these hypotheses in the context of the new expenditure policies created for the first time within the 2021-2027 MFF/NGEU. These policies are a) the Digital Europe Programme, b) the Recovery and Resilience Facility, c) the Just Transition Fund, d) the Public Sector Loan Facility, and e) the Integrated Border Management Fund: Instrument for Financial Support for Custom Control equipment.