In order to balance the democratic deficit that the European Union has been accused of having, the EU’s Commission has been extensively engaged in the subsidization of civil society. The result: NGOs are non-pluralistic, politically biased in favor of the EU, all while funding remains nontransparent.

A Controversial Report

In March of this year, the European Parliament’s budgetary control committee, under the responsibility of the German center-right rapporteur Markus Pieper, investigated the whole scale of EU-funded lobbyism and the immense grants associated with it. In the year 2015 alone, the EU spent a total €1.2 billion in grants in order to support European NGOs which lobby the EU institutions.

More interesting than the total expenditure is the unequal distribution of these grants. For instance, in the 2015 budget, almost 60 percent of the funding available under the EU’s environmental, social, health, and human rights programs was allocated to just 20 NGOs.

A 2013 Institute for Economic Affairs report came to the conclusion that these grants are often of an existential nature for these organizations. The report’s author, Christopher Snowdon, discovered multiple NGOs that were almost entirely reliant on the EU and justifiably labeled them as “puppets”:

For example, Women in Europe for a Common Future received an EC grant of €1,219,213 in 2011, with a further €135,247 coming from national governments. This statutory funding made up 93 per cent of its total income while private donations contributed €2,441 (0.2 per cent) and member contributions just €825 (0.06 per cent).

NGO-funding also suffers from a systematic ideological bias. The organization NGO Monitor has denounced some EU-funding to go to groups engaging in “political warfare” against Israel and called the focus of the funding “disproportionate.” The Pieper report, therefore, called for the rejection of funding for NGOs who “demonstrably disseminate untruths and/or whose objectives are contrary to the fundamental values of the European Union, democracy, human rights and/or strategic commercial and security policy objectives of the European Union institutions.”