Brussels wants to scrap a little-known farm subsidy safeguard amid a broader push to cut red tape — but one veteran official warns it’s a mistake.
BRUSSELS — The European Commission is preparing to scrap a crucial financial safeguard in the European Union’s €386 billion Common Agricultural Policy before it even completes its first trial run — a move billed as “simplification” that critics say will weaken oversight on how billions in farm subsidies are spent.
In the eyes of EU agriculture ministers, the so-called performance clearance — an annual check introduced in 2023 to verify whether CAP payments align with national spending plans — is a bureaucratic monster.
But Rudolf Mögele, a bespectacled German law professor who spent nearly three decades at the Commission and was in charge of audits and assurance at its agriculture wing DG AGRI, says junking the mechanism would be a grave error, making it harder to detect misuse of funds until substantial money has already been lost.
“If you take [it] away this quickly, how do you know where you’re going?” Mögele told POLITICO on a recent visit to Brussels. “And if you take away this step, what’s next? How do you prove the Common Agricultural Policy is delivering anything at all?”
“Scrapping performance clearance robs the CAP oversight system of a vital check,” he said in an interview. “You might not realize something’s going wrong until it’s too late.”
From compliance to performance
Historically, CAP spending was policed through strict compliance audits, but the EU aimed to move in the last reform toward a system that rewards results rather than box-ticking. Performance clearance was introduced as part of this shift — checking spending against clearly defined goals to provide an early-warning system for budget anomalies.
Yet despite these ambitions, performance clearance won few friends in national agriculture ministries. Last November, all 27 of them signed a joint letter urging the Commission to overhaul the rule, calling it a “substantial administrative burden” that forces them to explain even minor spending deviations.
One senior official at a national agriculture ministry, granted anonymity to speak freely, described performance clearance as “constant nitpicking from Brussels” that diverts staff from designing targeted farm programs. “It ends up delaying payments for real farmers while we haggle over technicalities,” the official said.
The message landed. At the January summit of agriculture ministers in Brussels, Agriculture Commissioner Christophe Hansen told them he plans to recommend dumping performance clearance altogether.
“I fully share your assessment,” Hansen said. “I will propose to the Commission to bring this procedure to an end.”
Hansen and other Commission officials maintain that shelving performance clearance won’t jeopardize CAP oversight, pointing to the biennial performance review and long-term impact evaluations, among other mechanisms, as adequate safeguards.
A precarious moment for the EU budget
Mögele — who rose to the rank of deputy director general at DG AGRI before retiring in 2019 to teach law in Göttingen and Würzburg — is unconvinced. He believes losing this annual check robs the EU of one of its only near-real-time tools for spotting budget anomalies.
“Monitoring performance has different stages,” he explained. “Long-term impact reviews can take years, and even medium-term result checks take a while. Performance clearance was the only early-warning system — a way to catch problems before they become full-blown crises.”
That’s no small concern, given that fraud in the CAP, while relatively low, still amounted to an estimated €226.5 million between 2016 and 2020 — just 0.09 percent of total payments but a tenth of all fraud detected in EU spending. And while fraud prevention isn’t the primary goal of performance clearance, it helps by making sure farm subsidies are actually being used as planned — checking that the money goes where it’s supposed to and delivers the expected results.
The move to scrap performance clearance comes at a critical juncture for EU finances. Starting in 2028, Brussels will begin repaying some €300 billion in post-Covid borrowing, tightening the screws on an already stretched budget. With heightened demands for defense, industrial policy and energy security, the CAP’s share of funding could be up for debate.
In this environment, Mögele warns, Brussels needs every assurance that agricultural subsidies are delivering real value. The European Court of Auditors and budget hawks in the European Parliament often question whether CAP offers enough bang for its massive buck — an argument that only grows stronger if clear oversight measures are scrapped.
“The Court of Auditors has already questioned whether CAP delivers value for money,” Mögele said. “And now we’re throwing away one of the only tools we have to prove that it does?”
‘Simplification’ — for whom?
Hansen has framed the repeal as a boon for “simplification,” a catchword Brussels has employed in a massive push to reduce administrative burdens on industries in Europe.
Ministers hailed it as a victory against red tape. Yet for farmers themselves, the short-term effect may be negligible: They seldom had to deal with performance clearance directly, because the mechanism targets ministries overseeing fund allocation.
“The biggest beneficiaries aren’t farmers,” Mögele said flatly. “It’s the ministries managing CAP money.”
That begs the question: If the point of simplification is to help farmers, why aren’t they the ones seeing the biggest relief?
In its short life, performance clearance has always been unloved, and the Commission seems poised to bury it for good. Scrapping it may ease short-term political headaches, Mögele said, but at what long-term cost?
“You can do away with this, but it will just make your whole thing less solid. And after several years, we’ll find out [CAP spending] hasn’t worked at all — but by then, it’ll be too late to fix.”