The Omnibus Package and why the EU needs a Policy Cycle 2.0

In this article, Christiny Miller, Laura Danilaviciute and Rachèle Chevallier from our governance team examine the EU Omnibus proposals and the drive for simplification. Is the Commission moving towards faster but riskier ‘crisis-mode’ policymaking? they ask.

The European Commission unveiled two new ‘Omnibus’ packages in February aimed at “cutting red tape” as part of its simplification priority. Omnibus I aims to simplify EU sustainability reporting rules by amending existing directives. Omnibus II proposes revisions to regulations around investment, including to simplify reporting requirements.  

A global trend 

This is part of a broader trend around the world to cut costs and increase efficiency in government. The United Nations’ ‘UN80 Initiative’ is focused on reforming the UN to make it effective and cost-efficient in the face of funding reductions. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently abolished the health service administrative body ‘NHS England’ to cut “burdensome layers of bureaucracy”. The most extreme case is the ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ in the US, led by billionaire Elon Musk, which has made efforts to slash government spending including by breaching constitutional law to fire thousands of government employees in the name of efficiency.   

The EU’s Omnibus I proposal introduces significant changes to a range of environment- and investment-related legislation adopted under the European Green Deal in the previous mandate . These amendments will now be discussed by the European Parliament and the Council.  

The first Omnibus package was subject to fast-tracking: the proposal was published just four months after the idea was first announced. There was no formal public consultation; instead, an invitation-only consultation with selected industry groups. There was no formal impact assessment process; instead, only a ‘staff working document’ summarising issues and impacts.  

While such fast-track processes are foreseen in the Better Regulation Guidelines, they are usually reserved for legislative acts prepared under exceptional circumstances that require very short responses, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic and after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

A policymaking process in crisis mode

Typically, EU legislative proposals are developed following a structured process, set out in the Better Regulation Guidelines. This process includes a 12-week long call for evidence (including a public consultation) and an impact assessment report investigating the potential economic, social, and environmental impacts. The whole process usually takes more than a year to complete. 

The Omnibus package is an amendment to existing directives rather than a brand new proposal, which can in part explain this shorter timeframe. However, another key factor for the rapidness of the procedure is the decision of the Commission to forgo the impact assessment and the public consultation (opting instead for a ‘reality check’ with a selected group of stakeholders). This decision is allowed and planned for by the Better Regulation Guidelines under specific circumstances:  

“In some cases, it may not be possible or appropriate to follow each step in the guidelines. For instance, there may be a political imperative to move ahead quickly, an emergency that requires a rapid response, a need to meet specific deadlines in legislation that cannot be met based on normal planning, or a need to protect security-related or confidential information” — Better Regulation Guidelines, p6.  

Such provisions have been used in the past to bypass standard procedures and address immediate needs, for example when the REPowerEU package, introduced to reduce the EU’s dependence on Russian gas and boost clean energy production, was presented less than three months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This decision must still be justified and politically validated, and the proposal must be followed by a ‘staff working document’ within three months to present evidence and cost estimates behind the proposal.  

In the case of the Omnibus package, the Commission justified the decision with the urgency of needing to strengthen EU competitiveness in a rapidly evolving economic landscape. This raises the questions of what an emergency is, how and in what cases ‘political imperative’ can be used as a justification to fast-track a policy file, and whether the use of emergency decision-making tools is justified as the norm in a world in polycrisis. At the heart of all of this is the question of the consequences this has for effective governance, the long-term sustainability of these policies, and the negative impacts they may carry. 

Speed at what cost? 

The acceleration of EU policymaking aligns with broader institutional trends to speed up processes. The Draghi report on the future of EU competitiveness emphasised the need to enhance Europe’s competitiveness through an expedited legislative process, noting that the average length of an ordinary legislative procedure (19 months) was too slow for global competition. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen echoed the need for speed in her political guidelines.  

This phenomenon has also been observed at the level of the European Parliament with a trend in recent years of voting on proposals in the first reading. The Parliament has not conducted any impact assessments on its substantial amendments since 2019. This trend is likely to continue as the European Peoples Party has urged the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, to use the urgent procedure so that lawmakers can vote on the first part of the Omnibus package “no later” than April. 

While the need for efficient decision-making is understandable, bypassing regulatory safeguards carries significant risks. Impact assessments serve as a filter to identify risks in proposals, ensuring that policies do not have unintended negative consequences. Without this process, crucial aspects – such as the impact of the Omnibus package on environmental sustainability – remain unexamined. NGOs have raised alarms about the consequences of this proposal on the environment and on human rights.

Investors have also already warned that the Omnibus package could paradoxically harm investment attractiveness due to legal uncertainty—the very reason for the creation of the Omnibus proposal. 

Shortened process: a new business-as-usual?  

The rapid process behind the Omnibus packages raises important questions for the future of EU policymaking; Is this a sign that the fast-track policymaking processes are now becoming business as usual for the Commission? Is it possible to adapt typical Better Regulation processes to allow for such flexible rapid responses without compromising evidence-informed policymaking with open stakeholder input? What could that look like?  

The Omnibus package shows that the EU governance system currently lacks a middle ground between fully fledged processes and crisis mode. Given the ongoing crisis conditions, the EU needs governance mechanisms that can balance speed with solid analysis of long-term impacts, and which represent the interests of all dimensions of society, not only a hand-selected group of stakeholders.  

A new path forward 

At ZOE Institute, we had already been looking at some of these questions prior to the introduction of the Omnibus packages. In 2023 we took the REPowerEU package as a case study to explore the EU’s crisis-context policymaking process, concluding that without a consultation or impact assessment, the proposal risked unexpected trade-offs and lacked policy coherence.  

Building on that research and a series of co-creative policy labs with policymakers and experts, we published our Policy Cycle 2.0, proposing process adjustments for the Commission. This included proposals for the crisis context, namely:  

• More upstream coordination across policy areas with integrated planning processes to align approaches across sectors.  

• Standing citizen panels in the EU’s policy process in general, which would then allow for a faster way to gain citizen inputs into policy processes without the time required for a typical 12-week public consultation.  

• A Rapid Impact Assessment which would allow policies to be evidence informed prior to adoption, without the full time needed for a comprehensive impact assessment. Clear criteria would need to be established to ensure that the rapid assessment does not become the status quo but is used only in times of urgency.  

Proposals such as these could have been used to ensure the Omnibus package does not cause unintended harm and is in line with the principles of Better Regulation. Moving forward, it is important that the Commission uses fast-track procedures only where it is truly an emergency. Even in those cases, it is important to still use evidence and broader stakeholder input to ensure the proposals are robust, future-fit, and don’t cause harm.  

Our Policy Cycle 2.0 is designed to bolster Better Regulation whilst avoiding the risks of cutting corners.