In 2025 the EU Commission introduced legal acts at a volume it hasn’t seen since 2010. Under the leadership of President Ursula von der Leyen (CDU), the Commission put forward 1,456 acts: 21 directives, 102 regulations, 137 delegated acts, and 1,196 implementing acts.
Von der Leyen had promised an “unprecedented” reduction of rules for the year. Yet even during her first term, from 2019 to 2024, the Commission drafted more legal acts than her two predecessors. Eliminating regulations normally requires new legal acts-repeal measures, omnibus packages, or re‑adoptions-so the number of acts can actually rise when cutting bureaucracy.
Oliver Zander, managing director of the industry group Gesamtmetall, warned that the Commission’s promises of relief keep falling short. “Brussels issues companies four new legal acts a day” he said, noting that “that is the opposite of bureaucracy reduction”. Firms struggle to keep pace with the rapid implementation demands.
Delegated acts, in particular, have drawn criticism. They allow the Commission to add or delete technical details to laws largely without convening the European Parliament or the Council for a vote, even though those institutions retain a veto. Zander and others see this as a problematic practice.
Former German EU Commissioner Günter Verheugen echoed the concerns. “There is a zone of action in Brussels that is utterly unmonitored democratically: delegated acts” he told the “Welt am Sonntag”. “Bureaucrats come together there and decide something that affects the lives of millions of people and thousands of firms across Europe”. He added that the Commission’s preference for this approach is unsettling from a democratic perspective.