Twenty months into the EU’s campaign to slash red tape, many of the businesses that demanded it are unimpressed. Firms told Politico the “simplification” drive is too slow, too costly, and too complicated.
Politico spoke to 17 companies, consultancies, and trade bodies across sectors. A common complaint was that an institution built to write laws is ill-suited to undoing them.
The EU is “hardwired” to create rules but poor at removing them, INEOS’s Richard Longden told the outlet. BusinessEurope’s Martynas Barysas said burden-reduction is “drowning in the inertia” of working-level talks.
The frustration is a sharp turn from late 2024, when Ursula von der Leyen promised to lighten the load and industry cheered. Since February 2025 the Commission has tabled around a dozen “omnibus” bills across defence, energy, chemicals, agriculture, and tech, promising billions in savings.
The Commission pushes back, calling its progress “unprecedented” and noting the cuts require getting 27 member states and Parliament on board. It has increasingly blamed national capitals for failing to implement changes.
The digital rules in the fire
For the tech world, the sharpest edge of this drive is the Digital Omnibus. It reopens the GDPR, the AI Act, and other digital laws in the name of competitiveness, part of a wider effort to rewrite Europe’s rulebook to chase the US and China.
Parliament and the Council signed off on the AI Omnibus in June, thinning the AI Act while adding a ban on nudification apps. The package delays high-risk AI obligations, creates a new basis to train AI on personal data, and drops an AI-literacy requirement.
That is exactly the loosening much of the tech industry had been lobbying for. Companies argued the AI Act and GDPR were choking European startups against lighter-touch rivals.
Nobody is satisfied
Yet the softening has pleased almost no one. Privacy and civil-rights groups call the Digital Omnibus a rollback of hard-won protections dressed up as tidying, weakening rights to feed the AI boom.
Industry, meanwhile, complains the cuts keep getting watered down in negotiation, with reporting rules re-added rather than removed. Even the AI Act changes were described by observers as procedural tweaks rather than substance, so the fight has produced friction on all sides, as earlier talks that collapsed after 12 hours showed.
Some firms now want a pause, a “predictability wave” of five to ten stable years rather than more churn. Others say red tape was never the real problem, pointing to energy costs and carbon prices instead.
The deeper question
Beneath the grumbling sits a genuine dilemma the Commission cannot easily resolve. It is trying to balance industry’s demand for fewer rules against warnings that gutting them harms privacy, health, and the environment.
That tension is not going away, and some argue Europe’s edge lies in getting the rules right rather than simply cutting them. Whether trustworthy regulation is an asset or an anchor is the argument underneath the whole exercise.
For now, Europe has lit its bonfire and satisfied few who gathered round it. The lesson emerging from Brussels is that unwriting laws may be every bit as hard, and as contested, as writing them.
