23 June 2026

The organisations that defend Europe’s information space carry out the research and analysis on which the EU’s enforcement and resilience architecture depends. They do this reliant on funding structures that were not built for the long term. This puts them in a state of quasi-permanent financial precarity. The 2028-2034 multiannual budget is the moment to position that crucial work on a stable footing. An independent endowment for the democratic news ecosystem, resourced through the EU budget alongside Member States’ and private resources, would support this work at arm’s length from the institutions.

Europe’s defence against disinformation rests on two uneven foundations. On one side is a regulatory and institutional architecture: the Digital Services Act, the AI Act, the European Media Freedom Act, the European Democracy Shield, and the European Centre for Democratic Resilience. On the other is the civil society sector that supplies much of the evidence and analysis on which this architecture relies. However, this field is resourced as if disinformation were a temporary, easily fixable and project-sized problem rather than one that requires permanent vigilance.

A viable answer is an independent endowment for the democratic news ecosystem: a fund resourced through the EU budget, Member States, and philanthropy, but governed at arm’s length from the institutions.

Civil society expertise: a vital piece of Europe’s democratic resilience

The dependence on the independent civil society sector is unmistakable: when the European Commission opened its first DSA enforcement proceedings against platform X, the evidence base relied on monitoring produced by independent researchers. Experience shows that it has often been thanks to civil society pushing the issue through the courts that platforms have been forced to abide by the obligations that the DSA lays down. For example, Democracy Reporting International established before the Berlin Regional Court that researchers can enforce their DSA data-access rights in the country where their research is conducted, a ruling that reaches far beyond that single case. In the same vein, EU DisinfoLab and Qurium produced the investigation that provided attribution of Doppelganger (a Russian information manipulation operation counterfeiting European news sites), which served as a basis to further sanction Russian entities involved. This analysis happened alongside other research and actions such as platform monitoring, media-literacy, or operational security carried out by other civil society groups.

Much of this work is funded as time-limited projects or ad-hoc mobilisation: each one closes on a fixed date, the teams disperse, and the knowledge must be rebuilt from scratch when the next call opens. Continuous analysis, secured incident databases, and the capacity to respond within days to a campaign cannot be sustained with that level of unpredictability. The financial base is also narrowing, as US philanthropy shrinks under political pressure, and platform contributions have similarly dried up.

The next MFF is an opportunity

The 2028-2034 Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) is where all of this can be resolved, and the AgoraEU programme, with a proposed budget of around €8.6 billion, is the relevant vehicle. EU DisinfoLab and others have already argued that AgoraEU must provide sustained, structural funding for the counter-disinformation field, through a dedicated support pillar and reduced dependence on non-European philanthropy and platform donations. While this is common knowledge, the missing piece from the debate is independence.

An increased funding envelope, inside an existing Commission-administered programme, would help settle the question of amount but not of independence, which remains the decisive requirement for this field. The credibility of these organisations rests on their capacity to scrutinise every actor in the information space, including the platforms, national governments, and the EU institutions themselves. Funding that flows directly from the executive, however well-intentioned, places that credibility in a position where it can, rightly or wrongly, be attacked, supplying an easy, albeit specious, argument to those who portray European action here as state-directed censorship.

An endowment: independence and accountability through one structure

An independent endowment resolves this by separating the funding decisions from the institutions that also act, or are supposed to act, as regulators and legislators. Resourced primarily through AgoraEU and able to pool contributions from Member States and European philanthropy, such a body would sit at arm’s length from the institutions and take its allocation decisions through an independent expert board, with the Commission present as an observer and contributor rather than as the authority that selects grantees.

Independence of this kind does not come at the expense of accountability. A body managing EU funds must pass the Pillar Assessment, a rigorous external audit of its controls, accounting, grant-making, and anti-fraud and transparency rules, before any funds are entrusted to it. Democratic oversight comes, for example, through the composition of its board, on which the European Parliament can sit alongside Member States and independent experts, and through regular public reporting.

A model that already exists and has proven successful

None of this requires a new, untested instrument, because the model for a publicly resourced but independently governed fund already exists in Europe. The European Endowment for Democracy (EED) was created in 2013 by the EU and its Member States as an autonomous foundation under Belgian law. It began with a Commission operating grant and received larger resources as it proved itself, and its independence is precisely what has allowed it to fund democracy actors and accept risks that EU instruments could not. In fact, EED makes its grant decisions through its own bodies rather than the EU Commission (or any other funder), with members of the European Parliament on its Board of Governors.

Pooling public and private funds for long-term actions

The experience of EEA and Norway Grants shows that resourcing civil society at scale, with more than €300 million across fifteen Member States is possible. It funds through independent fund operators rather than recipient governments, with multi-year core support as a standard feature. European philanthropy, through pooled vehicles such as Civitates, has shown that a lot can be achieved when funding organisations collaborate, and the Culture of Solidarity Fund has shown that grants can be financed by combining public and private money in one instrument.

Applied to Europe’s own information space, these precedents point to the need for one instrument with three properties: core, multi-annual operating support including for permanent staff, secure infrastructure, and legal protection; the flexibility to deploy resources within days when a crisis demands it, rather than over the 18 to 24 months a standard EU grant cycle takes; and independence by design. Such a dedicated body would not add to Europe’s bureaucracy or duplicate what exists; it would consolidate a fragmented and politically exposed set of funding streams into a single, accountable instrument, and give the field that underpins Europe’s democratic resilience the stability to plan beyond the next budget decision and impactfully contribute to Europe’s democratic resilience.