Cutting funding for Horizon Europe means losing ground in international competition

Most research carried out in the European Union is funded by individual Member States, but the main common instrument is Horizon Europe, the programme through which the Union allocates funds to scientific projects selected via competitive evaluation. With a budget of €93.5 billion for the period 2021–2027, Horizon funds basic research through the European Research Council and supports programmes in which institutions from different countries collaborate on problems that would be difficult to tackle at a purely national level. For many European research groups, securing one of these grants determines whether a research project can be carried out and for how long.

On 15 July, representatives of the European Union’s governments agreed on the position the Council will take in negotiations on the EU budget for 2027, reducing the allocation the Commission had proposed for Horizon Europe by €231.5 million. The programme, for which the Commission had earmarked €12.8 billion for 2027, would thus be reduced to around €12.6 billion; the cut would mainly affect the health sector, which would lose €74.5 million, whilst a further €15.9 million would be cut from the European Research Council and scientific infrastructure combined. The European Parliament will be able to amend these figures during the negotiations, which are due to be concluded by November, but the stance taken by the governments already indicates the value they place on research when setting spending priorities. The amount cut from Horizon Europe is equivalent to 1.8 per cent of the Commission’s proposed allocation and would bring the programme below the approximately 13 billion allocated in the 2026 budget, resulting in a nominal reduction that inflation would make even more severe in real terms. The decision also takes on broader significance when viewed in the context of recent negotiations, as the Council had already requested a cut of 211 million from Horizon Europe during the preparation of the 2026 budget, before the Parliament managed to overturn the outcome of the negotiations and secure an additional twenty million compared with the Commission’s initial proposal.

The same trend is evident in the comparison of the 2028–2034 multiannual budget, on which the scale of the next European Framework Programme for Research will depend. The Draghi report, having described the EU’s loss of competitiveness compared with the United States and China, had recommended increasing the programme’s seven-year funding to 200 billion; the Commission proposed 175, whilst the Cypriot Presidency of the Council put forward 167.9 billion, reducing that figure by 4 per cent as well. The individual amounts are still under negotiation, but the direction set by the governments remains consistent and shows how research, despite being continually referenced in documents on European autonomy, is regarded as one of the areas from which to recoup financial margins. This decision affects a system that already has resources far below the standard of the research submitted. According to the mid-term evaluation published by the European Commission, in the first three years of Horizon Europe, almost seven out of ten proposals judged to be of high quality received no funding, even though they had met the threshold set by the experts; a further €82 billion would have been needed to support all the projects deemed worthy. The cut proposed by the Council would further restrict a selection process that already excludes the majority of positively assessed projects, thereby also wasting the effort invested in developing them and subjecting them to a highly demanding scientific review.

The same assessment estimates that every euro invested through Horizon Europe could generate, over a period of twenty-five years, up to eleven euros of additional gross domestic product. Such a long timeframe depends on the nature of the research, as decades may elapse between the conception of an idea and its transformation into a usable technology, during which time the necessary expertise must be developed and knowledge must mature. When funding is cut off, the loss therefore concerns a capacity that will take many years to rebuild, assuming that those forced to abandon a project are still willing to resume it. The Draghi report linked this weakness to the political fragmentation of the Union. Overall, European governments allocate a share of gross domestic product to public research comparable to that of the United States, but only one-tenth of this expenditure is managed at EU level, whereas in the United States the federal component allows substantial funding to be concentrated on programmes that are large enough to compete on a global scale. Horizon Europe is the main instrument through which Europe can transcend national borders and select projects within a single scientific competition; reducing its budget therefore means weakening precisely the level at which the Union could offset the fragmentation of its resources.

The structure of the European budget helps to explain this vulnerability. Agricultural and cohesion funds allow each government to predict what share will return within its own borders, whilst a research project funded in one Member State may yield its most significant results elsewhere, even when the knowledge generated becomes usable across the entire Union. In negotiations between governments, which tend to focus on immediate national benefit, scientific funding therefore appears less lucrative, even though its supranational nature is precisely what constitutes the greatest added value of Horizon Europe. During the same period, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the country’s leading public agency for the competitive funding of basic research, announced that in 2026 it would support 12,000 additional projects through the Category C Young Scientists Fund, increasing the number of available grants by over 50 per cent. As each project receives 300,000 yuan over a three-year period, the additional investment will amount to 3.6 billion yuan, equivalent to approximately 531 million dollars according to the estimate reported by Nature. Category C, formerly known as the Young Scientists Fund, is the programme through which the Chinese agency enables early-career researchers to lead their own projects and gain their first taste of scientific autonomy. The individual grant is modest compared with the largest European grants, but it is awarded directly to the young project leader and allows them to develop an idea without being entirely dependent on the work of a more senior scientist. Increasing this category by 12,000 places means significantly expanding the number of young people who will be allowed to take responsibility for research, thereby building the expertise from which the scientific teams of the coming years will emerge.

Competition for funding and academic posts will remain fierce, as Nature observes, because the increase in funding does not alleviate the pressures caused by the rapid expansion of the Chinese university system. However, the decision does change the number of ideas that can be explored and allows scientific risk to be spread across a much wider audience. Since no agency can predict which projects will yield a significant discovery, funding thousands of young researchers increases the likelihood of unexpected results emerging, alongside the country’s ability to recognise and develop them. The strategic significance of the measure lies in the stage of the career at which it is targeted. China is investing in the people who will be conducting research over the coming decades and is willing to fund basic research whose industrial applications may as yet be unknown, because it regards the generation of knowledge as a prerequisite for its future power. The technological autonomy pursued by Beijing therefore begins long before the factory floor and involves the formation of a scientific community large enough to continuously fuel new programmes.

The increase in funding for young researchers is part of a long-standing national trend. According to the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics, in 2024 China spent 3,613 billion yuan on research and development, reaching 2.68 per cent of gross domestic product, whilst expenditure on basic research grew by 10.5 per cent in the same year. For 2026, the budget of the National Natural Science Foundation of China also sets the allocation for the National Natural Science Fund at 41.86 billion yuan, representing a 6.09 per cent increase on the previous financial year. The funding of these 12,000 new projects is therefore part of a policy that is increasing investment and channelling a growing proportion of resources towards building future scientific capacity. A historical comparison with Europe illustrates the speed with which the balance of power has shifted. In 2014, China allocated 1.96 per cent of its gross domestic product to research and development, whilst the European Union invested 2.09 per cent; by 2024, according to the latest Eurostat data, the European share had risen to 2.24 per cent, whilst China’s had reached 2.68 per cent. Over the course of ten years, the EU’s R&D intensity has therefore grown by just 0.15 percentage points, whilst China’s has increased by 0.72, having in the meantime overtaken the European level. The 3 per cent target, set by Europe over twenty years ago and reiterated in numerous subsequent documents, remains a distant prospect.

Horizon Europe and the Chinese Young Scientists Fund fund different activities, so the absolute amounts cannot be treated as two perfectly equivalent items; however, comparing them allows us to observe how the two regions are responding to the same global scientific competition. China, which started from a less advanced position, is rapidly increasing its investment and broadening young people’s access to independent research, whilst European governments are seeking to scale back their main joint programme at precisely the moment when available assessments show that a large proportion of excellent projects remain unfunded. The European crisis stems from this contradiction between the diagnosis and the decisions taken. The EU still has universities capable of producing high-quality research and employs competitive procedures that identify far more worthy projects than it is able to fund, but its common budget remains too weak to support a strategy capable of meeting the challenges of international competition. Member States continue to defend the national allocation of resources, whilst research requires programmes large enough to transcend those borders; the result is a continent that recognises its own loss of ground and, at the very moment it should be reacting, is scaling back the very tools needed to halt it.

The Council justifies its position by citing the need to conserve resources for international crises and unforeseen events. However, any future crisis will be tackled using the knowledge and personnel trained in previous years, as the technologies required to reduce energy dependence or respond to a new epidemic cannot be acquired at the very moment they become urgent. Withdrawing resources from research today means increasing the likelihood that Europe will tomorrow have to buy solutions elsewhere that it will not have helped to develop. In a few years’ time, we may find ourselves discussing China’s technological superiority as if it were the inevitable result of the country’s size or a particular aptitude for innovation. The reasons, however, will also be evident in the decisions taken today: whilst China is offering 12,000 more young people the chance to embark on independent research, European governments are proposing to scale back a programme that already leaves the majority of projects deemed excellent without funding.

Where do you think this will lead?