The staff of the tiny agency on the front lines of President Donald Trump’s trade wars has shrunk to its smallest size in two decades as its responsibilities balloon. Its work is suffering.

Since Trump returned to the White House, the agency has rolled out new tariffs across the globe, launched trade negotiations with dozens of countries and reopened the signature pact governing North American trade. And after the Supreme Court struck down many of his initial tariffs, it has begun four probes into countries’ unfair trade practices to provide legal justification for new duties — with more threatened. 

The trade agency is attempting to do all of this with a staff that has dwindled by about a fifth, which along with a hiring slowdown and an intensely compressed schedule is leading to often slapdash work, according to eleven former trade officials from the Trump and Biden administrations who spoke to POLITICO.

Some of the errors are embarrassing, including letters sent to foreign dignitaries announcing new tariffs that went out addressed to the wrong titles and genders, according to one former official.

Others could undermine the president’s drive to impose new duties on dozens of trading partners. A recent investigation into whether other countries’ inaction on forced labor is giving their exports an unfair advantage was rushed out in a matter of months when previous investigations have taken more than a year. An announcement of a second investigation lacked basic details like what policies are harming U.S. businesses. Tariff challengers have already seized on similar weaknesses in court.

“When you’re rushing like that, right, it’s kind of like crap in, crap out,” said one former Trump USTR official, who, like others interviewed by POLITICO, was granted anonymity to discuss the agency’s inner workings. USTR officials are getting “crushed” under the administration’s workload, the person said.

The brain drain at the agency, including the departures of senior officials responsible for leading trade talks with key allies, is continuing even as U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has pushed to expand the budget and stepped up hiring efforts.

A USTR spokesperson said that under Greer’s leadership, the agency has “delivered an unprecedented volume of work on behalf of the American people that is thorough and outcomes-based.”

Greer inherited an agency that was already shorthanded, and the Trump administration wasted no time in rolling out its new tariff-focused trade agenda. In the opening months of the administration, the president unveiled new tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China, before rolling out sweeping new duties on almost every U.S. trading partner on April 2, 2025 — what the president dubbed “Liberation Day.”

But the Liberation Day rollout was filled with errors. In addition to slapping tariffs on an uninhabited island filled only with penguins, which was roundly mocked in the media, the administration sent letters informing countries of their new tariff rates that contained the wrong genders and titles for foreign officials, said the first former official. The calculation for assessing the tariff rates, which USTR eventually published on its website, showed a simple back-of-the-envelope formula based on countries’ trade surpluses with the U.S., an embarrassment for an agency that prides itself on its data-driven, reasoned trade analysis and deep technical knowledge.

The episode “made USTR look like a joke,” the former official said.

The Supreme Court in February struck down Trump’s Liberation Day tariff regime, leaving USTR to come up with alternative legal justifications for imposing sweeping duties. More serious than the embarrassing mistakes, former officials said, is that the agency has been rushing out the reports and announcements that are used to create those justifications, potentially handing tariff challengers legal ammunition.

A March announcement of a probe into countries’ manufacturing overcapacity did not initially identify any specific policies from trading partners that qualify as an unfair trade practice, said Ed Gresser, a former assistant USTR for trade policy and economics, who left the agency during the Biden administration. The omission could leave the probe more vulnerable to a legal challenge, he said.

Countries also pushed back against inaccurate information in that announcement. An initial version referred to Singapore — one of the investigation’s targets — as having a bilateral trade surplus with the U.S. of $27 billion in 2024. But that language was quietly removed from a later version after the Singaporean government pointed out publicly that it was, in fact, the U.S. that had a trade surplus of $27 billion with Singapore. USTR also quietly corrected the numbers it cited for both Indonesia and Cambodia’s trade surpluses with the U.S.

Tariff challengers are already filing court documents citing omissions in the USTR investigation into efforts to curb imports made with forced labor. The July report into countries’ forced labor practices, initiated under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 and produced in just four months, lacked the depth featured in comparable reports from previous administrations, three former officials noted.

“It strikes me a lot more vulnerable to legal challenge than previous 301 reports have been,” said Gresser, who is now the vice president and director for trade at the Progressive Policy Institute.

Democratic attorneys general filed a suit earlier this month seeking to overturn the proposed duties tied to forced labor. “The USTR made no effort to link the scope of the tariffs to the scope of harm,” they wrote in their filing.

Burlap and Barrel, a vendor of imported spices that is also suing, noted that the USTR failed to provide a “reasoned, record-based explanation” for its tariff findings.

“You can tell they’re stretched,” said Peter Harrell, a former Biden administration economic official who is now a trade law professor at Georgetown Law. Officials are “not able to put in or do the level of detail that they’ve been able to do in the past.”

USTR’s staff of less than 300 people has always punched above its weight, almost all of the former officials noted. The Commerce and Treasury Departments, by comparison, count workforces of around 40,000 and 80,000 employees, respectively.

From 2023 to 2026, however, the number of USTR employees fell almost 20 percent, from 269 workers to 220, leaving it with the smallest workforce since 2005, according to data from the White House Office of Personnel Management.

The agency’s lowest staffing in more than 20 years continues a decline that began in the latter half of the Biden administration when the agency faced a staff exodus driven by frustration with the former president’s dormant trade agenda.

USTR’s in-house expertise has only continued to dwindle in the second Trump administration.

The agency’s most senior official responsible for North American trade, Daniel Watson, retired just days before the White House formally launched a review of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement on July 1. Meanwhile, Bryant Trick, the top trade official for Europe and the Middle East is also set to retire in the coming months at a time when U.S. talks with Europe over its digital trade practices, pharmaceutical pricing and implementation of a bilateral trade pact are in full swing.

Officials that left the agency during Trump’s second term did not agree on a single driving factor behind the recent departures. The first former USTR official cited their dismay over Trump’s ties to the late disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein as a reason for their own departure. Others noted there was a cohort of staff nearing retirement age.

“I don’t sense that one can point to a morale problem or something like that,” a second former official said.

Greer, who served as chief of staff to Trump’s first-term trade representative, Bob Lighthizer, is widely respected at the agency, former officials said, and built up goodwill among staff for his handling of the administration-wide effort to cut the size of the government last year. USTR was spared from those cuts, which several former officials attributed to Greer’s assertiveness on personnel matters.

There is money available for USTR to staff up. The agency received $88 million in fiscal 2026, which should accommodate 274 employees, according toUSTR’s budget documents.Greer is also asking for $95 million in fiscal 2027 to beef up trade enforcement activities. The agency says the funding increase would allow for 301 full-time employees.

But it hasn’t been easy to hire.

Since Trump returned to office, the private sector has scrambled to bring on trade experts to help companies navigate the more complex tariff landscape, offering higher salaries than candidates and sitting officials can earn in government.

“It is no surprise that the private sector is eager to hire the well-regarded experts at USTR during this period of historic change in U.S. trade policy,” the USTR spokesperson added in a statement.

Three of the former officials said it is common for jobs to sit vacant for more than a year. One said they have seen the recruitment process drag on for two years, as the Executive Office of the President, which handles USTR’s hiring, prioritizes recruitment in other executive offices.

Shifts in human resources policies under Trump have also hurt recruitment efforts, two of the former USTR officials said, citing, in particular, new limits on remote work.

A flexible working environment “is one of the ways that you compete with better salaries and more certainty in other sectors,” one of the people said.

USTR is supposed to be a “nimble” agency, the person stressed — particularly so under Trump, where trade negotiations, investigations and new tariffs are rolled out on shortened timelines and responding to fast-moving developments in bilateral trade relationships.

“They’re being asked to do a lot,” the person said, but the hiring “system is just not set up to be nimble or to get results on any quick timeline.”

Paroma Soni contributed to this report.

VILARDEVÓS, Spain — Nestled in the scrubby hills of northern Spain, this small village feels like a place that has fallen out of time. In reality, it offers a glimpse of the demographic future.

When Yaiza Ferreiro Collazos begins her English lesson on a June morning, eight children are sitting in front of her. The oldest are in sixth grade, the final year of primary school; the youngest are in fourth.

Teaching them together is not always easy, the 30-year-old says. But there are too few pupils to separate them.

The Rodolfo Núñez Rodríguez nursery and primary school opened in 1974 and was built for 700 children from Vilardevós and the surrounding villages. Today, it has 31 pupils, from preschool through sixth grade.

Apart from the school bell, the building is eerily quiet, even during breaks. The silence extends into the village. Most people encountered in its lanes are old. Many houses are abandoned, their façades marked with signs reading Se vende — for sale.

Vilardevós is an extreme case, but not an isolated one. Across Europe, birth rates are falling, populations are aging and fewer young people are entering the workforce.

Modern welfare states rest on an intergenerational bargain. Today’s workers finance pensions and health care for older people, trusting that others will eventually do the same for them.

Low fertility is straining that bargain. Fewer young people are entering the workforce just as large generations approach retirement. Pension reform has already become one of Europe’s most politically difficult issues, and the viability of the Social Security system is a perennial concern in the United States. Those political pressures will continue to intensify as the population ages.

That has forced governments to confront an increasingly urgent question: Can they persuade people to have more children — and, if not, can immigration prevent the demographic arithmetic from breaking down?

Why birth rates are falling

For a population to remain stable over time without immigration, women must have an average of about 2.1 children. According to the latest Eurostat data, the European Union’s fertility rate — the average number of children a woman is expected to have over her lifetime — fell to 1.34 in 2024. In Spain, the lowest among the continent’s large countries, it was 1.1 and still declining.

The United States is only slightly less exposed. Its fertility rate, long higher than Europe’s, has also dropped well below replacement level. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it fell to 1.6 in 2024.

For a long time, falling birth rates were not treated as an urgent problem. After all, their effects take decades to emerge: A decline in births does not become a shortage of workers until roughly a generation later. By the time schools empty and pension systems come under strain, the demographic trajectory is set.

Europe and the United States also appeared less exposed than parts of East Asia. Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore are already grappling with fertility rates below one child per woman.

Then there is the harder question: Why is this happening?

There are many competing explanations. Karen Benjamin Guzzo, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, has argued that part of the fall in the U.S. reflects a public-health success: Americans have become better able to avoid teenage pregnancies and unintended births. But beyond that, the story is similar on both sides of the Atlantic.

Housing is too expensive. Women are prioritizing their careers. Men are taking longer to mature. Religion has lost influence. Smartphones and social media are weakening real-world relationships. Fear of climate change makes having children feel useless and cruel.

Each hypothesis has its adherents, along with its own books, podcasts and preferred evidence. None, on its own, fully explains the decline.

Berkay Ozcan, professor of social and public policy at the London School of Economics, has little patience for attempts to identify a single culprit. The decline, says the 47-year-old father of two, is driven by a combination of causes. Insecure labor markets and high housing costs play a role, as do changing values, longer periods of education and rising expectations of parenthood.

But all these factors have a common effect: postponement. Surveys show that young people still want, on average, about two children. But many delay parenthood until they feel professionally, financially and emotionally ready, Ozcan says — and often wait longer than they intended.

Eva Beaujouan agrees, and she speaks from more than just professional experience. When the University of Vienna demographer was 34, she and her partner started trying to have a child. They finally managed five years later, after using IVF.

“I would never have imagined, starting at 34, that I would have issues,” says Beaujouan, who is now 48 and has focused her research on late parenthood.

Delayed parenthood extends well beyond affluent urban professionals. “Postponement is now observed in all social strata,” she says.

Assisted reproduction can create false reassurance. It may improve the chances of conception, but it cannot guarantee a child or fully overcome the effects of age. “It is invasive,” she says. “It is expensive. It creates inequalities. Not many people can afford it. And of course, it often fails.”

The cost of children

The fertility problem reflects a basic economic contradiction: Children are essential to the welfare state, but economically disadvantageous to the households that raise them.

In the past, children contributed labor and provided security in old age. In modern welfare states, that role has largely disappeared. “Although having children is necessary for the functioning of the welfare system, they do not have an economic function within the household,” says Beaujouan.

For all the meaning and fulfillment they may bring, raising children is expensive, can interrupt careers and may reduce lifetime earnings. Bringing up a child costs roughly $320,000 for a middle-class family in the United States, according to inflation-adjusted estimates based on U.S. Department of Agriculture data. In Britain, the Child Poverty Action Group, an anti-poverty charity, estimates the cost at about £250,000. For a household solely concerned with financial security in retirement, that money may offer a greater economic return if it is saved and invested instead.

What may be rational for individual households, however, can be damaging when repeated across an entire society.

Martin Bujard, research director at Germany’s Federal Institute for Population Research, explains the problem from an office in Wiesbaden crowded with stacks of paper. Before the conversation can begin, the 50-year-old sociologist and father of two has to clear a space for our two cups of coffee.

For an industrial country, Bujard says, quality of life does not depend primarily on the number of inhabitants. The crucial factor is how many people are entering the labor market relative to those retiring.

“If that is roughly in balance, the economy and welfare systems work,” Bujard says. “If only a few young people come up behind while very many retire, things become tricky.”

Searching for solutions

Back in Vilardevós, Yaiza Ferreiro Collazos remains in the classroom after the lesson and talks about her own plans. The 30-year-old is childless, like all her female friends.

“We work, and afterward we want fun or time for ourselves,” she says.

Collazos and her friends sometimes discuss having families, but she worries about what motherhood would require her to give up. “If I had a child, I could no longer continue my current life,” she says. She also worries about how pregnancy would change her body.

Governments across Europe have spent years trying to make such decisions easier. So far, none has found a reliable way to reverse falling fertility.

Two decades ago, Germany launched a major expansion of childcare for children under three. The reform was aimed primarily at closing the gap between the former West and East Germany. During the years that followed, fertility rose from around 1.4 to around 1.6 children per woman. But then the gains petered out — and the rate fell again. By 2025, it had reached a new historic low of 1.32.

Hungary relied more heavily on financial incentives. Former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government — proudly “illiberal” by its own description — offered parents bonuses and fiscal advantages, including an income-tax exemption for mothers with four or more children. Fertility rose from about 1.25 in the early 2010s to around 1.6 in 2021, before falling back to roughly 1.4.

Attempts at persuasion have fared no better. In 2016, Italy introduced a “Fertility Day” campaign. One advertisement showed a young woman holding an hourglass beside the slogan: “Beauty has no age. Fertility does.” The campaign provoked widespread outrage.

“It is very difficult to develop such campaigns,” says Beaujouan. “If you tell women at a later stage that if they do not start having children before such an age they will have trouble, then they start feeling guilty and anxious.”

Her assessment of the policy record is harsh. “I have not seen anything yet that would increase fertility rates,” she says. “Some policies can lay reasonable conditions for having children. And if they were not here, fertility may be even lower in some places. But they are rarely a motor of fertility rates.”

The immigration alternative

There is one response that has changed the demographic numbers where family policies and tax incentives have not: immigration. Spain offers perhaps the clearest example.

By the logic of its birth rate, the country should be shrinking. Instead, its population has grown from 46.5 million a decade ago to almost 50 million today. Foreign-born workers accounted for more than 70 percent of Spain’s employment growth between 2019 and 2024, according to an analysis by Esade, a prominent Spanish business school.

The country’s immigration policy is, however, hardly a template for the rest of Europe. Much of its recent immigration has come from Latin America, especially Colombia and Venezuela — countries where Spanish is the mother tongue and Christianity is the dominant religion. That does not make integration automatic. But it makes things easier.

In much of the rest of Europe, immigrants have been harder to absorb: Newcomers often arrive without the language, credentials or cultural familiarity that make it easier to find work and settle quickly. Migrants from Muslim-majority societies have also faced greater political and public pushback than Spain’s Latin America newcomers.

That may help explain why Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has been more willing than most European leaders to embrace large-scale immigration. Spain, he argues, needs younger workers to keep its economy growing and its welfare state afloat. His government recently launched one of Europe’s largest regularization programs for undocumented migrants. By early July, 1.2 million people had already applied.

But immigration solves one demographic problem by creating a different political challenge. Sánchez’s critics argue that the government counts the economic benefits while underestimating the pressure on housing, schools and public services, as well as the difficulties of integration and social cohesion.

Spain’s conservative opposition and the far-right Vox party accuse Sánchez of rewarding illegal immigration. Vox leader Santiago Abascal has claimed that the government is creating a “pull effect” and accelerating what he calls an “invasion.”

The recent crisis in Ceuta, a Spanish exclave on Morocco’s northern coast, demonstrated just how politically explosive immigration has become in Europe. In late July, tens of thousands of migrants, almost all of them young men, crossed into the territory, overwhelming local authorities. Some factors remain disputed, including the role of the Moroccan government, but the political backlash was immediate: Twenty-two of the EU’s 27 leaders signed a letter warning that Madrid’s generous policies risked creating a “pull factor” for irregular migration and placing pressure on other member states.

This criticism is backed by a public increasingly skeptical of large-scale immigration. Recent polling by YouGov, a London-based opinion research firm, found that majorities in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and Denmark said immigration over the past decade had been too high. In the United States, about half the population supports deporting immigrants back to their countries of origin.

The controversy will not be resolved anytime soon. Just as the consequences of collapsing birth rates take decades to become fully visible, the long-term effects of large-scale immigration unfold slowly.

Renewal and resistance

Luton, 1,350 kilometers north of Vilardevós and half an hour by train from London, offers a contrasting picture of Europe’s demographic future. The English city has just under a quarter of a million inhabitants. In 2024, its fertility rate was 2.0, the highest in the country. The national figure was about 1.4.

Data provided by the city administration points to one important difference: Women in Luton tend to have children earlier. One in three births is to a woman aged 25 to 29, compared with one in four across England. Births to women aged 35 to 39, by contrast, account for a larger share nationally than they do in Luton.

Immigration is central to that pattern. Two-thirds of babies born in Luton in 2025 had a mother who was born abroad, according to figures provided to POLITICO by the local council. Across England, the share was about one-third.

Tahmina Saleem, the Labour politician who chairs the town council, describes Luton as “super-diverse and proud of it.” Born in Sheffield to parents from Punjab, she argues that the city attracts families because it still offers jobs, including through its international airport, while housing remains cheaper than in London. Behind her, on the wall, hangs a portrait of King Charles III in a scarlet parade uniform.

The diversity is most visible in the neighborhood of Bury Park, where many newer families have settled. Shops, travel agencies and religious institutions reflect the area’s large Muslim population and its links to South Asia and elsewhere. Women in headscarves and hijabs are a common sight. Travel agencies advertise the Hajj and Umrah, the major and minor pilgrimages to Mecca, and grocery stores sell halal products.

Luton is also illustrative of the political backlash that large-scale immigration can engender.

While Saleem sees immigration as having made the city younger and more open, others see Luton as a symbol of a country becoming demographically and culturally unrecognizable.

The far-right English Defence League emerged in the city in 2009, drawing heavily from the football-hooligan milieu and organizing against immigration and Islam. Its best-known leader, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson, is also from Luton. Robinson has built his political identity on the same themes.

His influence now extends far beyond his hometown. In May 2026, Robinson drew roughly 60,000 supporters to a “unite the kingdom” rally in London, evidence that the grievances first mobilized in places such as Luton have become a national political force. The previous September, an even larger rally drew an estimated 110,000 people and featured a video link with Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who has repeatedly amplified Robinson’s agenda on his social media platform X.

“Tommy comes by now and then with cameras and foreign journalists to provoke us,” says Hamza Parker, a volunteer at Discover Islam Public Information Centre, a nonprofit organization in central Luton. “But he does not succeed.”

Limits of policy

Back in Vilardevós, Mayor Tamara Balboa García studies the population pyramid of her municipality. Of its 1,598 inhabitants, just 66 are 14 or younger. More than 960 are 60 or older. For every child or teenager, there are almost 15 senior citizens.

If the trend continues, García says, the village will eventually cease to have a future. But she insists that decline is not inevitable. The municipality helps returnees and newcomers find housing and work, particularly in agriculture, wine production and elder care. And even though the municipality is shrinking, it still has a supermarket, a pharmacy, a football pitch, an outdoor swimming pool, several bars, a bank branch and, of course, the school with its tiny classes.

A local nonprofit, Portas Abertas (“Open Doors”), plays a central role in the effort to keep the city alive. Andrea Rodríguez, the social educator who runs its local office, describes how the organization helped one immigrant family settle in the village: The mother, a trained nurse, found work quickly; the father was placed first as a truck driver and later as a baker; their child joined an after-school program.

Rodríguez’s own life is an example of what Portas Abertas wants to achieve. She left Vilardevós as a young woman for her training, but later returned. Four years ago, she bought a house for €92,000.

When the reporter looks at her incredulously, Rodríguez laughs. “It was even in good condition!”

Unlike the mayor, the schoolteacher and many other women in the village, Rodríguez has a child: a four-year-old daughter.

Before the reporter can ask whether she plans to have another child, Rodríguez answers.

“One child is enough.”

Hundreds of thousands of Europeans dream of landing one of the European Commission’s coveted civil service jobs, with around 170,000 people applying for just 1,500 entry-level positions at the EU institutions earlier this year.

Yet for many who make it inside the EU executive, the reality falls well short of the dream.

POLITICO spoke to a dozen officials from different commissioners’ cabinets and Directorates-General, varying in age, nationality and seniority, who described an institution where long hours, cumbersome bureaucracy and, in some cases, toxic management have left them exhausted, alienated and questioning whether the money and prestige are worth it.

Their experiences varied widely across the Commission’s 30,000-strong workforce — but the same complaints surfaced again and again. Some were granted anonymity to speak frankly about their workplace experiences.

“The conditions are more and more difficult,” said Nicolas Mavraganis, president of Union Syndicale Fédérale, an umbrella group linking roughly 20 staff unions across EU and international bodies. A Commission official since 1994, he has led the federation since 2019 and helps steer its representation of member unions in dealings with the institutions. “There is more and more workload, which means more and more pressure.”

As Brussels has taken on a more central geopolitical role — responding to Russia’s war against Ukraine, navigating tensions with China and managing an increasingly unpredictable United States — officials said there is a growing sense that every file matters.

Few of the complaints POLITICO heard — ranging from stressful projects and difficult bosses to endless bureaucracy and aging offices — are unique to the Commission, and similar stories can be found in ministries, law firms and consultancies across Europe. But officials said the combination of prestige, political pressure and the sheer scale of the institution makes the experience distinctive — and often difficult.

“It’s the EU’s executive so people have this weird God complex,” one official said.

A Commission spokesperson said the institution was “committed to being a modern, respectful and attractive place to work,” pointing to a review launched by President Ursula von der Leyen into the Commission’s operations. An internal survey found 74 percent of staff rated the Commission an attractive employer, up six percentage points from 2023.

Comparable public data is scarce. A 2025 staff survey at the European Central Bank found that 85 percent of employees were proud to work there, even as fewer than half considered their workload manageable. The figures point to a broader paradox: loyalty to an institution can remain strong even when day-to-day working conditions frustrate its staff. At the Commission, that gap helps explain why disillusionment does not necessarily lead people to leave.

Pressure cooker

Openings at the Commission, where employees shape policies affecting more than 450 million Europeans, remain some of the most sought-after public sector jobs. Brussels also remains relatively affordable compared to many Western European capitals, especially on a Commission salary.

The financial incentives are considerable too. Successful candidates for AD-5 jobs — the graduate-entry administrator role — earn roughly €6,000 to €7,000 a month before allowances, while Commission officials pay EU tax rather than national income tax, generally resulting in a lighter tax burden and more take-home pay. Family allowances, diplomatic discounts on cars and strong job security only add to the appeal. Some officials POLITICO spoke to even rent an apartment in Brussels while keeping their families in another country, flying home most weekends.

But several officials said the prestige of working at the Commission also creates its own pressures.

That atmosphere, officials said, filters down into daily life. Every briefing note, policy paper or press release attracts multiple layers of approval. Decisions move through sprawling email chains and successive rounds of revisions, while officials feel pressure to treat even routine work with the urgency of a geopolitical crisis.

One official in a commissioner’s cabinet said their days often begin at 7 a.m. or 8 a.m. and end around 7 p.m., with little time away from the office except to accompany their commissioner on missions. Another, working in communications, recalled crying late into the evening because of an overwhelming workload.

Several officials blamed the bureaucracy itself. Cabinet teams and the Commission’s policy departments, known as Directorates-General, often struggle to communicate effectively, leaving staff chasing approvals and information from one another.

“The DGs are waiting for scraps of information from the cabinets, who are so overworked that they don’t have the capacity to provide them that information,” another official working for a commissioner said. “It’s a structural problem. Everyone is trying to get information out of each other.”

Another official agreed. “I want to shoot myself sometimes.”

The institution’s sheer size can also leave people feeling anonymous. “There are thousands of people at the Commission, so even if you work there for 20 years, most people have never seen you,” a different official not working for a commissioner said. “You’re just this tiny little molecule in this huge organism.”

Mixed bag

Whether someone enjoys working at the Commission often comes down to luck.

First, there’s the boss.

Officials stressed that experiences can differ dramatically depending on which commissioner you work for. Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra’s cabinet is widely regarded internally as supportive, several officials said, while other commissioners have reputations internally for allowing toxic working cultures to develop, with infighting and power grabs.

One senior official in a commissioner’s cabinet has become notorious inside the Berlaymont for “screaming” at staff, according to two officials. An employee at DG ECHO, which coordinates the EU’s humanitarian program, said shouting was routine in their unit.

Another former official recalled watching a senior colleague berated over a leaked document in front of other managers. One official said their boss punched them during an argument after work in a bar near the Berlaymont.

Several said they felt they had little confidence complaints would be acted upon.

The Commission hired a chief confidential counsellor in 2024 to handle harassment complaints and has a team of 40 counsellors across the Commission and executive agencies as part of an “informal” approach to resolving workplace conflict, an official said.

Since September 2024, the chief counsellor, who reports to Budget Commissioner Piotr Serafin, has received 960 reports from “colleagues feeling harassed, alleged harassers, witnesses, managers and HR Correspondents,” according to a Commission spokesperson.

The Commission said 14,000 staff have attended presentations on anti-harassment policy while 2,400 managers have attended mandatory training sessions in the last two years. This increased awareness about how to seek support in dealing with harassment has “generated a relatively high number” of reports to the chief confidential counsellor, the spokesperson said.

The chief counsellor, however, “has no mandate to investigate and is not entitled legally to qualify the conduct as harassment as defined in the Staff Regulations,” the spokesperson explained. To make a formal complaint, staff have to go to the Investigation and Disciplinary Office (IDOC) or to the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF). The Commission receives around 20 to 25 of those per year, a spokesperson said.

Aging offices

Then there’s the building.

While the Berlaymont has benefited from extensive renovation, other Commission offices are showing their age. During June’s heatwave, staff at the DG AGRI building complained they were working without adequate air conditioning, according to internal communications seen by POLITICO.

At DG COMP’s headquarters in Madou Tower, meanwhile, officials were advised not to drink from certain water fountains because of possible contamination, while heating and sanitation systems were “not functioning to the level we should expect,” the acting director-general acknowledged in an email seen by POLITICO.

At the Berlaymont, staff on lower levels were left fuming after air conditioning was switched off in the middle of a heat wave but kept on for floors eight and above, which house commissioners and senior officials. An official told POLITICO at the time it was reminiscent of feudalism.

Experiences varied sharply across the institution, but many officials described the same tension: they remained drawn to the substance of their roles, even as their working conditions proved more frustrating and draining than expected.

Over cold pasta in a Commission cafeteria, one official was asked whether they were happy.

They shrugged. “It’s interesting work.”

For many inside the Commission, that is reason enough to stay.

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