More EAs should consider working for the EU

Context: The authors are a few EAs who currently work or have previously worked at the European Commission.

In this post, we

1. make the case that more people^[1] aiming for a high impact career should consider working for the EU institutions^[2] using the Importance, Tractability, Neglectedness framework, and;

2. briefly outline how one might get started on this, highlighting a currently open recruitment drive (deadline 10 March) that only comes along once every ~5 years.

Why working at the EU can be extremely impactful

Importance

The EU adopts binding legislation for a continent of 450 million people and has a significant budget, making it an important player across different EA cause areas.

Animal welfare^[3]

• The EU sets welfare standards for the over 10 billion farmed animals slaughtered across the continent each year.
• The issue suffered a major setback in 2023, when the Commission, in the final steps of the process, dropped the ‘world’s most comprehensive farm animal welfare reforms to date’, following massive farmers’ protests in Brussels.
  • The reform would have included ‘banning cages and crates for Europe’s roughly 300 million caged animals, ending the routine mutilation of perhaps 500 million animals per year, stopping the inhumane slaughter of a billion or so farmed fish, and reducing the overcrowding and pain-inducing growth rate of about 11 billion broiler chickens annually.’
• Still, the EU already has the highest animal welfare standards globally and is arguably the only major jurisdiction where further progress seems likely in the near term.

  • The reform options in the current political mandate are much less ambitious, but include a ban on cages^[4] and extending the EU’s standards to imported animal products.

  • Import standards could potentially affect farming practices worldwide through the ‘Brussels Effect’, and make any current and potentially future EU standards much less likely to be undermined by import competition.
  • There continues to be significant uncertainty whether these reforms will be proposed at all in the current mandate. Ultimately, the decision is up to the Commission - same as the decision not to propose the ambitious reforms in the last mandate.
• The EU is also the single biggest public investor in alternative proteins, ahead of the US or any other national government.

AI safety^[5]

• The EU AI Act remains the only comprehensive AI legislation in any major global jurisdiction.
  • The General-Purpose AI Code of Practice, published in July 2025, includes detailed safety and security requirements for frontier AI companies.
  • Any company offering frontier AI models in the EU needs to follow the obligations in the safety and security chapter around risk assessment, external safety evaluations and incident reporting.
  • The AI Office at the European Commission enforces the rules for frontier AI companies, and plays a key role in drawing them up.

Global health

• The EU and its Member States collectively account for roughly 42% of global official development assistance (ODA); amounting to approximately €96 billion in 2023.
  • A significant share of this comes directly from the EU budget or is influenced by the EU. A large fraction of aid directly given by the Commission is allocated to least developed countries.
• While the UK, and especially the US, are cutting back heavily on their foreign aid and international development cooperation spending, the EU continues with significant spending in this area.
  • In her 2025 State of the European Union Address, European Commission President von der Leyen unexpectedly announced a “Global Health Resilience Initiative".
  • It is a signal of commitment to this area to announce such an initiative when most others are decreasing their work on global health drastically.

Biosecurity

• The Commission is a major spender on pandemic preparedness and response, having created DG HERA during COVID-19 as a dedicated institution that continues to work on the issue even as political interest in the topic quickly faded after the pandemic.
  • DG HERA has a budget of ca. €1 billion per year, having spent a lot of it on stockpiling during COVID-19 and now mostly focusing on providing R&D funding for the development of vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics and other countermeasures.
  • EU funding for pandemic preparedness is becoming relatively more important as the US scales back - e.g. see the recent cancellation of nearly $500 million in BARDA mRNA vaccine contracts.
• The EU also became the first major jurisdiction to propose mandatory DNA synthesis screening in December 2025, alongside other biodefence measures in the EU Biotech Act. This might help in setting a global standard for companies screening customers for orders of synthetic DNA of dangerous viruses, raising the barrier to the development of bioweapons.

Tractability

We have and continue to observe that it is feasible to shape important policy decisions working in the Commission. While there are, of course, significant political constraints on individual policymakers and on the Commission as a whole, even relatively junior officials can make highly influential decisions.

This is particularly true for decisions that are not overtly political^[6], but can still be extremely consequential. In practice, policymakers often have substantial discretion over technical elements of legislation and over how funding is allocated. This includes choices such as whether pandemic preparedness money is spent on measures that meaningfully reduce catastrophic risk, whether development aid goes to effective health interventions, the kinds of evaluations frontier AI companies are required to run, or which species might be prioritised for a cage ban.

It is extremely important to be in the right position at the right time^[7], as the potential for impact within the Commission is very heavy-tailed. In some roles, officials have significant, and sometimes near-exclusive, decision power over entire chapters of legislative proposals or over tens, and in some areas even hundreds, of millions of euros in public spending each year. 

On the other hand, most jobs in the Commission are fairly low impact. Surprisingly, impact or decision power does not seem that correlated with seniority, but much more with working in the exact right division of the Commission, called ‘unit’^[8]. It can be very difficult to identify units with the highest impact potential from the outside, so we would strongly recommend getting in touch with people within the Commission before deciding which unit to join. This is even more important as, in practice, there is significant path dependency from the first unit you join to future roles, even if a Commission career allows you to switch policy areas relatively flexibly in theory.

Neglectedness

EU policy remains relatively neglected among EAs - for example compared to the UK civil service, where there appears to be a community of EA-aligned policy professionals^[9]. This is particularly true for people working in EU institutions themselves, as opposed to external advocacy orgs and think-tanks. To us, working within the civil service often seems more impactful than external advocacy at the margin.

The Commission employs around 32,000 staff. Even a small increase in the number of thoughtful, impact-oriented people could shift priorities on the margin.

Our best guess is that the total number of EAs (or EA adjacent people) in the EU institutions is roughly two dozen. This varies a lot by cause area. For most of the areas mentioned above, the number of EA-motivated people is probably only around 1 or 2 (!). For global health for example, we’re currently not aware of anyone working in this field with EA motivations.

While there has been a significant cultural shift within EA towards taking policy and government roles more seriously, joining established EA organisations still feels like the default or more prestigious option. In our view, a further shift is needed, with more people feeling encouraged to join government directly and to see institutional roles as a core path to impact.

Crucially, compared to joining an EA org, your impact working in government is often entirely counterfactual. The marginal person you replace would likely have very different values and no focus on scope-sensitive impact.

Paths into the EU

• This Forum post goes into some detail on how to get started through the Blue Book Traineeship, the Commission's flagship internship programme and most common entry point for young people. Doing such an internship is also a great way to test your fit^[10] for such a role.

  • The post also has sections on temporary positions (making up around one third of Commission staff) and a general background section about work culture, benefits^[11] and typical tasks in the Commission.

  • Generally, such temporary positions are often not publicly advertised, and a bit of a network within the EU is needed to hear about them - hence why most people start out through an internship programme. Some positions, e.g. for larger recruitment drives of temporary staff, are advertised publicly.

• The majority of Commission staff are lifetime civil servants. This status is awarded after passing a relatively competitive exam (‘concours’). A few exam sessions, adapted to different profiles and with different work experience and study requirements, take place each year. A list of upcoming selection procedures is kept up to date here.
  • We want to draw particular attention to the upcoming AD5 concours - the main entry-level competition for lifetime civil servants and open to any study background. It opens on 5 February 2026 with a deadline of 10 March 2026. Unlike typical job applications, you compete for a place on a reserve list, from which institutions then recruit.
  • The last AD5 competition for generalists was in 2019, so this is a rare opportunity. Any EU citizen with at least a Bachelor’s degree can apply. Success rate for the 2019 AD5 competition was 0.5%, though the new system should lead to a higher chance of making it to the reserve list. (UPDATE: After publication of the competition today, the reserve list is 10x as long as in 2019, significantly increasing the probability of success.)
  • For people interested in getting support with these exams, you can express interest here. There is an online cohort starting to support people across cause areas in global health & development and farmed animal welfare, run by Animal Advocacy Careers.
• Impactful Policy Careers aims to build a stronger pipeline of mission-aligned talent into EU institutions with a focus on farmed animal welfare and global health & development. They offer fellowships focused on helping people to understand EU institutions & policymaking, applying for EU jobs and ultimately transitioning into roles where they can have the highest impact. This includes a week-long in-person retreat for 20 people in Brussels. Applications for the Global Health cohort will launch in March 2026.

1. ^{^}

    This career path is generally restricted to EU citizens only.

2. ^{^}

    We mostly focus on the European Commission, where we have the most personal experience. Arguably, the Commission is most relevant for shaping EU policy since as the executive branch of the EU, it writes all initial law proposals and spends the EU budget. However, if you are at the right place at the right time - e.g. during the negotiations of a law proposal - you can also significantly shape EU policy in the Council or Parliament. 
   Working for the Council actually largely means working in the civil service or politics in an EU Member State. Beyond shaping EU policy, this of course also allows you to shape the policy of that country. There is also a very strong impact case for such paths, which is arguably even more neglected within the EA community than EU policy, though a discussion on this is outside the scope of this post.

   In the European Parliament, impact potential is generally highest in a political role, such as a political assistant to a Member of the Parliament or working for a political group.

   See the last section of this post for some discussion on both EP and Council career paths.

3. ^{^}

    See this post from a few years ago on ways EU law might matter for farmed animals, and this book published this month by the same author.

^{^}

 This follows a commitment by the Commission to make such a proposal following a European Citizens’ Initiative on "End the Cage Age"  with 1.4 million signatures.

^{^}

 Multiple forum posts discuss the relevance of the EU for AI Governance, though they are all from a few years ago and might not reflect the latest thinking in such a fast moving field. See this collection of Forum posts for AI governance, and specifically this post.

^{^}

 To make this more concrete, the above mentioned decision to drop the animal welfare reform in 2023 could be considered such a decision, given the significant political pressure from the agricultural sector. But even in such a case, more senior policymakers likely had significant discretion on how to react to the protests.

^{^}

 This generally involves identifying the right unit or Directorate to work for - which can be quite difficult from the outside. It’s therefore best to speak to people already working in the Commission, who can give advice. See also the relevant section in this forum post.

^{^}

 Often, it is not even more difficult to get into those units, as most other people working at the Commission or wanting to work there follow very different incentives to having an impact.

^{^}

 Including with Impactful Government Careers an organisation that supports the community and helps join the UK civil service.

^{^}

 For general considerations on fit for policy roles, see here and here - not EU specific, but we’d say they hit  the mark pretty well.

^{^}

 Salaries for lifetime civil servants start at ~€6000 net per month and increase depending on how many years of work experience you have (+ additional benefits if you have kids etc.) Obviously, becoming a lifetime civil servant gives you insane job security so this is also great for selfish reasons.

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