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Europe has spent a decade building the world's most ambitious rulebook for digital technology, the DSA, the DMA, the AI Act, then poured billions more into digital sovereignty: chips, cloud, AI, quantum, all aimed at cutting reliance on non-EU tech providers.

But rules don't enforce themselves, and infrastructure doesn't govern itself. Someone has to check the DSA is actually working. Someone has to catch an influence operation before an election, not after. Someone has to sue when a platform breaks the law, independently of the governments and companies being scrutinised. Europe already has an ecosystem doing that work.Indeed, this same ecosystem was instrumental in building the evidence base to get those pieces of legislation passed in the first place. What it doesn't have is a plan to fund it.

A new report, Digital Sovereignty and Europe's Democracy Stack, by Mark Scott (Atlantic Council's Democracy + Tech Initiative) and Richard Woods (Global Disinformation Index), puts hard numbers on just how precarious that gap has become.

Meet Europe's Democracy Stack

The report gives this ecosystem a name, and for the first time, a number. "Europe's Democracy Stack" is the collective term for the independent organisations that generate evidence, monitor implementation, run strategic litigation, fight influence operations, and hold governments and tech companies accountable across the EU's digital sphere,six institutional components, nine public-interest functions.

What holds it together isn't an organisation chart. It's independence: legal, editorial, financial, operational, from the very institutions and companies it scrutinises. That independence is exactly what makes it valuable. It's also what makes it fragile.

The numbers

Drawing on statutory financial data for 84 organisations (out of 94 mapped) between 2021 and 2024, the report puts scale to this capability for the first time. A few numbers stand out:

• Europe's Democracy Stack runs on roughly €144 million a year: about €0.27 per EU resident, or less than a quarter of the price of a postage stamp.
• Only 12% of that funding comes from EU institutions. The remaining 88% depends on decisions made outside the EU, 56% from US government and philanthropic sources alone.
• The comparable EU public bodies that do exist covering DSA enforcement, the AI Office, European External Action Service (EEAS) strategic communications and the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) Secretariat cost about €0.25 per resident, but between them cover only four of the Stack's nine functions, at a reduced scale.
• Volatility is structural, not incidental. US public and philanthropic funding for European democracy programmes has retrenched sharply, revealing that Europe lacks a comparable funding base of its own. Government support (excluding Ukraine) has fallen from about $227 million in 2023, driven by the December 2024 closure of the State Department's $61 million anti-disinformation office and the 2025 suspension of most of the National Endowment for Democracy's $11 million in European grants. Across the dataset, the smallest and most externally dependent organizations proved the most vulnerable to abrupt single-funder changes. One FIMI organization lost almost half its annual income after a single government program ended. Another exhausted almost all unrestricted reserves within two years. A third reduced staff after philanthropic funding was withdrawn.

In other words, the very capability Europe relies on to hold its own digital rulebook accountable is financed mostly from abroad, on short cycles, by funders whose priorities Europe does not control and that external support is now contracting.

The contradiction

The EU has decided that dependence on external providers is a risk worth billions to fix for chips, cloud, AI. It hasn't applied that logic to the organisations keeping those same technologies and the rules governing them honest. Secure the hardware layer and leave the accountability layer dependent on non-EU funders, and the strategy is incomplete by its own definition.

The fix isn't replacing philanthropic or international support, and the report is clear that Stack should never be folded into government itself; its value depends on staying independent of the states and companies it evaluates. The fix is a funding floor: enough durable, arm's-length European money that the capability doesn't collapse the moment one external funder changes course.

Two fixes

The report doesn't stop at diagnosis. It proposes two reforms to the EU's 2028–2034 Multiannual Financial Framework, built to move on different timelines:

1. Capitalise a €1 billion European Democracy Stack Endowment Fund. Modelled on the existing European Endowment for Democracy, which has already distributed almost €250 million to some 3,000 initiatives since 2013, the fund would generate roughly €45 million a year at a standard 4.5% payout rate: about a third of the Stack's current annual budget. That's enough to establish a permanent anchor without crowding out other funders, and for context, it's less than 2% of the €51.5 billion earmarked for digital leadership elsewhere in the EU's competitiveness budget.
2. Fix AgoraEU from within its existing budget. Protect multi-year Framework Partnership Agreements, create a renewable five-to-seven-year "Democratic Resilience Institutional Grant" tier open across all nine functions, and drop the European Parliament's proposal to fund civil society through regulatory fines, a mechanism the report argues actively undermines the independence it's meant to support. These changes are cost-neutral and can move on the Commission's own implementation timetable.

Bottom line

Europe decided it shouldn't depend indefinitely on outside providers for the technologies shaping its future. The same logic applies to the people making sure those technologies and the rules written for them actually serve the public. Right now, that work runs overwhelmingly on someone else's dime and someone else's timeline.

Digital sovereignty stays incomplete until Europe's Democracy Stack is funded like the strategic infrastructure it already is.

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Photo by Fabian Kleiser