Europe has spent a decade building the world's most ambitious digital rulebook, the DSA, DMA, AI Act and billions more on digital sovereignty: chips, cloud, AI, quantum. 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) and Richard Woods (Global Disinformation Index) puts hard numbers on this ecosystem for the first time. The report examines how the EU's next budget cycle could affect the organisations working at the centre of Europe's digital democratic resilience and finds a significant gap between the EU's ambitions and how this work is actually funded. Among the key findings:

• For the first time, we quantify the collective scale of this work: almost 100 organizations central to Europe's digital democratic resilience share a combined annual operating budget of approximately €144 million.
• EU institutional funds cover just 12 percent of that budget. Fully 56 percent comes from US philanthropy or the US government — two sources that are now contracting, for different reasons.
• Links this funding structure to what it calls Europe's "Democracy Stack" to the EU's own digital sovereignty agenda, showing how exposed the EU is to its continued reliance on non-EU institutional support, even as it commits substantial public funds to digital sovereignty elsewhere.
• Proposes two ways to close this gap: reforms to the existing AgoraEU program to provide long-term support for these organisations, and a new €1 billion European Democracy Stack Endowment Fund to anchor support for what have become essential public goods.