A new report from the Free Market Foundation traced over €12.8 million in EU funding flowing to nine Brussels so-called NGOs, and describes a loop that keeps recurring across the policy areas it examines. The European Commission grants public money to an NGO, the NGO turns around and lobbies EU institutions, and the resulting pressure from these organisations on the European Parliament and EU Member States gets read as independent civil society demand rather than what it is: taxpayer money circling back. The report calls this circular lobbying. 

Nowhere does that loop run more cleanly than in public health. Commission-funded organisations working on “tobacco control” constantly echo the Commission’s line in their own campaigns, actively defend it in public, and carry it into the other EU institutions. The same groups that receive Commission grants meet the Commissioners and their cabinets and then lobby MEPs and national governments on behalf of the Commission’s proposals. What should be a group of independent checkers on the Commission’s tobacco and nicotine agenda turned into one of its most consistent support networks.

The report names the European Cancer Organisation (ECO) and the Smoke Free Partnership (SFP) as the clearest case of this practice. On 30 September 2025, both organisations met with Commissioners Wopke Hoekstra and Olivér Várhelyi and their cabinets. At the same time, they co-signed a press release urging EU member states to “strongly support” the Commission’s own proposed revision of the Tobacco Excise Directive (TED), the very file they had just discussed with the Commission’s own cabinets. 

The ECO, which collected €1.46 million from the Commission, spent months lobbying against the tools smokers use to quit cigarettes and pushing for higher tobacco and nicotine taxes. The Smoke Free Partnership, on a €100,000 grant, focused on banning vape flavours, casting them as an industry tactic to hook young people, a policy the Commission has also pushed for years.

A third group, the European Public Health Alliance (EPHA), took €574,151 from the Commission last year, more than half of its of its entire budget, and spent part of it campaigning for higher taxes and tighter regulation on reduced-risk nicotine products, the same direction of travel as the TED.

None of the three organisations lobbied the Commission to change course. They met it, then carried its position to the audiences that still had to sign off on it: national governments and MEPs.

Over the past weeks, the European Parliament has adopted its position on two health files that both touch tobacco and nicotine. Neither is binding, since both are own-initiative reports, Parliament stating its position and calling on the Commission to act, but both contain some measures that point in the direction the ECO, the SFP and EPHA had spent years publicly backing.

The first responds to the Commission’s “Safe Hearts Plan,” its first EU-wide cardiovascular health strategy, unveiled in December 2025. Its rapporteur, Romana Jerković (S&D, Croatia), saw the report through the Public Health Committee on 24 June, and the plenary on 16 September. The version MEPs adopted was less restrictive than earlier drafts: reporting on the plenary text notes that Parliament removed or softened a number of more categorical measures between committee and plenary, and on nicotine specifically kept the concept of differentiated risk rather than treating every nicotine product as equivalent to cigarettes.

The second is the implementation report on the EU’s Beating Cancer Plan, known as BECA, led by rapporteur Vlad Vasile-Voiculescu (Renew). The Health Committee adopted the report anyway on 28 September, largely intact, keeping Voiculescu’s framing of new nicotine products as things “designed to create and maintain addiction” rather than the risk-differentiated language other groups wanted.

Flavour restrictions, higher taxes, and language treating reduced-risk products as equivalent to cigarettes are not new. The Commission has backed all three for years, well before ECO and the SFP’s September 2025 meetings with Hoekstra’s and Várhelyi’s cabinets. Whether the two organisations then lobbied MEPs on the Commission’s behalf, or simply arrived at the same position independently, isn’t something a funding disclosure can settle either way. But that uncertainty is itself the argument for change. 

The only way to remove the question is to stop the money flowing from the Commission to organisations that go on to lobby the same institution funding them. NGOs that want to argue for these policies should be free to do so, backed by members and by companies choosing to fund them, not by the taxpayers whose government is on the other end of that lobbying.