[bzxcvbn]

The budget of the EU parliament? What do you mean? The budget of the parliament was about 740k€ in 2022.

Did you mean the budget of the EU itself? It's about what you said (180B€ in 2022). Of course, that doesn't account for individual member States' budgets. The EU's budget is dwarfed by the aggregate of all members' budgets, and it is lower than most of the big EU countries' budgets.

[988747]

Did you mean 740k EUR per person? I can't find the whole budget right now, but it costs EU parliament over 100 million just to move it back and forth between Brussels and Strasbourg (which is totally pointless and is only done so that France can feel important). They also apparently spend 1 billion per year on translators.

EDIT: I guess I offended some French people, hence the downvotes :)

[nightpool]

Apparently this is correct:

> In [2014], the European Court of Auditors (ECA) carried out a further analysis of the potential savings if all meetings were held in Brussels, following a request from the Parliament. Their estimate of the cost of the monthly move is 113.800.000 euro.

(From an EJTA fact checking website, which labeled a separate 200MM euro number as "mostly false" https://eufactcheck.eu/factcheck/mostly-false-travelling-cir...)

[manholio]

> They also apparently spend 1 billion per year on translators.

Now that the UK is out of the Union, it would be nice for sanity to prevail and most of those translators be made redundant. Except for drafting official multi-language legal documents, the bulk of the proceedings can go on in English, and EMPs that require translation services should request them from their own countries.

It will never happen, but one can surely dream.

[Fiahil]

> EDIT: I guess I offended some French people, hence the downvotes :)

Yes.

But I have to recognise, they could - at least - hand out "free" train tickets to most of the Parliament staff. Not just between Brussels and Strasbourg, but everywhere in the EU.