1 August 2026
Securistan, Reckoned Year by Year
The budgets of the intelligence services between 2015 and 2026, and the comparison that settles the argument: Romania spends more per head of population than the United Kingdom, and four times more than Germany.
In December 2015 I wrote a short practical guide to identifying the front organisations and trumpets of the domestic intelligence service. One of the criteria was this: look at which journalists say not a word about the 25 per cent increase in that service’s budget — a budget which had then become the largest in Europe allocated to a “secret service”.
Ten years have passed, four governments, two presidential terms, a pandemic, a war on the border and a coup d’état. One thing only has changed: the figures. They have gone up.
In 2015 the four services together had nearly 2 billion lei. By 2024 they had reached 8.4 billion — 4.22 times more, while the country’s budget revenues had grown only 2.86 times. In 2025, after the services “saw” nothing at all in the annulled election, they received 20 per cent more. In 2026, in the middle of an austerity package, the domestic service’s budget grew again by almost 14 per cent, reaching 5.2 billion lei — close to a billion euros.
And now the comparison nobody puts on paper: Romania spends 85.7 euros per citizen per year on its secret services. Poland, which borders the war directly, spends 18.6. Germany, with three federal services and sixteen regional ones, spends 21.7. The United Kingdom, with MI5, MI6 and GCHQ together, spends 65.
The full study — with tables, sources and the chapter on the number of agents, which remains classified — is to be found in the Works section.
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