Cutting Red Tape, Cutting the Record: Contestability, Impact Assessments, and Judicial Review in the EU’s Omnibus Reform Strategy

Abstract Omnibus acts are no longer a neutral drafting technique in EU lawmaking. Since early 2025 they have become a reform strategy that bundles amendments to multiple instruments under the political promise of simplification and competitiveness. This article asks a procedural question with constitutional consequences: when regulatory change is bundled at scale, what happens to the evidentiary chain that makes EU risk regulation contestable, and therefore democratically and judicially accountable? The article develops contestability as a legal infrastructure for accountability that depends on a readable record of objectives, alternatives and supporting evidence, and it argues that contemporary omnibus practice tends to cut not only administrative burdens but also the record required for meaningful proportionality review and institutional scrutiny. The doctrinal analysis links legal certainty, institutional balance and proportionality to the EU’s Better Regulation safeguards, with specific attention to the legal and practical role of impact assessments, their interaction with public consultations and Article 11 TEU participation logics, and the contribution of evaluations and scientific advice to the justification of bundled change. Methodologically, the article combines close legal analysis with a documentary mapping of selected omnibus packages and scrutiny traces introduced since January 2025. Rather than claiming to offer a quantitative census of all omnibus initiatives, the mapping focuses on publicly available Commission proposals, explanatory memoranda, staff working documents, call-for-evidence materials and parliamentary scrutiny documents. Omnibus I is treated as the baseline case because it makes the new reform logic visible through the relation between sustainability simplification, administrative burden reduction, urgency and the absence of a full impact assessment. The Digital Omnibus is used as an emerging scrutiny trace because it shows how compression may arise before legislative closure, particularly where data, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence rules are reorganised through a common simplification frame. The article uses this documentary record to support three claims. First, bundling multiplies amended instruments while compressing the visibility of objectives and alternatives. Secondly, bundling reshapes participation conditions by raising the informational and temporal threshold for stakeholders to follow and contest proposals in a practically meaningful way. Thirdly, bundling may intensify accountability gaps by fragmenting responsibility across instruments and institutions, while also making later review more dependent on a record that is harder to separate at amendment level. The article concludes by proposing design principles for legitimate bundling in a multi-level risk-regulatory order, including minimum standards for separability of issues, modular and traceable evidentiary reasoning across amended instruments, and clearer triggers for ex post review where omnibus packages lower protection levels.