The thing about Europe: it's the actual land of the free now

> The boring processes of rule by consensus can slow the EU to a crawl: it took four days and four nights of haggling to agree on the bloc’s latest seven-year budget, in 2020.

That's a weird complaint. 27 member states, manage to agree on a seven year budget, in less than a week. That's seems alright to me. I get that there have been weeks if not months of work done by bureaucrats leading up to that week, but still, seems reasonably fast.

Yes, it was a bad example. But the underlying issue is very real, in that many important decisions are made with unanimous votes. Which puts the entire EU at the whims of any single country, which could even be compromised by Putin (cough Orban). More decisions should be moved to qualified majority voting.

Oh, and the EU should PRONTO implement the suggestions in the 2024 Draghi and Letta reports.

That's faster that in takes the US Congress to agree on a budget extension for the next year.

Compared to the grueling process of making US government budgets, I'd wager it was easier for the Europeans to make theirs.