Pavlos Gerulanos, the PASOK - Movement for Change lawmaker who heads the party's shadow committee on the Recovery and Resilience Fund, published a list on 24 August 2026 naming 100 projects and targets from Greece's "Greece 2.0" recovery plan that were either removed entirely or significantly scaled back from their original design.
Gerulanos said four projects were dropped in the days before and after the mid-August holiday alone. The Health Ministry lost a roughly 5 million euro programme of preventive screening in remote mountain and island areas with fewer than 10,000 residents, plus prenatal screening for an estimated 4,700 pregnant women, removed by government decision on 4 August 2026. The Education Ministry's 73.6 million euro plan to strengthen the "Digital School" was removed the same day. On 11 August 2026 the government cut a 151.6 million euro programme run through the public employment agency DYPA for the social reintegration of homeless people and recipients of the Minimum Guaranteed Income, and scrapped expansion projects for the Archaeological Museum of Chios (17 million euros) and the Archaeological Museum of Argostoli (7 million euros). Gerulanos said no explanation was given for any of the four removals.
Two-thirds of measures cut, PASOK says
Greece 2.0 is the country's national plan for spending its share of the European Union's Recovery and Resilience Facility, worth 36 billion euros in total. Gerulanos said a comparative study PASOK published on 1 July 2026, cross-checking the plan's text over time, found that two-thirds of the 195 measures that have appeared in Greece 2.0 have suffered either reduced targets or outright project removals.
He said the government now prefers to publicise only what was delivered, however partial, rather than the original 2021 commitments.
Energy storage target cut in half
Gerulanos pointed to the government's own promotion of the "installation of 700 MW of energy storage" as a case in point. The original Greece 2.0 plan committed Greece to having 1,380 MW of energy storage completed by the end of 2025, plus a further 175 MW added later, for a total of 1,555 MW. That target was cut to 700 MW. He cited the newspaper Kathimerini reporting on 23 June 2026 that Italy, Romania and especially Bulgaria have built up substantial battery storage capacity by importing cheap energy from the Greek market, a gap he attributed to Greece expanding renewable generation faster than the storage needed to use it.
Health and social projects scrapped
Among dozens of social policy cuts Gerulanos listed, a target to complete and staff at least 50,000 new childcare centre places, and a plan for 135 STEM creative activity centres for children aged 12 to 15, were both deleted. A 16 million euro project for childcare facilities inside 120 large and medium-sized companies was removed, as was support for 7,000 recipients of the Minimum Guaranteed Income. An 8.3 million euro project supporting the social and employment integration of people on the autism spectrum was removed on 19 November 2025. A target to renovate 100 apartments for homeless and vulnerable residents of Athens and Thessaloniki was cut to 50 before later disappearing, and a workplace diversity training target was cut from 680,000 employees to 80,000.
In health, a plan to deliver medical equipment to 80 hospitals, budgeted at 80 million euros, was removed on 18 June 2026. A 34 million euro reorganisation of the National Public Health Organisation was cut on 19 June 2026, and a 10.5 million euro primary prevention programme was removed on 20 July 2026. A training target for primary healthcare staff was cut from 10,000 to 6,172 professionals, mobile breast cancer screening units were removed on 18 June 2026, and the number of health centres set to get chronic disease management units fell from 312 to 156.
Infrastructure, digital and other ministries
Gerulanos said a target to fully install the European Rail Traffic Management System on the Athens-Thessaloniki line disappeared from the plan despite the 2023 Tempi rail disaster, and that safety upgrades for railway tunnels were cut from ten tunnels to six. He said the government publicly denied in summer 2025 that the Western Attica suburban rail line would be dropped from the fund, only for it to request the project's removal itself in May 2026. Flood-defence works in four regions were scrapped, a nationwide electronic tolling system was deleted, and the number of airport documents to be cleared for safety compliance at 13 airports was cut from 169 to 97.
In digital policy, a plan to install 5G infrastructure along 1,918 km of Greek motorways was dropped, along with several cybersecurity and cyber-defence projects removed through 2025 and 2026. Targets for upgrading small businesses' cash registers and card payment terminals were sharply reduced, and the number of small and medium firms set to receive digitisation vouchers fell from 100,000 to 72,400.
Elsewhere, a 31 million euro public-private partnership to build the Athens courthouse and prosecutor's office was cancelled on 12 June 2026. A thermal-spa tourism renovation programme saw its budget cut from 28.5 million to 6.8 million euros before disappearing altogether. A rebranding of 118 local employment centres was cut to 40 before building renovations were dropped too, and subsidised employment programmes for the unemployed were cut from 52,000 to 37,600 places. Gerulanos also said mismanagement of the fund's loan component left 135 already-approved investment plans worth 1.75 billion euros, and another 180 pending plans, without financing, with only 15,170 small and medium firms, about 2% of the national total, ultimately accessing loan funds before roughly 2 billion euros was hastily redirected to the Hellenic Development Bank.
Government defends the cuts
Gerulanos said the government argues that removing a project from the fund "is not a failure, it is a choice of a more suitable financing framework," pointing to a plan to shift some projects to the National Development Programme. He rejected that defence, saying this was not a small number of unfinished projects being moved to alternative funding, but a wave of removals that will now have to compete with other national priorities for scarce domestic and EU money, on top of the time already lost. He said the government had proven unable not only to design a Greece 2.0 plan matching the country's needs, but even to deliver the plan it announced in 2021, and said the list of 100 cases, while extensive, is not exhaustive.
