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Three authorities, three full leaderships, three separate administrative apparatuses

ASF, ANCOM and ANRE regulate different sectors but have the same structure: each with its own president, two vice-presidents and full support services, funded entirely from outside the state budget.

The ROptimizaRE editorial team · 5 min read · updated 15 October 2026

In short

  • ASF, ANCOM and ANRE are autonomous public authorities, funded entirely from their own revenue, not from the state budget[1]
  • Each has its own leadership made up of a president and 2 vice-presidents, appointed separately by Parliament, and its own staff structures[1]
  • All pay the state a “special levy”, calculated at a minimum of 33% of revenue, a financing mechanism parallel to the ordinary budget[1]
  • A 2025 bill proposes cutting support-service posts at these authorities by 30%, precisely to limit the duplication of administrative functions[1]

Three sectors, the same institutional architecture

Romania has several independent public authorities, each regulating a different sector: the Financial Supervisory Authority (ASF) for financial markets, the National Authority for Administration and Regulation in Communications (ANCOM) for telecommunications, and the National Energy Regulatory Authority (ANRE) for energy. All three are “autonomous public authorities, with legal personality, funded entirely from their own revenue”, meaning they operate outside the ordinary state budget[1].

The leadership structure is identical at all three: a president and two vice-presidents, appointed separately by Parliament for each authority, plus their own organisational structures (staff, legal, accounting, IT) built independently of one another, even though all are public institutions with similar regulatory and control functions[1].

A special levy, outside the normal budget

All three authorities pay the state a “special levy”, calculated by reference to the budget surplus but no less than 33% of revenue. This mechanism funds them independently of the ordinary budget process: the money comes from fees paid by the companies they regulate (banks, insurers, telecom operators, energy companies), not from general taxes[1].

A reform that acknowledges the problem

A bill initiated by the Government in 2025 proposes exactly to reduce this duplication: support-service posts (not specialist, regulatory ones) would fall by 30% at these authorities, and support structures would not exceed 20% of total posts. The measure explicitly targets parallel administrative functions (accounting, human resources, internal IT), not the regulatory activity itself[1].

Sources

Primary official sources; where we use the press (only when the official document is not public) we mark it. The links lead to the original document or to the report cited (titles are translated; the documents themselves are in Romanian unless stated).

  1. [1]

    Government of Romania (Prime Minister's Chancellery / General Secretariat of the Government) — Draft law on making the activity of certain autonomous administrative authorities more efficient — explanatory statement (in Romanian) (the exact date of the Government decision is illegible in the available scan; we use the date of registration at the Senate)

    Published 30 August 2025 · Accessed 15 October 2026 · the original document(opens in a new tab)

This is a translation of the Romanian article, which prevails. Source titles are translated for convenience; the documents themselves are in Romanian unless stated.