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This article comments on recent developments related to the establishment and empowerment of EU agencies. These developments raise questions about which legal basis in the Treaties may be used for such purposes and about the limits that the EU legislator should respect when empowering an agency. In the absence of a clear provision in the Treaties, legal scholarship relied on the Meroni and Romano rulings of the Court, which predate modern agencification, to clarify these issues. In Short-selling the Court has now scrutinised agency empowerment for the very first time, even if the Court's ruling is more of an excessive simplification exercise rather than a clarification exercise. The result of this ruling is that there seem to be few genuine limits imposed on the EU legislator when it contemplates the establishment and empowerment of an agency. The repercussions of this approach for the Single Resolution Mechanism of the Banking Union, in which the establishment of an agency is also envisaged, are also discussed.
