Someone was saying this sort of thing recently. "Way less of the EU budget is spent on admin than people think"

I think the true number was ~8.5bn from 140bn budget (but I'm going on memory, I assume it was euros). I'm not sure that is a low budget? France and Germany are actually running a country. Infrastructure, social security, armed forces, police etc etc. This is a layer of government over and above that, redistributing and legislating for (in theory) the benefit of all.

I honestly don't see it as a small budget, and whilst the admin costs may be 5% instead of 20% (which I seem to have as the median expected number in the survey) - it's still billions.

It's all a question of perspective.