Before a recent vacation, Klaus Welle downloaded several books by Joseph Ellis on his phone and plowed through most of them. The American historian is preoccupied with the early, difficult days of the republic that grew up to be the world’s superpower. So is Welle, a German who holds the top civil servant post at the European Parliament.

From his capacious office above the Parliament’s debating chamber, operating largely out of public view, Welle has drawn on the inspiration of America’s founding as well as the particulars of the organization of the U.S. Congress to shape a new future for his own institution. No person can claim more credit for Parliament’s emergence in this century as a counterweight to the other EU bodies and a player that national governments must take seriously — an evolution that took many by surprise in Brussels — than Welle.

“What I’ve tried to focus on in the last six years of this job is to build up a lot of opportunity for expertise to be able to challenge the Commission position and to challenge the point of view in the Council of Ministers,” Welle said in an interview with POLITICO last spring. “To be more powerful.”

Yet the past year for Europe — with the bloc roiled by the Greek and migration crises, by the growing rise of Euroskeptic politics and of the threat of terrorism, and the specter of Britain’s possible exit from the EU — has sharpened the Parliament’s growing pains and created unprecedented troubles for Welle.

Prominently associated with the chamber’s newfound muscle, Welle is feeling the pushback to his essentially federalist vision for Europe from the right of the political spectrum. On the left, the 50-year-old Eurocrat has tussled with the Parliament’s elected president, Germany’s Martin Schulz, a federalist who has different ideas from Welle about how the institution ought to be run.

It’s led to whispers that the Parliament’s secretary general, Welle’s formal title, has become a lame duck with three years left on his contract.

Parliament builds up muscle

Welle’s ambitions for the Parliament always carried the risk of exposing him to political backlash. From virtually the moment he took over in 2009, he made the U.S. Congress his model, and was willing to step on toes to overhaul his institution.

The most eye-catching changes involved creating new bodies and providing resources for parliamentarians to make the Parliament more of a varsity player in Brussels.

Welle helped set up the European Parliamentary Research Service, an in-house think-tank that functions like the U.S. Congressional Research Service. He appointed former U.K. Conservative party speechwriter Anthony Teasdale as director general of the service. He has also been pushing for an expanded role for the European Court of Auditors, making it more of a combination of the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, which provides budget related analysis and estimates the cost of proposed legislation, and the Government Accountability Office (GAO), an agency that conducts audits, investigations and impact assessments of federal programs.

Welle wants a strong, credible institution — an old-fashioned-way of strengthening the EU that’s more popular with EU countries and even with Euroskeptics

The idea behind both initiatives is to give parliamentarians their own independent sources of information and oversight of EU proposals, budget and legislation, and no longer rely on the Commission or national governments for that information.

The power of the committees in Congress rests partly with their permanent staffs. Welle has taken a similar approach here, looking to build up those teams. To help pay for it, he diverted a third of the Committee of the Regions interpreter budget in 2013, angering Schulz, who wanted those resources to go to the political parties in Parliament. Welle won that fight, but others soon followed.

Welle’s crown jewel — the Parliament’s visitor center — gives off a whiff of the U.S. Congress visitor’s center, many say. He has introduced a transatlantic exchange program where MEPs can visit their congressional counterparts in Washington.

The secretary general’s prominence, even if behind the scenes, grates on the elected members. In American terms, he’s the sergeant-at-arms of the House of Representatives, though his political sway resembles the House Speaker’s.

“He has played a significant role and made many political speeches,” while “beavering away in his efforts to construct a federal Europe,” said Nigel Farage, the leader of the anti-EU U.K. Independence Party who has served in the European Parliament for the past 17 years. “His behavior shows that the EU in many ways acts like a developing country where civil servants play a very political role.”

Welle declined interview requests for this article.

The secretary general controls the Parliament’s budget, another source of annoyance for many MEPs. In an April 2015 plenary session, they took the unusual step of passing a resolution taking Welle to task for not being responsive enough to their questions on the European Parliament’s budget.

The European Center Right has been critical of some ambitious plans for Parliament, including a proposal for a major overhaul of the Paul Henri Spaak building in Brussels that would require the 20-year-old structure to be closed down; and plans to introduce a paperless, open working environment with the the rather grand title of the "New World of Work." Under the latter, MEPs’ staff would have been working in open-plan offices, eschewing paper for iPads.

It didn’t happen. The whole thing was “too much to digest for Parliament,” said a senior parliamentary source.

“He could have set out to make Parliament more efficient and cut its costs,” said European Conservatives and Reformists MEP Geoffrey Van Orden, who wrote a report called “Ending Excess” on cutting 10 percent of the Parliament’s budget by trimming the translation services and closing the assembly’s Strasbourg seat, the Parliament’s museum and information offices.

“Instead he has borne responsibility for a major expansion of staff and costs.”

Even longtime EPP colleagues have begun to push back against Welle’s plans.

“He has a vision but he doesn’t share it with anyone. The plan is in his head,” said a former party colleague.

Others believe the resistance has broken Welle down.

“[Today] Welle is different than the 2012 Welle,” said the senior parliamentary source. “He’s a kinder, much more gentler figure than before. He’s not a lame duck, but he’s not a firebrand anymore.”

Rise of a small-town boy

In person, Welle is reedy, soft spoken and professorial. His character, people who know him say, reflects his humble beginnings in Beelen, a small town in western Germany that shaped his understanding of grassroots politics.

After studies in banking, he switched to politics, working on European and foreign policy for the Christian Democrats in Bonn. He was trusted enough for no less a figure than then Chancellor Helmut Kohl to send him to Brussels in 1994. His mission? To turn the European People’s Party into a pan-European political force.

“He’s a long-distance runner in the sense that he has a clear idea of what he’s doing and where he has to go”

A lot has changed since then. When Welle took over as secretary general of the EPP, the party had no staff and no offices. But Welle made the EPP the biggest game in town by working with center-right parties from other countries. Once he persuaded the Forza Italia (or “Forward Italy”) party and the British Conservatives to come on board, the EPP was the biggest group in Parliament (staying that way even after the Tories quit to form their own anti-federalist group).

“He’s a long-distance runner in the sense that he has a clear idea of what he’s doing and where he has to go,” said a senior parliamentary source. “No matter the job.”

He also has bags of energy. “There are 180 parties, eight groups and he can remember every party and their member state,” a colleague said. “He reminds you of a top staffer in Washington; he knows what’s going on, he can maneuver in the system.”

When Welle became secretary general of the Parliament, he was, at 45, the youngest person to hold a position long seen as a pre-retirement post — his predecessor Harald Rømer finished his career in the role at 65.

Who’s the boss?

One of Welle’s biggest obstacles to change has been Schulz, the president of the Parliament. Both are old-school German federalists, they believe in a powerful Parliament and a Germany in the heart of Europe, but they clash on how to achieve it.

Both men want an EU Commission that’s accountable to the European Parliament but for Schulz that means agreeing with Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker on priorities. In Schulz’s vision, Juncker would deliver agreed-upon policy and Schulz would secure the votes, giving the two institutions a strong standing against the Council.

Instead of giving MEPs more expertise and power, Schulz sees the power resting in political parties and his role as president as a sort of Speaker of the House who can deliver votes. To Schulz, the more resources MEPs have, the more dangerous they are.

Welle wants a strong, credible institution — an old-fashioned-way of strengthening the EU that’s more popular with EU countries and even with Euroskeptics, who can use additional staff and resources to promote their anti-Brussels agenda.

The two Germans spar privately over whose idea it was to bring the Spitzenkandidaten process, which gave the Parliament the power to choose the Commission president, to EU politics, according to sources.

Lately, Welle has been forced to take a back seat as Schulz asked him to look at ways to strengthen the role of the president and the main political groups while cutting down on politicking by individual MEPs.

Parliament sources said Welle has been much more cautious in his dealings with the President as there have been mumblings that Schulz is keen to replace him with his head of cabinet Markus Winkler. If Schulz is successful in holding onto the Parliament presidency for a third term he may choose not to renew Welle’s contract, which is up in 2019.

“It’s a power play in my view,” said Ingeborg Grässle, a German MEP from the EPP who chairs Parliament’s Budgetary Control Committee.

“No other institution in the EU has this kind of problem. And that’s why Schulz should start reflecting.”

When Schulz publicly axed Welle’s New World of Work plan, the relationship between the two men was the talk of Parliament. Welle responded with an olive branch, producing a paper called “First reflections on European Parliamentary democracy,” in which he suggested that a radical power shift is needed in the assembly towards the political parties and the President. The move represented a clear kowtow by Welle to Schulz.

In October, the two men and the Parliament’s directors-general mapped out a plan for the assembly’s president to be more like a Speaker of the House of the Representatives.

In the 12th-floor dining room, with a floor-to-ceiling hemicycle-shaped window and a painting of the “The Abduction of Europe,” they agreed on a plan that would make Schulz a power broker able to change amendments directly in plenary, with the secretary general in a supporting role.

“He’s giving the president more powers,” said a senior parliamentary source. “Which pleases Schulz and shows that he is a loyal civil servant and not the one who is running the show.”

This article was updated to correct a reference to Anthony Teasdale, who was not speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher.