The task of executive agencies is to manage specific activities which would normally have been carried out by the European Commission. The Research Executive Agency (REA) has its own legal personality, but is supervised and controlled by the European Commission.

The parts of FP7 that the REA manage are:
• The Marie-Curie Actions of the People Program.
• The SME-specific activities of the Capacities Program.
• A large part of the Space and the Security themes from the Cooperation Program.
• In addition, a major role of the REA is to provide and manage the evaluation facilities across the entire framework programme (except evaluation facilities for the Ideas Program, which is entirely managed by the European Research Council).

This means that in above areas your Project Officer will now be part of the executive agency and not the Commission.

More.