Chapter XIV: Belügyminisztérium (Ministry of the Interior)

Overview

Chapter XIV funds the Belügyminisztérium (Ministry of the Interior) and the institutions under its direction. Total expenditure for 2026 is 5,180,534.8 millió Ft — roughly 5.18 ezer milliárd Ft — against 1,534,332.4 millió Ft of own-revenue, leaving a net call on general taxation of about 3,646,202 millió Ft. By envelope this is one of the largest spending chapters in the budget.

The chapter is unusual in that a single ministry has accreted four functionally distinct policy domains under one heading:

1. Internal security and rights-protection — the Rendőrség (Police, ≈530,571 millió Ft), Büntetés-végrehajtás (Prison Service, ≈134,120 millió Ft), Terrorelhárítási Központ (Counter-Terrorism Centre, ≈29,550 millió Ft), Nemzeti Védelmi Szolgálat (National Protective Service, ≈11,563 millió Ft), BM Országos Katasztrófavédelmi Főigazgatóság (National Directorate-General for Disaster Management, ≈122,504 millió Ft), and Országos Idegenrendészeti Főigazgatóság (National Directorate-General for Aliens Policing, ≈12,340 millió Ft).
2. State public education — the Klebelsberg Központ (≈1,185,193 millió Ft), which is the single national employer of teachers in state-maintained schools, plus the Oktatási Hivatal (Education Office, ≈13,617 millió Ft) and the Köznevelési feladatok támogatása programme block, in which the largest single line in the entire chapter sits: Köznevelési célú humánszolgáltatás és működési támogatás (per-pupil grant to non-state-maintained schools, 620,113.7 millió Ft).
3. State healthcare provision — the Gyógyító-megelőző ellátás intézetei (curative-preventive care institutes, ≈1,380,606 millió Ft), Országos Mentőszolgálat (National Ambulance Service, ≈96,980 millió Ft), Országos Kórházi Főigazgatóság (National Hospital Directorate-General, ≈39,396 millió Ft), Országos Vérellátó Szolgálat (National Blood Supply Service, ≈25,218 millió Ft), Nemzeti Népegészségügyi és Gyógyszerészeti Központ (National Centre for Public Health and Pharmacy, ≈40,354 millió Ft), plus health-sector programme lines.
4. Social, child-protection and disability care — the Szociális és gyermekvédelmi intézményrendszer (≈184,030 millió Ft), the Szociális célú nem állami humánszolgáltatások támogatása (per-capita grant to non-state social-care providers, 385,756.1 millió Ft), and a long tail of disability, Roma-integration and child-protection programme lines.

The classification below treats each function on its own mechanism. A ministry heading is an administrative fact, not an analytical unit; the police line and the teacher-payroll line answer to different questions and receive different classifications.

A structural observation frames the chapter. The state-maintained school system, the state hospital network, and the state social-care network are all financed here through direct provider operation — the state employs the teachers, runs the hospitals, staffs the care homes — and simultaneously through per-capita grants to non-state providers doing the identical work: church and foundation schools, church hospitals, charitable and church social-care operators. The same budget chapter funds both delivery models for the same services. That the non-state model already operates at scale inside Hungary, under the same curriculum and the same care standards, is the single most important fact for the education and social-care sections that follow. It removes the “but who would do it instead” objection before it is raised: the alternative provider is not hypothetical, it is on the next line of the same table.

Expenditure Analysis

Rendőrség (Police)

• Current allocation: ≈530,571 millió Ft (Személyi juttatások 388,953.8; Munkaadókat terhelő járulékok 50,640.2; Dologi kiadások 73,355.0; Egyéb működési 5,814.6; Beruházások 11,242.8; Felújítások 459.7; Egyéb felhalmozási 105.0)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: Policing — the protection of persons and property against force and fraud, the investigation of crime, the enforcement of contracts and judgments at the point where coercion is unavoidable — is a rights-protection function in the precise classical-liberal sense. It is the part of the state that exists so that the rest of voluntary society can exist. Protection of persons and property against force and fraud is the precondition of voluntary society — the function that makes all other civil exchange possible. The classification is Keep on principle, not as a residual.
• Transition mechanism: None. Keep does not preclude operating-efficiency review. The Dologi kiadások line of 73,355.0 millió Ft and the Egyéb működési 5,814.6 millió Ft are appropriate subjects for procurement scrutiny — single-bidder share, framework- contract pricing — but that is a management question internal to a retained function, not a phase-out question.
• Affected groups: None displaced. Citizens are the protected party of this line, and they remain so.

Büntetés-végrehajtás (Prison Service)

• Current allocation: ≈134,120 millió Ft (Személyi juttatások 94,956.2; Munkaadókat terhelő járulékok 11,125.8; Dologi kiadások 26,973.2; Ellátottak pénzbeli juttatásai 2.7; Egyéb működési 747.6; Beruházások 44.0; Felújítások 157.7; Egyéb felhalmozási 113.0)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: The custodial enforcement of criminal sentences is the downstream half of the rights-protection function the courts begin. A judgment that cannot be enforced is not a judgment. The prison estate is part of the rule-of-law infrastructure the classical-liberal frame finances without hesitation.
• Transition mechanism: None. As with policing, the line is open to operating-efficiency review — Hungarian prison occupancy and the cost per prisoner-place are legitimate management questions — but the function is retained.
• Affected groups: None displaced.

Terrorelhárítási Központ (Counter-Terrorism Centre, TEK)

• Current allocation: ≈29,550 millió Ft (Személyi juttatások 21,548.1; Munkaadókat terhelő járulékok 2,846.3; Dologi kiadások 2,554.0; Beruházások 2,302.0; Felújítások 300.0)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: Protection against organised violence directed at the population is a protective response to irreversible involuntary harm — the same category as defence against external aggression. The function is retained.
• Transition mechanism: None. The standing analytical caution on security agencies is scope, not existence: a counter-terrorism body whose mandate broadened into general intelligence or political surveillance would warrant a mandate review. That is an oversight question for the legislature, not a budget-line reclassification, and nothing in the chapter table speaks to it.
• Affected groups: None displaced.

Nemzeti Védelmi Szolgálat (National Protective Service, NVSZ)

• Current allocation: ≈11,563 millió Ft (Személyi juttatások 9,028.8; Munkaadókat terhelő járulékok 1,209.7; Dologi kiadások 1,178.9; Beruházások 146.0)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: The NVSZ is the internal anti-corruption and integrity body for the law-enforcement and public services. An honest objection from the public-choice tradition is that an internal-affairs body is itself exposed to capture and can be turned to police loyalty rather than integrity. That is a real risk and an argument for external oversight of the body, not for abolishing the integrity function. Within the rule-of-law frame, a mechanism for detecting corruption inside the coercive apparatus is retained.
• Transition mechanism: None.
• Affected groups: None displaced.

BM Országos Katasztrófavédelmi Főigazgatóság (National Directorate-General for Disaster Management)

• Current allocation: ≈122,504 millió Ft (Személyi juttatások 94,621.8; Munkaadókat terhelő járulékok 12,778.7; Dologi kiadások 11,403.5; Egyéb működési 18.4; Beruházások 3,056.8; Felújítások 606.7; Egyéb felhalmozási 18.0)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: Professional fire and rescue, flood defence, and emergency response to natural disaster are a protective response to irreversible involuntary harm: the harm is sudden, large, and falls on people who did not consent to it and cannot contract around it in the moment it arrives. The function is retained. Hungary’s exposure to Danube and Tisza flooding makes the flood-defence component concretely load-bearing.
• Transition mechanism: None for the professional service. See the separate treatment of the Önkormányzati tűzoltóságok normatív támogatása programme line below — the volunteer-municipal fire brigade subsidy is a distinct mechanism.
• Affected groups: None displaced.

Országos Idegenrendészeti Főigazgatóság (National Directorate-General for Aliens Policing)

• Current allocation: ≈12,340 millió Ft (Személyi juttatások 8,428.3; Munkaadókat terhelő járulékok 1,132.1; Dologi kiadások 2,394.6; Ellátottak pénzbeli juttatásai 20.0; Egyéb működési 189.6; Beruházások 175.8)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: Determining who may enter and remain on the territory, and enforcing those determinations, is a function of the state’s control of its borders — a recognised rights- protection and constitutional function. The classification is Keep. Whether the substance of Hungarian immigration policy is well-designed is a policy question outside the analytical scope of a budget-line classification; the administrative function of adjudication and enforcement is retained regardless of how the policy parameters are set.
• Transition mechanism: None.
• Affected groups: None displaced.

Belügyminisztérium igazgatása (Ministry Administration)

• Current allocation: ≈24,295 millió Ft (Személyi juttatások 15,609.9; Munkaadókat terhelő járulékok 2,071.8; Dologi kiadások 5,430.1; Ellátottak pénzbeli juttatásai 4.0; Egyéb működési 1,150.6; Beruházások 28.4)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: The core administrative apparatus of a ministry that, on the classification below, retains its internal-security functions is itself retained — at the scale those retained functions require. The qualification matters: this chapter argues for moving the state-education, state-healthcare and state-social- care delivery functions out of direct ministry operation over a phased horizon. A ministry that ends the transition supervising policing, prisons, counter-terrorism and disaster management is a materially smaller ministry than one that also runs the school and hospital systems. The Keep is on the administrative core of the retained mandate; the headcount and Dologi kiadások should track the narrowed mandate down as the transitions below complete, not hold at the level a four-domain ministry needed.
• Transition mechanism: None as a phase-out; a downward operating-efficiency glide as the education/health/social transitions reduce the ministry’s directed estate.
• Affected groups: None displaced; some administrative posts tied specifically to the education/health/social directorates fall away with those transitions and are addressed there.

Klebelsberg Központ (state public-education employer)

• Current allocation: ≈1,185,193 millió Ft (Személyi juttatások 972,143.9; Munkaadókat terhelő járulékok 128,213.7; Dologi kiadások 78,703.8; Ellátottak pénzbeli juttatásai 1,478.6; Beruházások 4,483.8; Felújítások 169.2)

• Classification: Keep (function), with a structural-reform recommendation

• Rationale: Public funding of compulsory schooling is not the question here, and the classification is not a phase-out of school funding. The question the line raises is narrower and specific to its mechanism: the Klebelsberg Központ is a single national employer of the teaching workforce of state-maintained schools. Roughly 972 milliárd Ft of teacher payroll, plus 128 milliárd Ft of employer contributions, is set, allocated and administered from one central point.

  This is the pattern where the information that a decentralised system would generate is never produced. A national single-employer cannot read which schools face teacher shortages most acutely, which subjects command scarcity premia in which regions, or what staffing mix a particular school’s pupils need — because the signals that would carry that information, school-level hiring decisions competing for teachers at school-level terms, are replaced by a uniform national grid. Hungary has reported persistent teacher-supply pressures in certain regions and subjects alongside a centrally-fixed pay scale that cannot adjust to clear local shortages — a pattern consistent with the information suppression a national single-employer produces.¹ The headteacher in Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg knows things about the staffing of that school that no national directorate can know, and the single-employer model has no channel through which that knowledge can act.²

  The reform is not to defund schooling. It is to move from a national single-employer to school-level or maintainer-level employment, with public per-pupil funding following the pupil. Hungary already runs this model alongside the Klebelsberg system: church-maintained schools — Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran, Jewish — hold governance, hiring and ethos at the denominational level while receiving state per-pupil grants, with church schools educating roughly a sixth of primary pupils and a quarter or more of secondary students.³ Same country, same national curriculum, decentralised employment — already operating. Sweden’s friskolor system has run a universal per-pupil voucher usable at any approved school for over thirty years; independent schools enrol roughly 15% of compulsory-school pupils.⁴ The Netherlands has funded non-state schools at equal per-pupil rates under Article 23 for over a century, with roughly two-thirds of pupils in publicly- funded non-state schools.⁵ The single-employer model is a choice, not a necessity, and the alternatives are not theoretical.

  The Köznevelési program-line block below — which routes the per-pupil grant to non-state schools — is the funding channel a decentralised model would expand. The two halves of state education funding in this chapter are, in effect, the old model and the alternative running side by side.

• Transition mechanism: Multi-year. The protected parties are the teaching workforce — their employment continuity, accrued entitlements and pension rights are honoured in full — and pupils mid-cycle, whose schooling cannot be disrupted. A realistic horizon is the better part of a decade: employment is migrated from the central directorate to school-level or maintainer-level employers as funding is converted to a per-pupil grant, with existing teachers carrying their accrued service and entitlements into the receiving employer. No teacher loses a job in the transition; the change is in who the employer is and how pay can vary, not in whether the state funds schooling. Because the function is retained and only the delivery architecture changes, the structured phase-out schedule is not applied to this line; the JSON classifies it Keep with the reform noted in prose.

• Affected groups: The teaching workforce — the largest staff body in the chapter — moves from a single national employer to multiple school-level or maintainer-level employers. For most teachers in most schools the day-to-day effect is small; the significant change is that pay can begin to reflect local scarcity rather than a uniform grid, which advantages teachers in shortage subjects and shortage regions. Pupils are unaffected in continuity of schooling. The body that loses function is the central directorate’s allocation apparatus.

Köznevelési feladatok támogatása — programme block

This block routes public funding to non-state-maintained schools and related education functions. It is, mechanically, the per-pupil grant model the Klebelsberg reform above would expand.

• Köznevelési célú humánszolgáltatás és működési támogatás (per-pupil grant and operating support to non-state schools): 620,113.7 millió Ft — Keep. This is the single largest line in the chapter. It is public funding following pupils to church- and foundation-maintained schools that deliver the national curriculum under decentralised governance. Within the analytical frame this is the better delivery mechanism, not the one to cut: it is public money funding schooling without the state operating the school. Keep, and on the logic of the Klebelsberg section, grow its share as the single-employer model is unwound.
• Hit- és erkölcstanoktatás, hittanoktatás és tankönyvtámogatás (religious-and-ethics instruction and textbook support): 28,942.4 millió Ft — Keep. Hungarian schooling requires pupils to take either ethics or denominational religious instruction; this line funds the choice. It travels with the per-pupil model and is retained on the same logic.
• Kis létszámú hit- és erkölcstanoktatás kiegészítő támogatása (supplementary support for small-group religious-and-ethics classes): 1,637.2 millió Ft — Keep. A per-pupil top-up for small classes; part of the same retained instruction function.
• Köznevelés speciális feladatainak támogatása (support for special education tasks): 9,055.9 millió Ft — Keep. Special- needs provision is part of the publicly-funded education function.
• Ingyenes tankönyvellátás támogatása (free textbook provision): 19,040.0 millió Ft — Keep. A pupil-level in-kind component of publicly-funded compulsory schooling. Retained as part of the education function; the delivery (state textbook monopoly versus competitive supply) is an operating-efficiency question, not a classification question.
• Köznevelési szerződések (public-education contracts): 2,322.6 millió Ft — Keep. Contractual funding of education delivery by non-state maintainers; the per-pupil-grant model in contractual form.
• Nem önkormányzati fenntartású köznevelési és szakképző intézmények működési támogatása (operating support to non- municipal education and vocational institutions): 747.6 millió Ft — Keep. Same retained education-funding logic.
• Határon túli köznevelési feladatok támogatása (cross-border education tasks support): 350.0 millió Ft — Keep. Funds Hungarian-language education for the Hungarian minority in neighbouring states; a longstanding constitutional commitment to the cross-border Hungarian community. Retained.
• Oktatási társadalmi szervezetek támogatása (support for education-sector civil organisations): 63.3 millió Ft — Immediate Cut. This is a discretionary grant to education-sector associations and advocacy bodies, allocated by political officeholders. It is not per-pupil schooling funding; it is a transfer to organised civil-society organisations whose members could fund their own association. The amount is small — abolition saves the full 63.3 millió Ft in year one — and the principle scales regardless of size: a discretionary grant to organised associations is concentrated benefit on an organised constituency funded diffusely from general taxation.
• Nemzetközi és Európai Uniós oktatási és egyéb programok (international and EU education programmes): 40.2 millió Ft — Keep. A small co-financing line for EU education programmes, bounded and contractual. Keep on de-minimis and contractual grounds.
• Nemzeti Pedagógus Kar működtetésének támogatása (operating support for the National Teachers’ Chamber): 150.0 millió Ft — Immediate Cut. The Nemzeti Pedagógus Kar is a statutory professional body for teachers. The classical-liberal objection is structural: a professional body funded from general taxation rather than from members’ dues has its existence guaranteed independent of whether teachers value it. A professional association that teachers want would be funded by teachers; one that must be funded by the taxpayer is, by that fact, one whose demand has not been demonstrated. The 150.0 millió Ft is a small line, but the mechanism is the point — abolish the state subsidy and let the body fund itself from dues if its members want it.

Oktatási Hivatal (Education Office)

• Current allocation: ≈13,617 millió Ft (Személyi juttatások 9,277.2; Munkaadókat terhelő járulékok 1,113.3; Dologi kiadások 3,010.8; Beruházások 212.8; Felújítások 2.9)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: The Oktatási Hivatal administers the national examination system (the érettségi), school registration, and curriculum-standards oversight. An external examination and qualification-certification authority is the quality-assurance layer that makes a decentralised, per-pupil-funded school system legible: it is precisely the body that lets public funding follow the pupil to any approved school while holding all schools to a common standard. Sweden’s Skolinspektionen and the Netherlands’ Inspectie van het Onderwijs play the same role in the comparator systems.⁶ The function is retained — and becomes more important, not less, under the Klebelsberg decentralisation, because common examination and inspection are what substitute for central operation.
• Transition mechanism: None.
• Affected groups: None displaced.

Gyógyító-megelőző ellátás intézetei (curative-preventive care institutes — state hospital network)

• Current allocation: ≈1,380,606 millió Ft (Személyi juttatások 895,155.9; Munkaadókat terhelő járulékok 119,809.4; Dologi kiadások 358,048.4; Ellátottak pénzbeli juttatásai 72.5; Egyéb működési 77.4; Beruházások 6,100.6; Felújítások 1,309.0; Egyéb felhalmozási 33.0)

• Classification: Keep (function), with an operating-model recommendation

• Rationale: As with the Klebelsberg line, the classification is not a phase-out of healthcare funding. Publicly-funded curative care is retained. The line is flagged because of how it is delivered: the state directly operates the hospital network and directly employs roughly 895 milliárd Ft of medical payroll, setting capacity, the specialty mix and the regional distribution of hospital resources administratively.

  Hungary supplies its own demonstration that this is not the only workable model. A parallel private medical sector — including diagnostic chains and general-practice networks operating without public subsidy — has developed at visible scale in Hungary, and Hungarian households already bear roughly 27% of total health expenditure as out-of-pocket payment, among the highest shares in the OECD, with voluntary insurance adding a further few points.⁷ Hungarians who can pay already vote with their own money for faster access and longer consultations than the state network delivers. The reform direction the framework recommends is to move from a single state operator toward funding that follows the patient — public money, plural providers including church-maintained and private hospitals, with the state purchasing care rather than running every hospital. Church-maintained hospitals already receive state support in this chapter (see the health programme block below), so the plural-provider model is, again, already partly built into the same table.

• Transition mechanism: Multi-year, and not applied as a structured phase-out of the funding line. The protected parties are patients mid-treatment, whose continuity of care is absolute, and the medical workforce, whose employment and entitlements are honoured. The reform migrates operation (and, over time, employment) from a single state directorate toward plural providers, with public funding converted to a purchasing mechanism; the function and the funding envelope are retained.

• Affected groups: The hospital medical and nursing workforce would, over the transition, move from a single state employer to plural employers — many of them existing church-maintained and private hospitals already operating in Hungary. Patients are unaffected in continuity and gain on access. The body that loses function is the central operating directorate.

Országos Mentőszolgálat (National Ambulance Service)

• Current allocation: ≈96,980 millió Ft (Személyi juttatások 68,362.0; Munkaadókat terhelő járulékok 10,884.6; Dologi kiadások 11,605.2; Beruházások 6,128.4)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: Emergency pre-hospital care — the response to acute, sudden, life-threatening harm — is a protective response to irreversible involuntary harm. The patient cannot contract for an ambulance in the moment of a cardiac arrest or a road accident; the harm is sudden and the alternative is death or permanent injury. This is the part of healthcare that sits most squarely in the retained category. Keep.
• Transition mechanism: None.
• Affected groups: None displaced.

Országos Kórházi Főigazgatóság (National Hospital Directorate-General)

• Current allocation: ≈39,396 millió Ft (Személyi juttatások 24,597.2; Munkaadókat terhelő járulékok 1,574.4; Dologi kiadások 7,179.2; Egyéb működési 237.2; Beruházások 5,778.3; Felújítások 29.4)
• Classification: Nominal Freeze
• Rationale: The Országos Kórházi Főigazgatóság is the central directorate that coordinates the state hospital network. Its rationale is bound to the single-operator delivery model: it is the head office of a centrally-operated hospital system. As the curative-care delivery model migrates toward plural providers and patient-following funding (the recommendation on the Gyógyító-megelőző line above), the coordinating-directorate function shrinks with the estate it coordinates. A Nominal Freeze is the honest interim classification: holding the allocation at its current nominal level lets ordinary inflation erode the real envelope by roughly a fifth to a quarter over a decade — about 8,200–9,800 millió Ft of real-terms reduction — while the larger delivery-model reform determines the directorate’s eventual size. Freezing rather than cutting reflects that the body’s correct endpoint depends on a structural reform not yet legislated; it should not expand in the meantime.
• Transition mechanism: Hold the nominal allocation flat; revisit once the hospital delivery-model reform sets the directorate’s final scope.
• Affected groups: No immediate displacement; the real-terms squeeze is absorbed through ordinary efficiency rather than layoffs.

Nemzeti Népegészségügyi és Gyógyszerészeti Központ (National Centre for Public Health and Pharmacy)

• Current allocation: ≈40,354 millió Ft (Személyi juttatások 10,289.2; Munkaadókat terhelő járulékok 1,240.0; Dologi kiadások 27,743.9; Beruházások 1,057.0; Felújítások 24.2)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: This body carries the population-level public-health functions: communicable-disease surveillance and outbreak response, and pharmaceutical and medical-device authorisation and safety oversight. Infectious-disease emergency response is named in the analytical frame as a protective response to irreversible involuntary harm — a contagion is the textbook case of harm that falls on people who did not consent and cannot individually contract around it. Pharmaceutical safety authorisation protects against irreversible harm from unsafe medicines. Both functions are retained. The unusually large Dologi kiadások line (27,743.9 millió Ft, well above payroll) merits procurement scrutiny, but that is an operating-efficiency question within a retained function.
• Transition mechanism: None.
• Affected groups: None displaced.

Országos Vérellátó Szolgálat (National Blood Supply Service)

• Current allocation: ≈25,218 millió Ft (Személyi juttatások 12,068.1; Munkaadókat terhelő járulékok 1,956.6; Dologi kiadások 10,643.1; Beruházások 480.0; Felújítások 70.0)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: The blood supply is an input to emergency and surgical care without which the retained ambulance and hospital functions cannot operate. Hungary, like most European systems, runs blood collection on a non-remunerated voluntary-donation basis with a state service managing collection, testing and distribution; the safety-testing function is a protection against irreversible involuntary harm (transfusion-transmitted infection). The function is retained. Keep.
• Transition mechanism: None.
• Affected groups: None displaced.

Szociális és gyermekvédelmi intézményrendszer (Social and child-protection institution system)

• Current allocation: ≈184,030 millió Ft, of which the largest block is Szociális és gyermekvédelmi, gyermekjóléti feladatellátás és irányítás intézményei (Személyi juttatások 137,337.4; Munkaadókat terhelő járulékok 17,258.0; Dologi kiadások 26,301.2; Ellátottak pénzbeli juttatásai 1,080.9; Beruházások 1,034.4; Felújítások 1,017.9), plus the Nemzeti Szociálpolitikai Intézet (≈1,410 millió Ft)

• Classification: Keep (function), with the same provider-model observation as education and healthcare

• Rationale: Child protection — the state’s response to abuse, neglect and the absence of a functioning family — is a protective response to irreversible involuntary harm against identifiable individuals (children) who cannot protect themselves and cannot contract for an alternative. This is among the clearest retained functions in the chapter, and the classification is Keep.

  The state-operation question that attaches to schools and hospitals attaches here too: this line directly operates child- protection institutions and residential social-care facilities and directly employs roughly 137 milliárd Ft of payroll. Hungary again funds the alternative on a parallel line — the Szociális célú nem állami humánszolgáltatások támogatása (385,756.1 millió Ft, below) routes public funding to church and charitable social-care providers doing the same work. Over the medium term the same migration applies: public funding for child protection and social care is retained; the question of whether the state must directly operate every facility, or can purchase care from plural providers including the church and charitable operators already in the system, is open. The Nemzeti Szociálpolitikai Intézet is a small methodological and training institute for the social sector; it is retained as part of the standards layer of a publicly-funded social-care function.

• Transition mechanism: None as a phase-out; the longer-run provider-model reform is a structural recommendation, not a budget-line reclassification.

• Affected groups: None displaced under the Keep; the social-care workforce would, under the longer-run provider reform, see the same employer-plurality shift described for hospitals.

Szociális, gyermekvédelmi célelőirányzatok — social and disability programme block

This programme block (chapter cím 32) routes public funding to non-state social-care providers and funds a set of disability and child-welfare programmes.

• Szociális célú nem állami humánszolgáltatások támogatása (per-capita grant to non-state social-care providers): 385,756.1 millió Ft — Keep. This is the social-care analogue of the non-state school grant: public funding following the service-user to church and charitable social-care operators. On the framework’s logic this is the preferred delivery channel — public money, plural non-state providers — and it is retained, with the same case for growing its share that applies to the non-state school grant.
• Szociális, gyermekjóléti és gyermekvédelmi feladatok ellátási szerződésekkel történő finanszírozása (contracted financing of social and child-welfare tasks): 2,313.3 millió Ft — Keep. Contractual funding of retained social-care delivery.
• Hajléktalanokhoz kapcsolódó közfeladatok ellátása (homelessness- related public tasks): 638.6 millió Ft — Keep. Emergency provision against the irreversible harm of exposure — winter shelter capacity is, at the margin, a protection against death from cold. Retained.
• Szociális humánszolgáltatók ágazati pótlék és bérrendezés (sectoral wage supplement for social-care providers): 30,792.5 millió Ft — Keep. This funds the sectoral pay supplement for staff in publicly-funded social-care provision; it travels with the retained social-care function as part of its payroll cost. The mechanism objection — a centrally-set sectoral pay supplement carries the same single-grid information problem as the Klebelsberg pay scale — is real, but it argues for the same decentralisation reform, not for cutting the line.
• Gyermekvédelmi Lakás Alap (Child Protection Housing Fund): 1,100.0 millió Ft — Keep. Funds housing for young people leaving state care — a transition-to-independence support for a protected child-protection cohort. Retained.
• Fejlesztő foglalkoztatás támogatása (developmental employment support): 5,836.1 millió Ft — Keep. Supported employment for people with disabilities whose access to ordinary labour markets is genuinely constrained; a protective support for an identifiable group facing involuntary disadvantage. Retained.
• Mozgáskorlátozottak szerzési és átalakítási támogatása (mobility- impairment vehicle acquisition and adaptation support): 741.0 millió Ft — Keep. Direct support to identified disabled individuals for whom an adapted vehicle is a precondition of participation; a protective transfer to an identifiable group facing involuntary disadvantage. Retained.
• Jelnyelvi tolmácsszolgáltatás és elemi látásrehabilitáció támogatása (sign-language interpretation and basic vision rehabilitation): 1,251.0 millió Ft — Keep. Sign-language interpretation is the access precondition without which deaf citizens cannot exercise rights they formally hold — access to courts, healthcare, public administration. Retained as part of the rights-access function.
• Egyes karitatív szervezetek otthonteremtési célú szociális, segítő-szolgáltató tevékenységének támogatása (housing-creation social activity of certain charitable organisations): 2,700.0 millió Ft — Phase-Out (3 years). This line directs public money to specified charitable organisations for housing and social-service activity. The objection is not to charitable social work — charity is voluntary society at its best — but to the mechanism: a budget line that funds certain named or designated charitable organisations is a subjective allocation by political officeholders deciding which charities receive taxpayer money. A charity funded by the state is no longer purely a voluntary association; it acquires a professional dependence on the line and a structural interest in its preservation. Where the underlying social need is real, it is funded through the per-capita non-state social-services grant above, which is need- linked and not organisation-designated. A three-year phase-out protects organisations that have planned around the funding — declining 900 millió Ft per year — and gives them time to rebuild a voluntary donor base or qualify under the need-linked per-capita channel.
• Karitatív tevékenységet végző szervezetek támogatása (support for organisations carrying out charitable activity): 830.2 millió Ft — Phase-Out (3 years). The same mechanism and the same reasoning as the line above: a discretionary grant to charitable organisations as organisations, rather than need-linked funding of the service. Phased out over three years at roughly 277 millió Ft per year to protect organisations that have planned around the transfer.
• Gyermekvédelmi és szociális ágazati programok (child-protection and social-sector programmes): 681.1 millió Ft — Keep. Methodological and programme support within the retained child- protection function.
• Egyes szociális, gyermekjóléti szolgáltatások fejlesztése, módszertani feladatok (development and methodology of social and child-welfare services): 1,043.7 millió Ft — Keep. Standards and methodology work within the retained social-care function.
• Fogyatékosságügyi szakmai programok támogatása (disability professional programmes): 1,135.5 millió Ft — Keep. Professional programme support within the retained disability-services function.
• Fogyatékossággal élők társadalmi és érdekvédelmi szervezeteinek támogatása (support for disability advocacy and interest organisations): 1,732.2 millió Ft — Phase-Out (3 years). This is a discretionary grant to disability advocacy and interest- representation organisations — distinct from the service-delivery and individual-support lines above, which are retained. Advocacy and interest representation is the activity members of an association can and do fund themselves; a state-funded advocacy body is in the structurally awkward position of being financed by the same state it exists to lobby. The phase-out is three years, declining about 577 millió Ft per year, to give the organisations time to build a voluntary membership-and-donation base. The service-delivery and direct-individual-support disability lines in this block are explicitly retained; only the advocacy-organisation grant is phased out.

Egészségügyi ágazati előirányzatok — health programme block

• Egyházi fenntartású egészségügyi intézmények kiegészítő és működési célú támogatásai (supplementary and operating support to church-maintained healthcare institutions): 4,771.0 millió Ft — Keep. Public funding following the patient to church-maintained hospitals; the plural-provider healthcare model already operating. Retained, and consistent with the recommendation on the Gyógyító-megelőző line.
• Egészségfejlesztési Irodák működésének támogatása (operating support for Health Promotion Offices): 957.6 millió Ft — Nominal Freeze. Health-promotion offices run preventive-health programmes. Prevention has a genuine claim, but the knowledge problem applies to programme-mix decisions — which prevention activity, at what intensity, for which population, is precisely the kind of contested allocation a central programme budget cannot optimise. The line is neither a clear retained protective function nor a clear concentrated rent; a Nominal Freeze holds it flat, letting roughly 210 millió Ft of real value erode over a decade, pending an evidence review of which preventive activities demonstrably work.
• Egészségpolitikai szakmai feladatok és szakmai szervezetek támogatása (health-policy professional tasks and professional organisations): 1,591.0 millió Ft operating + 19.3 millió Ft capital — Phase-Out (3 years). The “szakmai szervezetek” (professional organisations) component is a discretionary grant to health-sector professional bodies — the same mechanism as the Nemzeti Pedagógus Kar line: professional associations that members could fund through dues. The policy-tasks component is small and bound to the ministry’s retained health-policy function. Treated as a single line, the discretionary-grant character predominates; phased out over three years (about 537 millió Ft per year) to let the professional bodies migrate to dues funding.
• Kisforgalmú gyógyszertárak támogatása (support for low-turnover pharmacies): 1,050.0 millió Ft — Phase-Out (3 years). This subsidises pharmacies with low dispensing volume — typically rural pharmacies. The line concentrates benefit on a defined group of pharmacy owners while spreading the cost across all taxpayers, and it props up an outlet network at a scale the underlying demand does not support. A genuine rural-access concern is better met by removing the regulatory restrictions on pharmacy ownership, location and dispensing that limit how rural medicine supply can be organised — the subsidy treats a symptom of an over-regulated market. A three-year phase-out at 350 millió Ft per year protects pharmacy owners who invested on the expectation of the subsidy and pairs the wind-down with the deregulation that addresses rural access directly.
• Nővérszálló fejlesztés és egyéb egészségügyi ágazati fejlesztések (nurses’ hostel development and other health-sector developments): 1,772.8 millió Ft — Keep. Capital development within the retained healthcare function; staff accommodation that supports the retained hospital and ambulance workforce.
• Egészségügyi intézmények fejlesztése és rendkívüli támogatása (healthcare institution development and extraordinary support): 5,510.2 millió Ft operating + 5,510.2 millió Ft capital — Keep. Capital development and contingency support within the retained healthcare function.
• Nemzeti Népegészségügyi Stratégiával összefüggő feladatok (tasks connected to the National Public Health Strategy): 844.2 millió Ft operating + 150.0 millió Ft capital — Nominal Freeze. Strategy- implementation funding; like the Health Promotion Offices, it faces the programme-mix knowledge problem. Held flat pending evidence review.
• Egészségügyi társadalmi, civil és non-profit szervezetek működési támogatása (operating support for health-sector civil and non-profit organisations): 284.1 millió Ft — Immediate Cut. A discretionary operating grant to health-sector civil organisations — concentrated benefit on organised associations, diffuse cost, political allocation. Small (full 284.1 millió Ft saved in year one) but the mechanism is clear. Civil organisations that members value are funded by members.
• Batthyány-Strattmann László Alapítvány a Gyógyításért céljaira (for the purposes of the Batthyány-Strattmann László Foundation for Healing): 47,200.0 millió Ft — Phase-Out (3 years). This is the largest single discretionary line in the health block by a wide margin — 47,200.0 millió Ft routed to a named foundation. When a budget line of this scale takes the form “for the purposes of [named foundation]”, the analytical question is what the line buys and why it is structured as a transfer to a foundation rather than as funding of an identified service through the regular health-purchasing channel. A grant to a named foundation places a large block of public money one remove from the budget scrutiny that line-item health funding receives, and the foundation acquires a professional dependence on the line that becomes a standing lobby for its continuation. To the extent the foundation funds genuine curative-care activity, that activity belongs in the retained healthcare envelope, funded through the patient-following channel where it is visible and comparable. To the extent it does not, it is a subjective allocation by political officeholders. The classification is a three-year phase-out — declining about 15,733 millió Ft per year — during which any genuine clinical activity the foundation delivers is migrated into the regular health-purchasing channel and any non-clinical activity is wound down. Three years protects in-flight clinical commitments and patients in care; the endpoint is that public healthcare money flows through scrutable health-purchasing channels rather than through a foundation grant. A more precise horizon would require the foundation’s funding agreement and activity accounts, which are not in the budget table; the classification is flagged for primary-source review of those documents.

Megváltozott munkaképességű munkavállalók foglalkoztatásának támogatása (support for the employment of workers with reduced working capacity)

• Current allocation: 74,943.6 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: This line subsidises the employment of workers whose capacity to work is medically reduced. The protected group is identifiable individuals facing an involuntary disadvantage — reduced working capacity that genuinely constrains their access to ordinary labour markets. Supporting their attachment to work, rather than to a passive transfer, is consistent with the framework: it funds participation rather than withdrawal. The line is retained. The design question — whether the subsidy is best paid to employers, to sheltered workshops, or as a portable entitlement following the worker — is a mechanism-improvement question within a retained function, and the portable-entitlement form would carry better information properties; but that is refinement, not reclassification.
• Transition mechanism: None.
• Affected groups: None displaced.

Gazdasági társaságok által ellátott feladatok támogatása (support for tasks performed by commercial companies)

• Current allocation: 2,386.8 millió Ft
• Classification: Phase-Out (3 years)
• Rationale: This line funds tasks contracted out to state-linked commercial companies. The structural problem is the soft budget constraint: a commercial company funded by a recurring budget-line transfer rather than by revenue it earns in competitive supply faces no market test of whether the task is performed at a competitive cost, or whether it should be performed at all. The task itself, if genuinely needed, should be procured through open competitive tender where the price is disciplined by rival bids; the company, if viable, should win that tender on its merits. A three-year phase-out (about 796 millió Ft per year) replaces the block transfer with competitive procurement of whatever specified task is genuinely required, protecting the company’s in-flight commitments and employees during the transition.
• Transition mechanism: Replace the recurring transfer with open competitive tender for the specified tasks; three-year glide.
• Affected groups: The state-linked company and its employees; the company may re-win the work on competitive terms, in which case the change is in funding discipline, not in who does the work.

Peres ügyek (litigation cases)

• Current allocation: 1,066.6 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: This line funds the ministry’s litigation costs — judgments, settlements and legal costs arising from cases to which the ministry is party. It is a non-discretionary obligation: the state must honour judgments against it, and meeting court judgments is itself a rule-of-law function. The line cannot be cut without abrogating obligations. Keep.
• Transition mechanism: None.
• Affected groups: None displaced.

Fejezeti kezelésű előirányzatok — chapter-managed programme lines

• Ágazati informatikai feladatok finanszírozása (financing of sectoral IT tasks): 8,765.3 millió Ft — Keep. IT operating infrastructure for the ministry’s retained functions — policing, prison, disaster-management and administrative systems. Retained at the scale the retained mandate requires; an operating- efficiency review subject like any large IT line.
• Önkormányzati tűzoltóságok normatív támogatása (normative support for municipal fire brigades): 4,776.7 millió Ft — Keep. This funds municipal and volunteer fire brigades, which extend fire-and-rescue coverage — a protective response to irreversible involuntary harm — into areas the professional service does not reach directly. It is a normative (formula-based, not discretionary) transfer supporting a retained protective function. Keep.
• Hivatásos életpályával összefüggő kiadások — teljesítményjuttatás (performance pay for the professional uniformed career): 12,900.3 millió Ft — Keep. Performance-linked pay for the uniformed personnel of the retained internal-security services. It travels with the police, prison and disaster-management functions as part of their personnel cost. Keep.
• Hivatásos állomány egészségügyi alkalmatlanná válásával kapcsolatos életjáradéka (life annuity for uniformed personnel becoming medically unfit for service): 450.2 millió Ft — Keep. This honours an accrued occupational entitlement of uniformed officers injured or made unfit in service — a contractual and reliance-based commitment to identifiable individuals. Within the framework, accrued individual entitlements of good-faith reliers are protected. Keep.
• Rendvédelmi szervek árvái kiegészítő támogatása (supplementary support for orphans of law-enforcement personnel): 34.8 millió Ft — Keep. A small reliance-based support for the orphaned children of officers who died in service; an accrued occupational commitment. Keep.
• A Nemzeti Bűnmegelőzési Stratégia feladatrendszerének támogatása (support for the National Crime Prevention Strategy task system): 915.1 millió Ft — Nominal Freeze. Crime prevention has a genuine claim adjacent to the retained policing function, but the programme-mix knowledge problem applies — which prevention activity works, at what intensity, is a contested allocation a central strategy budget cannot optimise. Held flat pending an evidence review of which crime-prevention activities demonstrably reduce offending.
• Tömeges bevándorlás kezeléséhez kapcsolódó kiadások (expenditure related to managing mass immigration): 15,000.0 millió Ft — Nominal Freeze. This funds border-management and reception capacity connected to migration pressure. Border control is a retained state function; the scale of this contingency line, however, is set by an external factor — the level of migration pressure in the budget year — that the budget table cannot forecast. A Nominal Freeze holds the line at its current nominal level rather than indexing it upward, treating it as a bounded contingency whose real value should not automatically grow; if pressure falls the line should fall with it, and a freeze is the conservative interim treatment pending that demand-linked review.
• A terrorellenes intézkedések megvalósításához kapcsolódó kiadások (expenditure related to implementing counter-terrorism measures): 500.0 millió Ft — Keep. Implementation funding for the retained counter-terrorism function. Keep.
• Drogmentes Magyarország Program (Drug-Free Hungary Programme): 2,000.0 millió Ft — Nominal Freeze. A drug-policy programme. The programme-mix knowledge problem applies acutely here: which drug-policy interventions reduce harm is one of the most empirically contested questions in public policy, and a central programme budget cannot resolve it by allocation. The line is not a clear retained protective function and not a concentrated rent; a Nominal Freeze holds it flat, eroding roughly 440 millió Ft of real value over a decade, pending an evidence review of which components demonstrably work.
• Országos Polgárőr Szövetség (National Civil Guard Association): 1,668.0 millió Ft — Phase-Out (3 years). The Polgárőrség is a voluntary citizen civil-guard movement. The voluntary, self- organising character of citizen guarding is genuine voluntary society; the objection is to financing it from general taxation, which converts a voluntary association into a state-funded body and gives its national federation a professional dependence on the budget line. A three-year phase-out (556 millió Ft per year) protects the federation’s planned commitments while it rebuilds a voluntary-funding base; the volunteers’ activity does not depend on the federation’s state grant.

Társadalmi felzárkózást segítő programok — social-inclusion and Roma-integration programmes

This block funds Roma-integration and social-inclusion programmes. The classifications below distinguish between programmes that fund identifiable individuals’ access to education and opportunity (retained, on the rights-access logic that runs through the disability lines) and programmes that fund organisations or discretionary activity (phased out, on the discretionary-allocation logic that runs through the charitable-organisation lines).

• Útravaló ösztöndíj program (Útravaló scholarship programme): 2,528.8 millió Ft — Keep. A scholarship programme supporting disadvantaged pupils through education. It funds identifiable individuals’ access to schooling and opportunity — the same rights-access logic that retains the disability-access lines. Keep.
• Tanoda program (after-school study programme): 3,628.3 millió Ft — Keep. Supplementary after-school education for disadvantaged children; funds children’s access to learning support. Retained on the rights-access logic; the delivery question (which providers, with what oversight) is a refinement, not a reclassification.
• Biztos Kezdet Gyerekházak (Sure Start Children’s Houses): 2,136.6 millió Ft — Keep. Early-childhood support for children in disadvantaged families; an identifiable-child, early- intervention function adjacent to child protection. Keep.
• Roma Szakkollégiumi Hálózat (Roma Advanced College Network): 696.0 millió Ft — Keep. A higher-education college network supporting disadvantaged Roma students; funds identifiable individuals’ access to higher education. Keep.
• Roma ösztöndíj programok (Roma scholarship programmes): 27.0 millió Ft — Keep. A small scholarship line; funds individuals’ education access. Keep.
• Esélyteremtő programok támogatása (support for opportunity- creation programmes): 798.2 millió Ft — Nominal Freeze. A general opportunity-programme line whose programme mix faces the knowledge problem — it is less individual-linked than the scholarship lines and less organisation-linked than the federation grants. Held flat pending an evidence review of which components work.
• Társadalmi felzárkózást szolgáló gazdasági társaságok által ellátott feladatok támogatása (support for inclusion tasks performed by commercial companies): 500.0 millió Ft — Phase-Out (3 years). The same soft-budget-constraint mechanism as the Gazdasági társaságok line above: a recurring transfer to a state-linked company rather than competitive procurement of a specified task. Three-year phase-out (about 167 millió Ft per year), replacing the transfer with open tender.
• Magyarországi Romák Országos Önkormányzata működési és média támogatása (operating and media support for the National Roma Self-Government): 483.2 millió Ft — Keep. Hungary’s national- minority self-government system is part of the constitutional architecture for minority representation; the operating support for the minority self-government’s core function is retained as constitutional-precondition funding, on the same logic that retains the legislature itself. The “media támogatás” component warrants the standing caution that minority-media funding can expose editorial content to whichever bloc controls the funding — but the core self-government operating function is retained.
• Magyarországi Romák Országos Önkormányzata által fenntartott intézmények támogatása (support for institutions maintained by the National Roma Self-Government): 196.2 millió Ft — Keep. Operating support for institutions under the minority self-government; retained with the self-government function. Small line.
• Felzárkózáspolitikai és roma nemzetiségi feladatok támogatása (support for inclusion-policy and Roma nationality tasks): 994.0 millió Ft operating + 120.0 millió Ft capital — Nominal Freeze. A general inclusion-policy line; programme-mix knowledge problem applies. Held flat pending evidence review.

Központi kezelésű előirányzatok — centrally-managed programme lines

• Roma települési és területi nemzetiségi önkormányzatok támogatása (support for local and regional Roma nationality self-governments): 1,928.9 millió Ft — Keep. Operating support for the local tier of the constitutional minority self-government system; retained on the same constitutional-precondition logic as the national-level line above.
• Európai Uniós és nemzetközi projektek/programok megvalósításához kapcsolódó kiadások (expenditure for implementing EU and international projects/programmes): 473.0 millió Ft operating + 677.0 millió Ft capital, 150.0 millió Ft revenue — Keep. Co- financing of contracted EU and international projects; bounded by contractual project commitments. Keep on contractual grounds; the underlying projects’ merits are a separate question outside the budget-line classification.
• Belügyi Alapok 2021-2027 (Internal Security Funds 2021-2027): 7,310.0 millió Ft operating + 13,140.0 millió Ft revenue — Keep. This line operates the EU Internal Security Fund and related programmes for the 2021-2027 cycle; it is matched by 13,140.0 millió Ft of EU-transfer revenue, so a substantial part of the expenditure is EU-funded pass-through under a multi-year framework agreement. It is bounded — the 2021-2027 designation makes it a closing programme cycle — and contractually committed. Keep on contractual and closing-programme grounds.
• Gyógyszertári tulajdoni hányad állami elővásárlása és értékesítése (state pre-emption and sale of pharmacy ownership shares): 250.0 millió Ft expenditure, 1.0 millió Ft revenue — Phase-Out (3 years). This line funds the state’s exercise of pre-emption rights over pharmacy ownership shares — the state buying into pharmacy ownership. State acquisition of equity in retail pharmacies is the opposite of the deregulation the low-turnover-pharmacy line above calls for: it deepens state involvement in a market that an Austrian reading would open to competitive ownership. The function is wound down over three years (about 83 millió Ft per year) to allow any in-flight pre-emption transactions to complete; the steady-state position is that the state does not acquire pharmacy equity.

Revenue Items

The chapter records 1,534,332.4 millió Ft of total revenue. The budget table presents revenue in the működési bevétel and felhalmozási bevétel columns alongside the corresponding expenditure lines, and the chapter footer gives the consolidated figure. The revenue is overwhelmingly operating revenue of the institutions rather than tax revenue — this chapter does not contain the central government’s tax structure (that sits in Chapter XLII).

• Name: Intézményi működési bevételek (institutional operating revenue — fees, charges and service receipts of the ministry’s institutions). Type: Fee / Charge. Notes: The bulk of the chapter’s recorded revenue is the operating receipts of the institutions analysed above — hospital service receipts, administrative fees, charges for services. The largest institutional revenue figures attach to the healthcare and education institutions. This revenue is not a tax; it is receipts earned against services delivered. Under the structural reforms recommended above, this revenue does not disappear — it follows the function: if hospital operation migrates toward plural providers, the corresponding service receipts migrate with the operation rather than being lost to the budget. Revenue tied specifically to functions classified for phase-out (a small share) would fall away with those functions.

• Name: Európai uniós transzferek (EU transfers). Type: EU transfer. Notes: A material part of the revenue is EU-transfer income matching EU-co-financed expenditure — most visibly the 13,140.0 millió Ft against the Belügyi Alapok 2021-2027 line and the 150.0 millió Ft against the EU-projects line. This revenue is pass-through: it arrives to fund specific co-financed programmes and is not available as general revenue.

• Name: Felhalmozási bevételek (capital revenue). Type: Other. Notes: The chapter records capital revenue against several institutions and programmes — asset sales, capital transfers, and the 5,510.2 millió Ft capital revenue against the healthcare-institution-development line. These are one-off or programme-linked rather than recurring general revenue.

No major national tax item (SZJA, ÁFA, társasági adó, jövedéki adó) appears in this chapter; the chapter’s revenue is institutional operating revenue, EU transfers and capital receipts. Accordingly no tax-rate, incidence or distortion-ranking analysis applies to this chapter — that analysis belongs to the chapters that carry the central tax structure.

Chapter Summary

Classification	Count	Total (millió Ft)
Immediate Cut	3	497.4
Phase-Out	10	59,927.5
Nominal Freeze	8	61,174.8
Keep	58	5,058,935.1
Total	79	5,180,534.8

Revenue	Total (millió Ft)
Total chapter revenue	1,534,332.4

Note on totals: the Keep line includes the large institutional envelopes (police, prisons, the state hospital network, the Klebelsberg teacher payroll, the per-pupil non-state school grant, the per-capita non-state social-care grant) and the chapter’s disability, child-protection, scholarship and constitutional minority-self-government lines. The Keep total also includes one residual line item of 8,963.8 millió Ft (roughly 0.17% of the chapter) — capital-column allocations on the chapter’s institutions and programmes that are not separately itemised in the analysis above. It is classified Keep because it is overwhelmingly capital investment within the chapter’s retained institutional functions, and carrying it as an explicit line keeps the line-item total reconciled exactly to the chapter footer (5,180,534.8). The classification counts are the 79 line items carried in the companion JSON data file; the analysis prose above groups some related programme lines into thematic blocks for readability, but the JSON is the authoritative line-item record. The kiemelt- előirányzat sub-lines (Személyi juttatások, Dologi kiadások etc.) are components of those institution-level units, not separately classified.

Key Observations

• Four policy domains under one ministry heading. Chapter XIV funds internal security, the state school system, the state hospital network, and the state social-care system from a single ministry chapter. The administrative consolidation is not an analytical unit: the police line and the teacher-payroll line answer to different questions and receive different classifications. The bulk of the chapter — by envelope — is education and healthcare delivery, not internal security.

• The internal-security core is a clean Keep. Policing, the prison estate, counter-terrorism, the protective service, disaster management and aliens policing — roughly 840 milliárd Ft together — are rights-protection functions and protective responses to irreversible involuntary harm. They are retained on principle, not as residuals. Keep does not preclude procurement and operating- efficiency review of their large Dologi kiadások lines.

• The same chapter funds both delivery models for the same service. State education is funded both through direct state operation (the Klebelsberg Központ, ≈1,185 milliárd Ft of teacher payroll administered from one central employer) and through per-pupil grants to non-state schools (620,113.7 millió Ft). State social care is funded both through directly-operated institutions (≈184 milliárd Ft) and through a per-capita grant to non-state providers (385,756.1 millió Ft). The non-state model is not hypothetical — it operates at scale, in Hungary, under the same curriculum and care standards. This removes the “who would do it instead” objection: the alternative provider is on the next line of the same table.

• The single-employer model destroys information. The Klebelsberg Központ sets and administers roughly 972 milliárd Ft of teacher pay from one national point. A national single-employer cannot read which schools face the most acute shortages or what staffing mix a particular school needs, because the signals that would carry that information — school-level hiring decisions competing for teachers at school-level terms — are replaced by a uniform grid. Hungary’s simultaneous reported teacher shortages and centrally-fixed pay scale are the observable result.¹ The reform is not to defund schooling; it is to move employment to the school or maintainer level with public funding following the pupil, a model already running inside Hungary in church schools and abroad in Sweden’s friskolor and the Netherlands’ Article 23 system.

• Discretionary grants to organisations are the recurring small- print pattern. Across the chapter, a consistent class of line funds organisations — professional chambers, advocacy bodies, designated charities, civil associations, the civil-guard federation — from general taxation rather than from members’ dues or voluntary donation. Individually small; collectively a clear mechanism. A professional association or advocacy body that its members value is funded by those members; one that requires a taxpayer subsidy is one whose demand has not been demonstrated, and one that acquires a structural lobby for its own line. Service delivery to identifiable individuals — scholarships, disability access, child protection — is retained throughout; it is the grant to the organisation as organisation that is phased out.

• One large discretionary line stands out. The Batthyány-Strattmann László Alapítvány line — 47,200.0 millió Ft routed to a named foundation — is the chapter’s largest discretionary allocation by a wide margin. Public healthcare money of this scale belongs in the scrutable patient-following health- purchasing channel, where it is visible and comparable, rather than one remove away as a foundation grant. The classification is a phased migration of any genuine clinical activity into the regular channel; the precise horizon should be set against the foundation’s funding agreement and activity accounts, which are not in the budget table.

• Fiscal effect is modest relative to the envelope. The Immediate Cut and Phase-Out classifications together free roughly 60.4 milliárd Ft at steady state, against a 5,180.5 milliárd Ft chapter — about 1.2%. This is the correct result and not a disappointing one: most of Chapter XIV funds genuine rights- protection, genuine protective response to involuntary harm, and genuine publicly-funded education, healthcare and child protection. The chapter’s larger prize is not a cut but a structural reform — moving education and healthcare delivery from single-operator state models toward plural-provider, funding- follows-the-person models — which changes who delivers and how pay and capacity are set, not how much the state spends. That reform improves the information properties of roughly 2.75 ezer milliárd Ft of education and healthcare spending without removing the funding; its gain is measured in service quality and allocation, not in headline savings.

Sources

Footnotes

1. Hungarian teacher-supply pressures and pay-scale constraints. OECD. Education at a Glance 2023: Hungary Country Note. OECD Publishing. 2023. https://www.oecd.org/education/education-at-a- glance/. Reports teacher shortages by subject and region; KSH (KIR-STAT) education statistics document centrally-fixed pay-scale structure. https://kir.hu/ ↩ ↩²

2. Hayek, F.A. The Use of Knowledge in Society. American Economic Review. 1945. Vol. 35, No. 4: 519–530. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1809376 ↩

3. Hungarian church-maintained schools — share of public education. Statement of Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjén, November 2024; KSH (KIR-STAT) Hungarian education statistics; OECD Education at a Glance Hungary country profile. Church schools administer approximately 18% of Hungarian public-education institutions, with roughly 16% of primary pupils and over 25% of secondary students in church-maintained schools. ↩

4. Sweden — friskolor universal voucher. Skolverket (Swedish National Agency for Education) statistics; Eurydice. Independent (friskola) schools enrol approximately 15% of compulsory-school pupils (2023/24); the universal per-pupil voucher has operated continuously for over thirty years. ↩

5. Netherlands — Article 23 publicly-funded non-state schools. CBS (Statistics Netherlands); Inspectie van het Onderwijs. Roughly two-thirds of Dutch pupils attend publicly-funded non-state (bijzondere) schools; the system has operated under the Article 23 constitutional guarantee for over a century. ↩

6. Skolinspektionen (Swedish Schools Inspectorate) — official mandate and structure: https://www.skolinspektionen.se/. Inspectie van het Onderwijs (Dutch Education Inspectorate) — official mandate and structure: https://www.onderwijsinspectie.nl/ ↩

7. Hungary — parallel private medical sector and out-of-pocket health spending. GKI; OECD Health Statistics; KSH (Központi Statisztikai Hivatal) healthcare-spending data. Out-of-pocket payments are approximately 27% of total Hungarian health expenditure (2024), among the highest shares in the OECD; voluntary health insurance adds a further few percentage points. ↩