National Assembly

At 141,268.4 millió Ft — 40.6% of total chapter expenditure — the state contribution to public broadcasting has grown more than fivefold since 2010. Annual budget dependence makes editorial independence structurally difficult regardless of governance intentions: the appropriations authority also sets the editorial rules. Germany's KEF commission and the BBC licence fee demonstrate that public broadcasting can be financed through instruments decoupled from parliamentary appropriation. The 5-year phase-out replaces the budget-line with an independent household levy, preserving a public broadcasting function while removing the structural conflict.

Parliamentary administration — staffing the committee system, legal drafting, and official records — is the precondition for any functioning rule of law. Article 1 of Hungary's Fundamental Law mandates the National Assembly; the Office that supports it is the constitutional minimum. Buchanan's distinction between the protective state and the productive state places legislative administration unambiguously in the former category. There is no private alternative; no reduction is proposed.

Electoral administration is the protective state's defining function, and 2026 is a parliamentary election year. The 33,122.8 millió Ft is dominated by the one-time cost of the general election itself — 22,938.0 millió Ft that will not recur in 2027. The underlying structural base (NVI administration plus electoral system) is 9,273.9 millió Ft annually. Holding competitive elections is a constitutional obligation that cannot be reduced without impairing the democratic mechanism. The post-election structural envelope is the appropriate benchmark for future budgets; the 2026 spike is correctly sequenced.

The Parliament building is a listed heritage structure; genuine maintenance of a functional legislative seat is constitutionally justified. The case for nominal freeze rather than continued growth is that the Steindl programme has expanded into prestige urban development — visitor centres, underground car parks, square redesign — without published independent value-for-money assessments. Holding the capital envelope at 21,369.5 millió Ft in nominal terms, paired with a value-for-money review of each project package before commitment, distinguishes necessary heritage preservation from prestige capital spending.

The SZTFH covers an unusually broad regulatory scope: gambling, tobacco licensing, judicial enforcement, insolvency, mining, and cryptoassets. Gambling regulation corrects a genuine market failure in addiction-prone activities; judicial enforcement supervision is a rule-of-law function; mining oversight protects third-party property rights. The 14,327.2 millió Ft in spending is partially offset by 6,254.0 millió Ft in regulatory fee revenue. The analytical concern is governance coherence across jurisdictions, not the regulatory function itself. A scope review in 2027 is warranted; no immediate reduction is proposed.

MEKH is the utility regulator for electricity, gas, and district heating — and it is fully self-financing: its 12,917.0 millió Ft in regulatory fee revenue exactly covers its 12,917.0 millió Ft in spending. There is no net public subsidy. The ordoliberal tradition specifically supports rules-based independent regulation of natural-monopoly networks as an alternative to state ownership; MEKH performs precisely this function. A fully self-financing regulator funded by the regulated sector, not the general taxpayer, is the user-charge model working as intended. Kept.

Goods and services spending covers the operational costs of running the legislature — utilities, IT, translation, legal publications, and committee materials. The 12,678.6 millió Ft is consistent with an administrative-heavy institution where payroll represents 84% of operating expenditure and goods and services the remaining 16%. This is the machinery of a functioning parliament, not discretionary comfort. No reduction is proposed.

Nuclear safety regulation is a binding obligation under both Hungarian law and IAEA framework agreements. The consequences of under-regulated nuclear activity are catastrophic and irreversible; there is no credible private-sector substitute for the licensing and inspection function. OAH's own revenue from operator licence fees (3,180.3 millió Ft) covers 43% of its 7,474.3 millió Ft total spending. Hungary's Paks II construction project places additional inspection demands on OAH through the late 2020s; maintaining adequate technical capacity is a precondition for safe construction oversight. Kept.

These are the statutory employer social contributions legally tied to the personnel allocation in I-E1. They are not a discretionary spending choice: Hungarian labour law mandates the contribution rate as a percentage of gross wages. Keeping them follows automatically from the Keep classification on parliamentary personnel. Singling them out for reduction would require either illegal non-payment or a statutory wage cut neither proposed nor warranted.

Physical security of the Parliament building and its surroundings is a core protective-state function with no feasible private equivalent. The Parliamentary Guard provides the necessary perimeter for parliamentary proceedings; its 6,246.3 millió Ft covers approximately 500–600 officers. There is no contested public-choice interest here: the service benefits all legislators equally and cannot be captured by any faction. Periodic benchmarking against comparable small EU legislatures is a reasonable accountability instrument, but no reduction is warranted.

Parliamentary elections are scheduled for 2026. This envelope covers the one-time transition costs of a new legislature: office fit-out for incoming MPs, IT systems, severance for departing staff. These are genuine constitutional expenditures tied to the democratic cycle. Buchanan's public-choice framework regards competitive elections and the associated turnover costs as core to the protective state's function; impairing this mechanism would be inconsistent with the constitutional economics framework. No reduction is proposed; post-election audit of actual versus appropriated spend is standard practice.

State reimbursement of campaign costs follows the same structural logic as direct party grants: it substitutes budget income for voluntary private fundraising and insulates established formations from competitive pressure to maintain donor networks. Ireland and the UK demonstrate that electoral integrity does not require campaign reimbursement — spending caps with real-time disclosure are the appropriate instrument. The 3-year phase-out, rather than immediate elimination, reflects that parties entered 2026 commitments in good faith anticipating reimbursement. The 4,000.0 millió Ft costs each SZJA payer roughly 889 Ft per year.

Effective procurement oversight is a precondition for the ordoliberal rule that public funds are spent on competitive terms. Public-choice theory identifies procurement as a primary rent-seeking channel; an adequately funded authority reduces the equilibrium level of waste and capture. The Közbeszerzési Hatóság recovers 2,194.0 millió Ft of its costs through fees charged on above-threshold procedures, covering roughly 55% of its operating budget. The net public subsidy of approximately 1,373.8 millió Ft is a sound investment if the authority's enforcement rate delivers proportionate savings. Kept.

Party foundations are private entities in civil law with no direct democratic accountability to voters, yet they receive 3,230.4 millió Ft through a vote-share formula that concentrates nearly half the envelope in a single formation-linked foundation. Unlike direct party grants, foundations carry no constitutional rationale connected to the democratic process. German Politische Stiftungen face Bundesrechnungshof audit with published output metrics; Hungarian equivalents do not. The 3,230.4 millió Ft costs each SZJA payer approximately 718 Ft per year. Genuine public-benefit research should compete through open ministry programmes.

State financing of political parties, distributed by vote-share formula, creates a public-choice loop in which formations that hold parliamentary majorities influence the formula parameters that determine their own funding. The mechanism substitutes state income for voluntary private support, reducing competitive pressure on established parties to maintain broad donor bases. The 5-year phase-out preserves continuity of party operations while transferring funding responsibility to voluntary supporters. The 2,548.8 millió Ft costs each Hungarian SZJA payer roughly 566 Ft per year. When Slovakia reformed its political finance rules, democratic competition continued.

EU member states carry a binding obligation under Article 51 GDPR to maintain an independent data protection supervisory authority. NAIH enforces individuals' informational property rights against both state and private actors — a classical-liberal function grounded in the principle that personal data belongs to the person it concerns. The 2,414.5 millió Ft covers an authority of approximately 100–150 FTE carrying out a mandatory EU law function. There is no legal mechanism to reduce this while remaining an EU member state in good standing. Kept as a rule-of-law constitutional minimum.

Capital investment in IT systems, furniture, and equipment for the National Assembly keeps the legislature functional as a working institution. The 2,338.7 millió Ft covers infrastructure that supports committee work, voting systems, and digital record-keeping — services without which the protective state's core rule-making function cannot operate. Investment in digital infrastructure in particular can reduce long-run operating costs. Kept as constitutionally justified capital expenditure.

The ÁSZTL preserves the archives of Hungary's communist-era state security apparatus and gives citizens access to their own files — a function grounded in historical justice and individual informational rights, with direct parallels in Germany's BStU and Poland's IPN. The case for nominal freeze rather than growth is that digitisation reduces the marginal cost of access: an archive moving to on-demand digital delivery does not require the same physical reading-room infrastructure indefinitely. Holding the 2,147.8 millió Ft flat in nominal terms is the appropriate discipline.

The Parliament Office renovation allocation of 1,755.7 millió Ft covers maintenance of the buildings and facilities used for the legislative function itself — distinct from the prestige Steindl programme (I-E14). Keeping functional working space in repair is a basic requirement for any institution. The Fundamental Law's mandate of a National Assembly implicitly requires a habitable legislative building. Routine renovation of the working estate is a justified constitutional cost.

The NEB's core archival function — preserving communist-era state security records and supporting citizens' right to know — has genuine public-good characteristics. The institution's current scope, however, extends beyond archival custody into political commemoration mandates that carry mission-creep risk. The phase-out proposal transfers the archive collection to the Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár over five years, retaining the historical-justice function at an estimated 300–400 millió Ft per year — a saving of approximately 1,200 millió Ft annually once complete. A five-year transition avoids abrupt displacement of the approximately 100–130 FTE currently employed.

This modest line covers statutory cash entitlements owed to staff and beneficiaries of the Parliament Office — a category that includes legally mandated allowances inseparable from the employment regime governing parliamentary civil servants. At 373.2 millió Ft it is less than 0.5% of the Parliament Office's total operating cost. The obligation is statutory; elimination would require legislative amendment unconnected to fiscal discipline. Kept as constitutionally bound expenditure.

Three former heads of state each receive 73.0 millió Ft to distribute as personal charitable donations from public funds — without programmatic criteria, independent selection, or auditable beneficiary lists. Former presidents already receive lifetime pensions under statute; this additional instrument has no constitutional basis and no equivalent in comparable EU member states. It embeds named-individual grant discretion into the budget structure without the neutral criteria that apply to competitive grant programmes. The 219.0 millió Ft costs each SZJA payer approximately 49 Ft per year. Elimination in 2027 is warranted.

This line authorises the Speaker to make personal charitable donations from public funds, with recipients chosen at the officeholder's discretion. That mechanism concentrates grant-making power in a single individual without programmatic criteria or independent assessment — a textbook public-choice accountability failure. Charitable purposes that serve genuine public interest should compete for funding through open grant programmes. The 100.0 millió Ft costs each Hungarian SZJA payer roughly 22 Ft per year. The function lacks constitutional necessity; elimination in 2027 is the appropriate outcome.

This is a direct state grant to a named foundation administered through the parliamentary chapter, with no competitive process and no independent accountability mechanism. Diaspora representation is a legitimate policy goal; channelling its funding through a single designated foundation without annual performance reporting is not appropriate. Comparable German and Slovak minority-support programmes operate through dedicated ministry budget lines with published outputs. The 80.0 millió Ft costs each SZJA payer approximately 18 Ft per year. Any legitimate programme should reapply through the Foreign Affairs chapter.

At 60.0 millió Ft, this residual operating envelope covers miscellaneous costs that fall outside the main personnel, goods, and transfer categories — administrative overheads inherent to running a constitutional institution. The amount is immaterial relative to chapter expenditure. Attempting to cut it would generate administrative friction exceeding any fiscal gain. Kept as a necessary operational residual of the parliamentary function.