Prime Minister's Cabinet Office

The Special Service for National Security is Hungary's largest single institutional budget in this chapter, providing technical intelligence and expert support to authorised agencies across counterterrorism, justice, and constitutional protection mandates. These are core state functions under any serious account of government's legitimate role. The large goods-and-services line reflects significant operational and technical infrastructure costs. Keep at current levels; parliamentary oversight strengthening is the institutional reform agenda.

The government communications envelope covers advertising campaigns and 'national consultation' mass mailings. In 2022, 16.6 billion HUF of state advertising went to outlets aligned with the governing majority — Mérték Média Monitor has characterised this pattern as meeting EU prohibited state-aid criteria. The consultation mechanism's democratic-input rationale cannot justify saturation-scale mailing at 3–7 billion HUF per round for a mechanism reaching 18–19% of eligible voters. The mechanism benefits the controlling ministry directly; dispersed taxpayer costs generate no organised resistance. Year-one saving: 39,470 millió Ft.

State subsidies for hosting international sports competitions transfer rents to global governing bodies and commercial organisers. The economic literature on sports-event hosting — reviewed in Econ Journal Watch — consistently finds that promised multiplier effects do not materialise and that public subsidies benefit organisers rather than host economies. Hungary's 38,537 millió Ft sports-events envelope costs each SZJA payer roughly 8,571 Ft per year. Sports governing bodies should fund event infrastructure from commercial revenues; no new public hosting commitments should be made.

Civil-society support is a legitimate state function in principle — ordoliberal theory places real value on intermediate institutions as the structural preconditions of market order. The concern is distributional: the allocation formula concentrates grants toward organisations aligned with the administering ministry's political priorities, reproducing the concentrated-benefits problem of the communications envelope in civil society form. A three-year transition to a competitive, criteria-transparent grant system administered by an independent arm's-length body — modelled on Sweden's Allmänna arvsfonden — addresses the governance problem without eliminating the function.

The Foreign Intelligence Service is Hungary's civilian foreign intelligence agency, gathering and analysing foreign-origin national security intelligence for government decision-makers. Foreign intelligence is a constitutionally required function for a state operating in a contested geopolitical environment; NATO membership creates additional alliance-intelligence obligations. The near-equal goods-and-services and personnel lines indicate significant operational overhead. Keep at current levels; parliamentary oversight strengthening is the structural reform.

Counterintelligence and domestic security services are a constitutionally required core state function for a NATO member facing documented foreign-intelligence activity. The Constitution Protection Office carries a mandate that includes counterintelligence, anti-corruption intelligence, and economic security work. The appropriate reform is strengthened parliamentary intelligence oversight — equivalent to Germany's PKGr — not budgetary reduction. Keep at current levels while pursuing the institutional accountability improvement.

State ceremonial events — national day observances, official state receptions, formal commemorations — have a defensible role in maintaining shared civic symbols. At 26,353 millió Ft this is a significant production budget, not a modest ceremonial allocation. The public-choice pattern is familiar: state events provide a platform for visible association between governing incumbents and national symbols, generating political visibility externalities concentrated on the controlling ministry while costs are borne by all taxpayers. Phase down over three years to approximately one-third the current level, sufficient for core national-day and protocol functions.

Government policy programmes at 16,144 millió Ft cover cross-government research, impact analysis, and coordination activities managed at the chapter level. Without a published sub-breakdown, individual classification is not possible. A nominal freeze prevents expansion while the opacity persists; a future audit should disaggregate this envelope and subject each sub-programme to the core-state-function test. The direction — less state policy capacity, more contracted-in competitive research — is clear, but the detailed reform requires the disclosure this line currently withholds.

The Cabinet Office's core coordination, protocol, and policy-support functions are constitutionally necessary — the executive cannot function without administrative capacity. Personnel costs (10,499 millió Ft) and employer contributions (1,524 millió Ft) form a reasonable baseline; the goods and services line (1,759 millió Ft) in a communications-heavy office warrants periodic State Audit Office scrutiny. A nominal freeze at 2026 levels provides natural discipline through real-terms erosion without disrupting core coordination functions.

'Priority social relations' (Kiemelt társadalmi kapcsolatok) carries no programmatic content visible in the budget document. At 11,000 millió Ft this is not a rounding item. The absence of a defined beneficiary category, measurable output, or legislative mandate creates exactly the conditions under which public-choice theory predicts rents are extracted: no observable allocation criterion means no external benchmark against which misallocation can be demonstrated. Immediate cut unless a full sub-allocation disclosure is provided; the 11,000 millió Ft costs each SZJA payer roughly 2,445 Ft per year.

The National Information Centre carries the ETIAS passenger-information operations mandate — a binding EU obligation — alongside government decision support and open-source intelligence analysis functions. The ETIAS element cannot be eliminated without EU treaty breach. The analytical support functions are legitimately governmental. An efficiency review at the five-year mark (2026) is appropriate given the institution's 2022 establishment date; keep at current levels pending that review.

Government Decree 726/2020 requires provision of a free data deletion application to consumers selling storage devices — a legitimate consumer-protection function. At 5,000 millió Ft (approximately 12.5 million EUR) the operating cost is extraordinarily high for the technical scope of issuing secure-erasure codes. Either the allocation includes significant capital investment in certification infrastructure, or it reflects cost overruns in poorly tendered IT contracts. An independent technical and cost audit precedes a three-year phase-down to a competitively tendered service.

The Defence Administration Office, established in November 2022, coordinates defence and security administration regulatory reform — a regulatory coordination function that consolidates previously fragmented administrative tasks. At 3,336 millió Ft the allocation is modest relative to other entities in this chapter. Keep at current levels; an efficiency review at the five-year mark (2027) should assess whether consolidation with existing defence and security regulatory functions would reduce overhead.

A dedicated government communications agency with its own institutional budget separate from the larger communications envelope has no classical-liberal justification. Core state functions require modest press capacity; they do not require a standalone agency. Átlátszó documented that 16.6 billion HUF of 2022 public-service advertising went to politically aligned outlets. Eliminating the NKA as an institution reduces the structural capacity for concentrated, politically directed media placement. Year-one saving: 1,633 millió Ft.

The Government Control Office performs a legitimate internal audit function — examining the lawful, effective, and efficient use of public funds with authority to initiate criminal proceedings. The institutional-design concern is that KEHI's president is appointed and dismissed by the Prime Minister, auditing the executive while reporting to it. Independent audit requires separation from the audited body. At 1,222 millió Ft a nominal freeze with a five-year review of the KEHI/ÁSZ boundary is the practical first step toward the institutional reform.

Resource grants to state-owned companies under the Cabinet Office's ownership authority — without published recipient list or commercial rationale — default to the classical-liberal presumption that state-owned enterprises should be capitalised from commercial revenues or privatised. A three-year phase-out follows a year-one disclosure of the full company list and the rationale for state ownership. Viable companies transfer to an independent state-property management entity; non-viable ones wind down.