A 2026-os költségvetés-elemzésből
A national agency picking research winners — Hungary's innovation gap in one mechanism.
40 billion Ft a year passes through a central grant agency whose call priorities replace the dispersed judgement of working scientists and research institutions.
40,048 millió Ft — roughly 4,150 Ft per employed worker — allocated annually by a central agency whose priority lists substitute for the research community's own assessment of what questions are ripe.
Amit látsz — és amit nem
The seen: universities and research institutes receiving project grants, the National Research Excellence Programme, funded science. The unseen: the dispersed knowledge of 10,000 Hungarian scientists — which questions are promising, which teams are credible — overridden by a national priority list that rewards conformity to the call rather than originality of the question.
Ellenvetés
"Basic research cannot survive without state funding — there is no market to finance it."
Válasz
Basic research needs financing, not a national agency picking questions. The reform replaces central project calls with institutional block grants allocated to universities and research institutes on output-based formulae — the research institution, which holds the relevant information, allocates internally. The Dutch block-grant model works on this principle. What ends is not research funding but a national bureaucracy substituting its priority list for the research community's own judgement.
Share if you think scientists — not ministry officials — should decide which questions are worth asking.
Az elemző értékelése
Kutatási Alaprész
Az elemző indoklása jelenleg angol nyelven elérhető; magyar fordítás folyamatban.
Indoklás
This sub-fund finances competitive grants for basic and applied research, including the National Research Excellence Programme, and supports research institutes and university research.[^2] The classification question differs from the Innovation Sub-fund's. Basic research has no near-term buyer, so the consumer-sovereignty test cannot be run on it the way it can be run on a firm's product-development project — basic research is exactly the activity for which "would a future buyer pay for this" is not the operative question. That does not, however, make a central grant committee the right allocator. Which research lines are promising, which teams are credible, which questions are ripe — this is information dispersed across the research community itself, held by working scientists, journal editors, and the institutions that employ them. A national council setting research priorities and a central agency scoring applications cannot aggregate that dispersed judgement; it substitutes a politically-set priority list and an administrative scoring rubric for it. The result is a research portfolio shaped by what the call rewards. The reform is not to abolish research financing but to move the allocation decision closer to the people who hold the information. Research-intensive universities and institutes are better placed than a national agency to judge which of their own research lines deserve funding; endowment income, competitively-tendered contract research, philanthropic research funding, and international grant competitions (EU framework programmes, ERC) already operate as non-state or arms-length allocators with their own peer-review machinery. The classification is Phase-Out rather than Keep because the case for a national administrative grant agency as the allocator does not survive the calculation argument — but it is Phase-Out rather than Immediate Cut because abrupt removal would strand research staff mid-project and because the replacement allocators (institutional block funding tied to research output, an arms-length endowment model) take time to stand up.
Átállási mechanizmus
A five-year phase-out aligned with the Innovation Sub-fund. Year 1: in-flight research grants honoured; no new central calls. Years 2-5: the central grant function is wound down as existing multi-year research grants complete, and research financing is migrated to institutional block grants allocated to universities and research institutes on transparent output-based formulae, with the institutions themselves running internal allocation. This places the decision at the level — the research institution — that holds the relevant information, consistent with institutional block-grant models such as the Dutch eerste geldstroom, where the research institution rather than a national project agency is the primary allocator, alongside competitive funding rather than instead of it. The National Research Excellence Programme's accrued multi-year commitments are honoured to term; the bridge cost is the contractual tail of signed grants, funded from the run-off of contribution revenue as the levy is reduced in step.
Érintett csoportok
Research institutes and universities keep research financing but receive it as institutional block funding rather than as project grants from a national agency — a change of channel, not a withdrawal of funds, for the institutions overall, though individual research teams whose work matched the old call priorities better than an output formula may lose relative position. The MTA library and information services and similar research-infrastructure recipients that currently draw on this sub-fund need their funding line explicitly preserved in the replacement structure. Grant-administration staff are addressed under the managing-agency line.
Források
- Csaknem 120 milliard forintbol indulhatnak uj palyazatok a Nemzeti Kutatasi, Fejlesztesi es Innovacios Alapbol 2026-ban · Nemzeti Kutatasi, Fejlesztesi es Innovacios Hivatal (NKFIH) (2025)
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