Who runs the government's PR machine — and what does it cost you?

Indoklás

The Cabinet Office is the staff apparatus of the minister responsible for general political coordination. A government needs an executive coordinating office; that function — interministerial coordination, cabinet servicing, the dossier work behind the legislative programme — is a legitimate part of running the executive, and the operating costs (Dologi kiadások, 1,759.3 millió Ft) and capital line (Beruházások, 580.7 millió Ft) are retained on that basis. The capital line is small enough that a nominal freeze, eroding it by roughly 22 millió Ft per year in real terms, is the proportionate treatment rather than an outright cut. The personnel line is different, and the reason is in the chapter itself. The Cabinet Office does not only coordinate; it administers the 174 milliárd Ft communication, events, and grant cluster analysed below. A substantial part of the 10,499.4 millió Ft payroll exists to run campaigns, consultations, and ceremonial spending that this analysis recommends ending. When that activity goes, the staff who delivered it no longer have a function. The honest treatment is therefore a payroll Phase-Out tied to the wind-down of the discretionary cluster: a 2-year severance-with-overlap bridge that keeps affected staff on full salary while they move to private-sector employment, and permits them to keep both incomes during the transition. The protected party is roughly the share of the office's establishment dedicated to communication and events management — a body of permanent-contract civil servants on the central-administration salary tier, whose skills (procurement, project management, public relations) transfer directly to the private market. The bridge cost is the full 10,499.4 millió Ft payroll plus 1,524.0 millió Ft of employer contributions, paid across years 1 and 2, with the line reaching fiscal zero in year 3. A residual coordinating staff would continue under the retained Dologi kiadások; the Phase-Out figure here is deliberately the whole personnel line, because the chapter does not break the establishment into coordination and communication sub-units, and the framework's discipline is to size the bridge to the protected party rather than guess a split the budget does not show.