Office of the President

Rationale

This line funds the salaries of the staff of the Office of the President — the office that supports the head of state in the exercise of constitutional functions: promulgating statutes, representing the state, exercising the appointment and pardon powers the Fundamental Law assigns the office. Staffing a constitutional office is staffing a precondition of the rule-of-law order, not a discretionary transfer. The line secures the operation of an institution the framework recognises. Keep does not preclude an operating-efficiency review of headcount and grade structure — a presidential office is a small body and its establishment can be scrutinised on its own terms — but it precludes phase-out.

Rationale

The operating costs of the presidential office — utilities, maintenance of the Sándor-palota, supplies, services, communications. These are the running costs of a constitutional office. The classification follows the personnel line: the office is retained, so the cost of running it is retained. As with personnel, Keep does not foreclose an efficiency review — the appropriate scale of an operating budget is always open to scrutiny — but it does foreclose phase-out.

Rationale

This line funds the production and conferral costs of the state-honours system — the medals, orders, and decorations conferred in the name of the Republic. The Fundamental Law grants the head of state the power to confer state honours; that grant is a permission, not a funding mandate, and so the constitutional standing of the office does not by itself carry this line to Keep. The honours system is a long-standing, bounded ceremonial function of a kind every European republic and monarchy maintains; it is neither a rights-protection function nor a concentrated rent. It is closest to a bounded, self-limiting ceremonial line: the case for outright abolition is weak, the case for expansion is absent, and the administrative cost of eliminating a 693.1 millió Ft ceremonial line would not be repaid by the saving. A nominal freeze holds the allocation flat and lets typical inflation erode its real share by roughly 20-25% over a decade — a quiet, low-cost discipline on a line that does not warrant growth.

Rationale

The Magyar Corvin-lánc is a state honour — described in the governing legislation as ranking immediately below the Order of Saint Stephen — conferred on individuals judged to have contributed in an exceptional way to Hungarian science, culture, and public thought.[^2] Act XLIX of 2023 establishes the **Magyar Corvin-lánc Testület** (the body composed of the living holders of the honour, up to fifteen members at any time) and the **Magyar Corvin-lánc Iroda** (an office operating within the Sándor-palota structure that maintains the register of recipients and handles the administrative and organising work connected with conferral of the honour).[^2] The function divides into two parts, and the classification follows the division. The *honour itself* — the act of conferral — is part of the state-honours system already funded under the Állami kitüntetések line above; on its own it would carry no separate appropriation. What this 540.0 millió Ft funds is the standing apparatus: a deliberative body that, by the Act's design, convenes rarely, and a permanent office that administers it. Set the apparatus against the three questions. There is no rights-protection function here and no constitutional precondition: nothing in the rule-of-law order depends on a Hungarian state honour having its own standing secretariat rather than being administered, as honours generally are, by the honours-system staff. The deliberative body — a small assembly of distinguished honorees offering opinions on questions of science, culture, and education — is precisely the kind of advisory function that the calculation and knowledge problems place beyond the reach of useful state organisation: there is no price signal and no objective optimum that tells the state how much advisory deliberation by honorees it should purchase, and the same individuals are free to publish, advise, and convene through the academies, universities, and learned societies they already belong to, financed by those bodies' own members and supporters. A 540.0 millió Ft standing budget for the apparatus of a single honour is a discrete, severable line whose removal violates no one's rights — but it does employ staff in the Iroda on permanent contracts, and abrupt closure would strand them without a transition. That reliance is what moves the line from immediate cut to a short phase-out.

Rationale

This line funds the protocol of the head of state — the ceremonial and diplomatic apparatus of state visits, the receiving of foreign heads of state, the conduct of official representation. The representation of the state in its unity, at home and abroad, is part of what the office of the head of state *is*; a head of state who cannot host a counterpart or conduct a state visit is not exercising the constitutional function. Protocol is the operating cost of that function. It is bounded, it is not a transfer to an organised constituency, and it is not a discretionary allocation in the sense the donation line is — it funds the conduct of a defined constitutional role. As with the office's other operating lines, Keep permits scrutiny of scale and efficiency; it does not warrant phase-out.

Rationale

This is the employer-side payroll charge on the personnel line above — the social contribution tax (szociális hozzájárulási adó) and related employer levies on the Office's own staff. It is a mechanical companion to the salary line and follows its classification. The employer wedge is worth naming, because it is the same wedge that runs through every chapter of this budget and through every Hungarian payslip: out of every 100 Ft of total employer cost, the social contribution tax and the employee-side levies (SZJA, TB) on the wage take roughly 37 Ft before the worker spends a forint, and ÁFA on what is then spent takes a further 13-14 Ft.[^3] That cumulative wedge is the subject of the revenue chapters; here it appears only as the state paying the tax to itself on its own staff. The line is retained because the personnel line is retained.

Rationale

The capital line for the presidential office — equipment replacement, building works on the Sándor-palota, IT investment. At 163.1 millió Ft this is a modest, routine capital allocation for the upkeep of a constitutional office and its historic seat. It is a recurring maintenance-grade line, not a discretionary expansion. The classification follows the office: retained.

Rationale

Strip the euphemism and state what this line is: a statutory entitlement to a discretionary public-donation budget placed at the personal disposal of the President of the Republic. Act CX of 2011 on the legal status and remuneration of the President of the Republic establishes a separately budgeted appropriation, within the Köztársasági Elnökség chapter, over which the President holds personal spending authority for "public-interest offerings and donations."[^1] The Sándor-palota publishes the recipient, purpose, and amount of each donation within fifteen days of the President's written commitment[^1] — disclosure that documents the mechanism rather than disciplining it. Run the line against the three questions. Voluntariness: charitable giving is the paradigm case of an activity that can be financed voluntarily, at a scale set by the actual preferences of actual donors. There is nothing the holder of this budget can give to a good cause that a private donor cannot give to the same cause; the only thing the line adds is that the gift is made with other people's money. Calculation: there is no market price, no objective optimum, and no aggregator of subjective valuations that tells the state which causes a discretionary donation budget should support — the allocation is, by construction, the personal preference of one officeholder. Public-choice exposure: the line concentrates a visible benefit (the named recipient organisations, and the goodwill the donating officeholder accrues) while spreading the 100 millió Ft cost diffusely across every taxpayer. The line fails all three. It is not a rights-protection function, not a constitutional precondition — the Fundamental Law does not require that the head of state command a personal philanthropy budget — and not a protective response to involuntary harm. It is the subjective allocation of public resources by a single political officeholder. The seen here is small and sympathetic: 100 millió Ft distributed to causes that are, in any given year, very likely genuinely worthy. The unseen is the structure. Every Ft of this budget was first taken, involuntarily, from a wage-earner — and that wage-earner has a specific family, a specific tax burden, and specific things they can no longer do for the people they love. A worker at the roughly 540,000 Ft median monthly gross wage[^4] contributes to general revenue through the payroll wedge and through ÁFA on every purchase; some small slice of that contribution funds a donation budget whose recipients that worker did not choose and may never hear of. The honest description is not "the President supports good causes." It is: the state takes money from a working household by compulsion and hands the disposal of it to an officeholder to give away as that officeholder sees fit. If the cause is worthy, the worker — left with the 100 millió Ft spread back across the tax base — can give to it directly, or not, as that worker judges. The reductio is the line's own logic taken seriously: if it is legitimate for the state to tax a household in order to let an officeholder make charitable gifts on the household's behalf, there is no principled stopping point — every officeholder could be granted a philanthropy budget, and the household's own giving would be displaced by giving chosen for it. The line does not survive its own extension.

Rationale

A small chapter-level contingency reserve, 66.3 millió Ft against a total envelope of 6,961.5 millió Ft — under 1% of the chapter. A modest reserve against in-year cost variation is ordinary, prudent budgeting for any institutional chapter and does not, on its own, warrant a transition classification. Its size is appropriate and self-limiting. The reserve is retained; in practice, were the donation line cut and the Corvin-lánc apparatus wound down, the residual chapter would be smaller and a proportionate reserve smaller still — but the reserve line itself is not the object of reform.