From the 2026 budget audit
1.47 billion Ft just to run the grant competitions — not the grants themselves.
The NKA's administrative apparatus — staff, convened colleges, application processing — costs 1,470 million Ft a year, 8.3% of the grants it disburses, and exists only to service a central-allocation function that the reform removes.
Roughly 153 Ft per resident per year — 1,470 million Ft to administer a grant tournament whose structural problem is the tournament itself.
What you see — and what you don't
The seen: the NKA staff managing applications and convening appointed colleges. The unseen: the lottery player and copyright payer whose contributions fund the overhead of a bureaucratic apparatus that could be replaced, under matched-giving, by a far smaller credit-processing function inside the existing tax administration.
Objection
"Grant administration costs money anywhere — private foundations also have overheads. This is just the cost of running a serious grant programme."
Answer
A private foundation spends its donors' voluntary contributions; its overhead is their cost to bear. The NKA apparatus spends earmarked public revenue and replaces the donors' own judgements with a committee's. When the central-allocation function is phased out, the residual administrative need — verifying donor claims and publishing matching rates — absorbs into existing tax administration at a fraction of the current cost. The overhead follows the function.
Pass this on to anyone who has wondered why grant bureaucracies grow independently of the value they distribute.
The analyst's verdict
Operating costs of the Fund's apparatus
Rationale
This line funds the administrative apparatus that runs the grant competitions — the staff and operating costs of managing applications, convening colleges, and disbursing awards. It is 8.3% of the grant envelope it administers. Its classification follows the grant line: an administrative apparatus exists to service an activity, and where the activity is phased out, the apparatus phases out with it. There is no enduring rationale for the administrative cost independent of the central-allocation function it supports. Under the matched-giving destination, the residual administrative need — verifying donor claims, publishing the matching rate, processing credits — is far smaller than running a competitive grant tournament with appointed colleges, and is most naturally absorbed by the existing tax administration rather than sustained as a standalone apparatus.
Transition mechanism
5-year linear taper, parallel to the grant line — the apparatus shrinks as the grant tournament it administers shrinks. The protected party is the fund's permanent administrative staff. As each tranche of the apparatus is wound down, the staff affected are protected by severance-with-overlap: full salary continued for a 12-to-24-month window, during which they may take and retain new private-sector or public-administration employment. The skills involved — grant administration, programme management, financial control — are general administrative skills with a broad labour market, which makes severance-with-overlap the appropriate staff-protection device within the linear glide. The payroll component is not separately broken out in the chapter table; the operating-cost line of 1,470.2 millió Ft is the full envelope, and the non-payroll operating costs (premises, IT, materials) end with the apparatus rather than carrying a protected tail.
Affected groups
The NKA's permanent administrative staff. Severance-with-overlap inverts the usual transition politics: staff offered continued salary plus the freedom to take new work tend to support an orderly wind-down rather than resist it.
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