Prime Minister's Office

Rationale

Religious practice is the paradigm case of a voluntary association. A church is sustained by the freely-given contributions of its believers — and Hungarian churches, like churches everywhere, have a millennia-tested mechanism for this: the offering, the tithe, the membership of the faithful. The classical-liberal frame does not judge the worth of religious life; it observes that religious life does not require involuntary tax financing, because the people who value a church can and historically do fund it directly. The seen here is a funded parish, a renovated church building, a supplemented clergy income. The unseen is the wage-earner — of any faith or none — whose SZJA was routed to a religious institution they may not belong to and did not choose. The within-class point sharpens it: the 31,705.0 millió Ft core-institution line is partly an SZJA kiegészítés, a state top-up of the voluntary 1% church designation. The mechanism means that a worker who designates their 1% to no church, or to a small one, still funds — through general tax — a state supplement that scales toward the large recipient denominations. The voluntary designation channel already exists and already works; the state top-up converts a voluntary mechanism back into an involuntary one.

Rationale

This line is not a discretionary subsidy. It is the contractual annuity created when the Hungarian state, settling the post-communist restitution of expropriated church property, converted the cash compensation for properties it chose not to physically return into a perpetual indexed annuity. The arrangement is fixed in the 1997 Hungary-Holy See agreement and its enacting law: the compensation claim was treated as a long-term state investment, the annuity set at a defined percentage of that claim (phased to 5% from 2001), and indexed annually to the forint's average depreciation in the budget currency basket.[^4] This is the narrow case where first principle and current law converge on Keep: the recipients are good-faith counterparties to a property-rights settlement, the obligation is contractual, and the classical-liberal rule-of-law principle protects exactly such accrued settlements. A reform package may revisit whether a perpetual annuity was the right instrument, and may negotiate a buy-out at the next contractual opening — but it does not unilaterally abrogate a restitution settlement. Keep, on rule-of-law grounds.

Rationale

This single line is the largest discretionary grant pool in the chapter, and its name describes the mechanism precisely: a budget from which political officeholders allocate money to non-profit and civil organisations of their choosing. There is no market price for "civil-society activity" and no aggregator of citizens' subjective valuations of which organisations should exist; the allocation is therefore a subjective judgement by whoever controls the line. A civil organisation that depends on this transfer for its operating budget is not financed by the citizens who value its work — it is financed by the office that selected it, and its survival becomes a function of staying selected. That is the rent-generating structure (see Key Observations below). Genuine civil society — the kind that classical liberalism prizes as the space between the individual and the state — is funded by the voluntary contributions of those who value it: membership dues, donations, the 1% SZJA designation mechanism that already lets every taxpayer direct a slice of their own tax to a civil organisation of their choice. A 26.5 milliárd Ft centrally-allocated pool does not strengthen that civil society; it substitutes a political selector for a voluntary one.

Rationale

Religious practice is the paradigm case of a voluntary association. A church is sustained by the freely-given contributions of its believers — and Hungarian churches, like churches everywhere, have a millennia-tested mechanism for this: the offering, the tithe, the membership of the faithful. The classical-liberal frame does not judge the worth of religious life; it observes that religious life does not require involuntary tax financing, because the people who value a church can and historically do fund it directly. The seen here is a funded parish, a renovated church building, a supplemented clergy income. The unseen is the wage-earner — of any faith or none — whose SZJA was routed to a religious institution they may not belong to and did not choose.

Rationale

The University trains the officer and civil-service intake for public administration, defence, law enforcement and national security; in 2025 it admitted over 2,400 new students, the largest group in its Faculty of Public Governance and International Studies.[^2] A state that maintains a defence and rule-of-law apparatus has a defensible interest in the supply of trained officers and administrators for it — that part of the mandate sits close to a constitutional-precondition function. But "the state needs trained administrators" does not establish that the state must operate a dedicated single-purpose university to produce them: public-administration, law and international-relations degrees are supplied across the ordinary Hungarian university sector, and officer training proper is the narrower, genuinely state-specific core. The honest classification is therefore a nominal freeze rather than a Keep — hold the 46.7 milliárd Ft envelope flat, let real-terms erosion apply, and use the decade to separate the genuinely state-specific officer-cadet function (which a reformed institution would retain) from the general public-administration teaching that the competitive university sector already provides. A capital line of 9,427.6 millió Ft inside a freeze warrants particular scrutiny: a frozen institution should not be carrying a near-10-milliárd-Ft annual building programme without a specific, time-limited justification.

Rationale

The National Cooperation Fund is the structured grant programme for civil organisations, administered through collegiate bodies and the Bethlen Gábor Foundation Management, with published calls and award bands — operating support of 500,000-3,000,000 Ft, combined professional-and-operational support to 4,500,000 Ft per organisation.[^3] It is the more rules-bound sibling of the discretionary pool above, and the rules-bound structure is precisely why it is a Phase-Out rather than an Immediate Cut: a substantial number of small local associations have built operating plans around NEA award cycles, and abrupt removal would strand commitments those associations reasonably relied on. But a published award rubric does not change the underlying mechanism. The state still has no way to know whether the civil activity it funds is worth its cost; it has only replaced an open political selector with a committee one. The Fund channels involuntary tax to organisations whose own members and supporters could fund them voluntarily — and the 1% SZJA designation route already exists for exactly that.

Rationale

Religious practice is the paradigm case of a voluntary association. A church is sustained by the freely-given contributions of its believers — and Hungarian churches, like churches everywhere, have a millennia-tested mechanism for this: the offering, the tithe, the membership of the faithful. The classical-liberal frame does not judge the worth of religious life; it observes that religious life does not require involuntary tax financing, because the people who value a church can and historically do fund it directly. The seen here is a funded parish, a renovated church building, a supplemented clergy income. The unseen is the wage-earner — of any faith or none — whose SZJA was routed to a religious institution they may not belong to and did not choose.

Rationale

Religious practice is the paradigm case of a voluntary association. A church is sustained by the freely-given contributions of its believers — and Hungarian churches, like churches everywhere, have a millennia-tested mechanism for this: the offering, the tithe, the membership of the faithful. The classical-liberal frame does not judge the worth of religious life; it observes that religious life does not require involuntary tax financing, because the people who value a church can and historically do fund it directly. The seen here is a funded parish, a renovated church building, a supplemented clergy income. The unseen is the wage-earner — of any faith or none — whose SZJA was routed to a religious institution they may not belong to and did not choose.

Rationale

The University trains the officer and civil-service intake for public administration, defence, law enforcement and national security; in 2025 it admitted over 2,400 new students, the largest group in its Faculty of Public Governance and International Studies.[^2] A state that maintains a defence and rule-of-law apparatus has a defensible interest in the supply of trained officers and administrators for it — that part of the mandate sits close to a constitutional-precondition function. But "the state needs trained administrators" does not establish that the state must operate a dedicated single-purpose university to produce them: public-administration, law and international-relations degrees are supplied across the ordinary Hungarian university sector, and officer training proper is the narrower, genuinely state-specific core. The honest classification is therefore a nominal freeze rather than a Keep — hold the 46.7 milliárd Ft envelope flat, let real-terms erosion apply, and use the decade to separate the genuinely state-specific officer-cadet function (which a reformed institution would retain) from the general public-administration teaching that the competitive university sector already provides. A capital line of 9,427.6 millió Ft inside a freeze warrants particular scrutiny: a frozen institution should not be carrying a near-10-milliárd-Ft annual building programme without a specific, time-limited justification.

Rationale

The administrative core of the executive branch is a constitutional precondition — a government must have an office that runs it. The classical-liberal frame does not contest the existence of an executive; it contests what the executive spends money on outside its rights-protection and constitutional-precondition functions. The 15.9 milliárd Ft that runs the office itself is the legitimate core. Keep here is not an exemption from scrutiny: the 4,471.7 millió Ft operating-cost line and the personnel envelope are fair targets for an efficiency review. Keep means the function survives the transition, not that the budget is beyond question.

Rationale

The University trains the officer and civil-service intake for public administration, defence, law enforcement and national security; in 2025 it admitted over 2,400 new students, the largest group in its Faculty of Public Governance and International Studies.[^2] A state that maintains a defence and rule-of-law apparatus has a defensible interest in the supply of trained officers and administrators for it — that part of the mandate sits close to a constitutional-precondition function. But "the state needs trained administrators" does not establish that the state must operate a dedicated single-purpose university to produce them: public-administration, law and international-relations degrees are supplied across the ordinary Hungarian university sector, and officer training proper is the narrower, genuinely state-specific core. The honest classification is therefore a nominal freeze rather than a Keep — hold the 46.7 milliárd Ft envelope flat, let real-terms erosion apply, and use the decade to separate the genuinely state-specific officer-cadet function (which a reformed institution would retain) from the general public-administration teaching that the competitive university sector already provides. A capital line of 9,427.6 millió Ft inside a freeze warrants particular scrutiny: a frozen institution should not be carrying a near-10-milliárd-Ft annual building programme without a specific, time-limited justification.

Rationale

Religious practice is the paradigm case of a voluntary association. A church is sustained by the freely-given contributions of its believers — and Hungarian churches, like churches everywhere, have a millennia-tested mechanism for this: the offering, the tithe, the membership of the faithful. The classical-liberal frame does not judge the worth of religious life; it observes that religious life does not require involuntary tax financing, because the people who value a church can and historically do fund it directly. The seen here is a funded parish, a renovated church building, a supplemented clergy income. The unseen is the wage-earner — of any faith or none — whose SZJA was routed to a religious institution they may not belong to and did not choose.

Rationale

This line provides the founding endowment for one more közérdekű vagyonkezelő alapítvány — a public-interest asset-management foundation. The model transfers public assets and a cash endowment into a foundation governed by a self-perpetuating board, placing the assets permanently outside the annual budget process and outside the reach of any future parliamentary majority. Whatever the stated public purpose, the structural effect is to move 5,884.6 millió Ft of taxpayer money into a vehicle that no future budget can reclaim and no future government can redirect — a one-way removal of public funds from democratic fiscal control. The classical-liberal objection is not to foundations as such; it is to the conversion of involuntarily-collected tax into a permanent endowment governed by an unaccountable board. A new endowment of this kind is the cleanest possible Immediate Cut: nothing is being wound down, no reliance interest has yet formed, the money simply is not committed.

Rationale

A geographically-targeted variant of the civil-grant mechanism — a discretionary pool for urban civil organisations. The analysis is the same as for the main civil-support line: the state selects the recipients, the recipients depend on staying selected, and the voluntary alternatives (membership, donations, the 1% SZJA channel) remain fully available. Immediate Cut.

Rationale

The distinction here turns on a rights consideration. Hungary's recognised national minorities have a constitutional and statutory framework of minority self-government — elected bodies with a defined institutional role. Funding the operation of those elected self-governing bodies and the core institutions they maintain sits close to a constitutional-precondition function: it finances the machinery through which a recognised community exercises collective self-administration, analogous to financing a tier of local government. Those two lines are Keep. The discretionary grant lines — general "minority subsidies", media support, project funding, investment grants — are a different thing: subjective allocation by political officeholders to minority-sector recipients of their choosing, with the same calculation and rent problems as the civil and church grant pools. Those phase out over three years, during which minority organisations can migrate to community funding and to the budgets of their own self-governments.

Rationale

The administrative core of the executive branch is a constitutional precondition — a government must have an office that runs it. The classical-liberal frame does not contest the existence of an executive; it contests what the executive spends money on outside its rights-protection and constitutional-precondition functions. The 15.9 milliárd Ft that runs the office itself is the legitimate core. Keep here is not an exemption from scrutiny: the 4,471.7 millió Ft operating-cost line and the personnel envelope are fair targets for an efficiency review. Keep means the function survives the transition, not that the budget is beyond question.

Rationale

Religious practice is the paradigm case of a voluntary association. A church is sustained by the freely-given contributions of its believers — and Hungarian churches, like churches everywhere, have a millennia-tested mechanism for this: the offering, the tithe, the membership of the faithful. The classical-liberal frame does not judge the worth of religious life; it observes that religious life does not require involuntary tax financing, because the people who value a church can and historically do fund it directly. The seen here is a funded parish, a renovated church building, a supplemented clergy income. The unseen is the wage-earner — of any faith or none — whose SZJA was routed to a religious institution they may not belong to and did not choose.

Rationale

The Nemzetpolitikai tevékenységek és határon túli magyarok támogatása line (4,333.3 millió Ft) is treated as a Phase-Out (4 years, linear): the national-policy transfer is discretionary external grant-making that phases out on the same logic as the other grant pools.

Rationale

The University trains the officer and civil-service intake for public administration, defence, law enforcement and national security; in 2025 it admitted over 2,400 new students, the largest group in its Faculty of Public Governance and International Studies.[^2] A state that maintains a defence and rule-of-law apparatus has a defensible interest in the supply of trained officers and administrators for it — that part of the mandate sits close to a constitutional-precondition function. But "the state needs trained administrators" does not establish that the state must operate a dedicated single-purpose university to produce them: public-administration, law and international-relations degrees are supplied across the ordinary Hungarian university sector, and officer training proper is the narrower, genuinely state-specific core. The honest classification is therefore a nominal freeze rather than a Keep — hold the 46.7 milliárd Ft envelope flat, let real-terms erosion apply, and use the decade to separate the genuinely state-specific officer-cadet function (which a reformed institution would retain) from the general public-administration teaching that the competitive university sector already provides. A capital line of 9,427.6 millió Ft inside a freeze warrants particular scrutiny: a frozen institution should not be carrying a near-10-milliárd-Ft annual building programme without a specific, time-limited justification.

Rationale

Religious practice is the paradigm case of a voluntary association. A church is sustained by the freely-given contributions of its believers — and Hungarian churches, like churches everywhere, have a millennia-tested mechanism for this: the offering, the tithe, the membership of the faithful. The classical-liberal frame does not judge the worth of religious life; it observes that religious life does not require involuntary tax financing, because the people who value a church can and historically do fund it directly. The seen here is a funded parish, a renovated church building, a supplemented clergy income. The unseen is the wage-earner — of any faith or none — whose SZJA was routed to a religious institution they may not belong to and did not choose. The within-class point sharpens it: the 31,705.0 millió Ft core-institution line is partly an SZJA kiegészítés, a state top-up of the voluntary 1% church designation. The mechanism means that a worker who designates their 1% to no church, or to a small one, still funds — through general tax — a state supplement that scales toward the large recipient denominations. The voluntary designation channel already exists and already works; the state top-up converts a voluntary mechanism back into an involuntary one.

Rationale

The distinction here turns on a rights consideration. Hungary's recognised national minorities have a constitutional and statutory framework of minority self-government — elected bodies with a defined institutional role. Funding the operation of those elected self-governing bodies and the core institutions they maintain sits close to a constitutional-precondition function: it finances the machinery through which a recognised community exercises collective self-administration, analogous to financing a tier of local government. Those two lines are Keep.

Rationale

The distinction here turns on a rights consideration. Hungary's recognised national minorities have a constitutional and statutory framework of minority self-government — elected bodies with a defined institutional role. Funding the operation of those elected self-governing bodies and the core institutions they maintain sits close to a constitutional-precondition function: it finances the machinery through which a recognised community exercises collective self-administration, analogous to financing a tier of local government. Those two lines are Keep. The discretionary grant lines — general "minority subsidies", media support, project funding, investment grants — are a different thing: subjective allocation by political officeholders to minority-sector recipients of their choosing, with the same calculation and rent problems as the civil and church grant pools. Those phase out over three years, during which minority organisations can migrate to community funding and to the budgets of their own self-governments.

Rationale

Religious practice is the paradigm case of a voluntary association. A church is sustained by the freely-given contributions of its believers — and Hungarian churches, like churches everywhere, have a millennia-tested mechanism for this: the offering, the tithe, the membership of the faithful. The classical-liberal frame does not judge the worth of religious life; it observes that religious life does not require involuntary tax financing, because the people who value a church can and historically do fund it directly. The six small lines carry no comparable multi-year reliance and are Immediate Cuts.

Rationale

The distinction here turns on a rights consideration. Hungary's recognised national minorities have a constitutional and statutory framework of minority self-government — elected bodies with a defined institutional role. Funding the operation of those elected self-governing bodies and the core institutions they maintain sits close to a constitutional-precondition function: it finances the machinery through which a recognised community exercises collective self-administration, analogous to financing a tier of local government. Those two lines are Keep.

Rationale

The transfer funds the professional research and analysis work of the foreign-affairs institute — a state-financed think-tank in the foreign-policy domain. As with the Institute for National Strategy, this is research, not a rights-protection or constitutional-precondition function, and the state cannot price whether the analysis is worth its cost. Foreign-policy analysis is, moreover, exactly the kind of work that universities, independent institutes and the diplomatic service itself produce; a dedicated state-funded transfer is not the only channel for it.

Rationale

The distinction here turns on a rights consideration. Hungary's recognised national minorities have a constitutional and statutory framework of minority self-government — elected bodies with a defined institutional role. Funding the operation of those elected self-governing bodies and the core institutions they maintain sits close to a constitutional-precondition function: it finances the machinery through which a recognised community exercises collective self-administration, analogous to financing a tier of local government. Those two lines are Keep. The discretionary grant lines — general "minority subsidies", media support, project funding, investment grants — are a different thing: subjective allocation by political officeholders to minority-sector recipients of their choosing, with the same calculation and rent problems as the civil and church grant pools. Those phase out over three years, during which minority organisations can migrate to community funding and to the budgets of their own self-governments.

Rationale

The University trains the officer and civil-service intake for public administration, defence, law enforcement and national security; in 2025 it admitted over 2,400 new students, the largest group in its Faculty of Public Governance and International Studies.[^2] A state that maintains a defence and rule-of-law apparatus has a defensible interest in the supply of trained officers and administrators for it — that part of the mandate sits close to a constitutional-precondition function. But "the state needs trained administrators" does not establish that the state must operate a dedicated single-purpose university to produce them: public-administration, law and international-relations degrees are supplied across the ordinary Hungarian university sector, and officer training proper is the narrower, genuinely state-specific core. The honest classification is therefore a nominal freeze rather than a Keep — hold the 46.7 milliárd Ft envelope flat, let real-terms erosion apply, and use the decade to separate the genuinely state-specific officer-cadet function (which a reformed institution would retain) from the general public-administration teaching that the competitive university sector already provides. A capital line of 9,427.6 millió Ft inside a freeze warrants particular scrutiny: a frozen institution should not be carrying a near-10-milliárd-Ft annual building programme without a specific, time-limited justification.

Rationale

The administrative core of the executive branch is a constitutional precondition — a government must have an office that runs it. The classical-liberal frame does not contest the existence of an executive; it contests what the executive spends money on outside its rights-protection and constitutional-precondition functions. The 15.9 milliárd Ft that runs the office itself is the legitimate core. Keep here is not an exemption from scrutiny: the 4,471.7 millió Ft operating-cost line and the personnel envelope are fair targets for an efficiency review. Keep means the function survives the transition, not that the budget is beyond question.

Rationale

The distinction here turns on a rights consideration. Hungary's recognised national minorities have a constitutional and statutory framework of minority self-government — elected bodies with a defined institutional role. Funding the operation of those elected self-governing bodies and the core institutions they maintain sits close to a constitutional-precondition function: it finances the machinery through which a recognised community exercises collective self-administration, analogous to financing a tier of local government. Those two lines are Keep. The discretionary grant lines — general "minority subsidies", media support, project funding, investment grants — are a different thing: subjective allocation by political officeholders to minority-sector recipients of their choosing, with the same calculation and rent problems as the civil and church grant pools. Those phase out over three years, during which minority organisations can migrate to community funding and to the budgets of their own self-governments.

Rationale

Religious practice is the paradigm case of a voluntary association. A church is sustained by the freely-given contributions of its believers — and Hungarian churches, like churches everywhere, have a millennia-tested mechanism for this: the offering, the tithe, the membership of the faithful. The classical-liberal frame does not judge the worth of religious life; it observes that religious life does not require involuntary tax financing, because the people who value a church can and historically do fund it directly. The six small lines carry no comparable multi-year reliance and are Immediate Cuts.

Rationale

The Institute maintains the Nemzeti Sírkert (National Graveyard) and the registry of protected memorial sites — a bounded, finite custodial mandate. It is not a rights-protection function, but it is self-limiting: the stock of graves and memorial sites does not expand on a budget cycle. An outright cut would strand a custodial obligation toward physical heritage that has no private claimant ready to assume it; an expansion is unwarranted. Nominal freeze is the honest classification — hold the allocation flat and let inflation erode the real envelope by roughly 20-25% over a decade, during which the custodial arrangement can be reviewed against a foundation or trust model. The Institute is, like the Institute for National Strategy, named in the government's restructuring list with Veritas as successor;[^1] if that absorption proceeds, the freeze simply carries into the successor's books.

Rationale

The Institute maintains the Nemzeti Sírkert (National Graveyard) and the registry of protected memorial sites — a bounded, finite custodial mandate. It is not a rights-protection function, but it is self-limiting: the stock of graves and memorial sites does not expand on a budget cycle. An outright cut would strand a custodial obligation toward physical heritage that has no private claimant ready to assume it; an expansion is unwarranted. Nominal freeze is the honest classification — hold the allocation flat and let inflation erode the real envelope by roughly 20-25% over a decade, during which the custodial arrangement can be reviewed against a foundation or trust model. The Institute is, like the Institute for National Strategy, named in the government's restructuring list with Veritas as successor;[^1] if that absorption proceeds, the freeze simply carries into the successor's books.

Rationale

The Institute conducts research, surveys and analysis on Hungarian heritage and the Hungarian communities of the Carpathian Basin. Whatever the merit of that research, it is not a rights-protection function, not a constitutional precondition, and not a protective response to involuntary harm. It is a state-funded think-tank — and a state cannot determine through a budget line the optimal quantity or direction of strategic research, because there is no price signal telling it whether the research is worth its cost. The Hungarian government itself has reached a structurally similar conclusion: the Institute is among the seventy-plus state bodies slated for elimination or restructuring, with its functions to be absorbed by the Veritas Institute.[^1] When the government's own bureaucracy-reduction programme already marks a body for closure, the classical-liberal recommendation is simply to follow through cleanly rather than fold it into a successor.

Rationale

Religious practice is the paradigm case of a voluntary association. A church is sustained by the freely-given contributions of its believers — and Hungarian churches, like churches everywhere, have a millennia-tested mechanism for this: the offering, the tithe, the membership of the faithful. The classical-liberal frame does not judge the worth of religious life; it observes that religious life does not require involuntary tax financing, because the people who value a church can and historically do fund it directly. The six small lines carry no comparable multi-year reliance and are Immediate Cuts.

Rationale

Religious practice is the paradigm case of a voluntary association. A church is sustained by the freely-given contributions of its believers — and Hungarian churches, like churches everywhere, have a millennia-tested mechanism for this: the offering, the tithe, the membership of the faithful. The classical-liberal frame does not judge the worth of religious life; it observes that religious life does not require involuntary tax financing, because the people who value a church can and historically do fund it directly. The seen here is a funded parish, a renovated church building, a supplemented clergy income. The unseen is the wage-earner — of any faith or none — whose SZJA was routed to a religious institution they may not belong to and did not choose.

Rationale

Religious practice is the paradigm case of a voluntary association. A church is sustained by the freely-given contributions of its believers — and Hungarian churches, like churches everywhere, have a millennia-tested mechanism for this: the offering, the tithe, the membership of the faithful. The classical-liberal frame does not judge the worth of religious life; it observes that religious life does not require involuntary tax financing, because the people who value a church can and historically do fund it directly. The six small lines carry no comparable multi-year reliance and are Immediate Cuts.

Rationale

Religious practice is the paradigm case of a voluntary association. A church is sustained by the freely-given contributions of its believers — and Hungarian churches, like churches everywhere, have a millennia-tested mechanism for this: the offering, the tithe, the membership of the faithful. The classical-liberal frame does not judge the worth of religious life; it observes that religious life does not require involuntary tax financing, because the people who value a church can and historically do fund it directly. The six small lines carry no comparable multi-year reliance and are Immediate Cuts.

Rationale

Subsidising religious tourism is industrial policy wearing a heritage label. Pilgrimage sites and religious-heritage destinations that draw visitors generate their own revenue from those visitors; sites that do not draw visitors are not made viable by a marketing subsidy. The state cannot calculate the optimal level of "religious tourism" because there is no such optimum independent of what travellers voluntarily choose to visit and pay for. The line is small, and its size is not the point — it is a clean Immediate Cut on principle.

Rationale

Religious practice is the paradigm case of a voluntary association. A church is sustained by the freely-given contributions of its believers — and Hungarian churches, like churches everywhere, have a millennia-tested mechanism for this: the offering, the tithe, the membership of the faithful. The classical-liberal frame does not judge the worth of religious life; it observes that religious life does not require involuntary tax financing, because the people who value a church can and historically do fund it directly. The seen here is a funded parish, a renovated church building, a supplemented clergy income. The unseen is the wage-earner — of any faith or none — whose SZJA was routed to a religious institution they may not belong to and did not choose.

Rationale

The Institute conducts research, surveys and analysis on Hungarian heritage and the Hungarian communities of the Carpathian Basin. Whatever the merit of that research, it is not a rights-protection function, not a constitutional precondition, and not a protective response to involuntary harm. It is a state-funded think-tank — and a state cannot determine through a budget line the optimal quantity or direction of strategic research, because there is no price signal telling it whether the research is worth its cost. The Hungarian government itself has reached a structurally similar conclusion: the Institute is among the seventy-plus state bodies slated for elimination or restructuring, with its functions to be absorbed by the Veritas Institute.[^1] When the government's own bureaucracy-reduction programme already marks a body for closure, the classical-liberal recommendation is simply to follow through cleanly rather than fold it into a successor.

Rationale

A monitoring system for state investments is a second-best administrative substitute for a discipline that a smaller state-investment footprint would not need. The honest reading is that the system exists because the state commissions a large volume of investment projects whose execution it must then police. As the broader reform reduces the state's discretionary investment and grant footprint — visible across this very chapter — the monitoring requirement shrinks with it. The line phases out in parallel with the activity it monitors rather than being defended as a permanent oversight fixture.

Rationale

Religious practice is the paradigm case of a voluntary association. A church is sustained by the freely-given contributions of its believers — and Hungarian churches, like churches everywhere, have a millennia-tested mechanism for this: the offering, the tithe, the membership of the faithful. The classical-liberal frame does not judge the worth of religious life; it observes that religious life does not require involuntary tax financing, because the people who value a church can and historically do fund it directly. The six small lines carry no comparable multi-year reliance and are Immediate Cuts.

Rationale

The memorial-sites line is a small, bounded custodial mandate that pairs naturally with the National Heritage Institute freeze.

Rationale

The Institute maintains the Nemzeti Sírkert (National Graveyard) and the registry of protected memorial sites — a bounded, finite custodial mandate. It is not a rights-protection function, but it is self-limiting: the stock of graves and memorial sites does not expand on a budget cycle. An outright cut would strand a custodial obligation toward physical heritage that has no private claimant ready to assume it; an expansion is unwarranted. Nominal freeze is the honest classification — hold the allocation flat and let inflation erode the real envelope by roughly 20-25% over a decade, during which the custodial arrangement can be reviewed against a foundation or trust model. The Institute is, like the Institute for National Strategy, named in the government's restructuring list with Veritas as successor;[^1] if that absorption proceeds, the freeze simply carries into the successor's books.

Rationale

The Institute conducts research, surveys and analysis on Hungarian heritage and the Hungarian communities of the Carpathian Basin. Whatever the merit of that research, it is not a rights-protection function, not a constitutional precondition, and not a protective response to involuntary harm. It is a state-funded think-tank — and a state cannot determine through a budget line the optimal quantity or direction of strategic research, because there is no price signal telling it whether the research is worth its cost. The Hungarian government itself has reached a structurally similar conclusion: the Institute is among the seventy-plus state bodies slated for elimination or restructuring, with its functions to be absorbed by the Veritas Institute.[^1] When the government's own bureaucracy-reduction programme already marks a body for closure, the classical-liberal recommendation is simply to follow through cleanly rather than fold it into a successor.

Rationale

The Institute maintains the Nemzeti Sírkert (National Graveyard) and the registry of protected memorial sites — a bounded, finite custodial mandate. It is not a rights-protection function, but it is self-limiting: the stock of graves and memorial sites does not expand on a budget cycle. An outright cut would strand a custodial obligation toward physical heritage that has no private claimant ready to assume it; an expansion is unwarranted. Nominal freeze is the honest classification — hold the allocation flat and let inflation erode the real envelope by roughly 20-25% over a decade, during which the custodial arrangement can be reviewed against a foundation or trust model. The Institute is, like the Institute for National Strategy, named in the government's restructuring list with Veritas as successor;[^1] if that absorption proceeds, the freeze simply carries into the successor's books.

Rationale

The administrative core of the executive branch is a constitutional precondition — a government must have an office that runs it. The classical-liberal frame does not contest the existence of an executive; it contests what the executive spends money on outside its rights-protection and constitutional-precondition functions. The 15.9 milliárd Ft that runs the office itself is the legitimate core. Keep here is not an exemption from scrutiny: the 4,471.7 millió Ft operating-cost line and the personnel envelope are fair targets for an efficiency review. Keep means the function survives the transition, not that the budget is beyond question.

Rationale

The administrative core of the executive branch is a constitutional precondition — a government must have an office that runs it. The classical-liberal frame does not contest the existence of an executive; it contests what the executive spends money on outside its rights-protection and constitutional-precondition functions. The 15.9 milliárd Ft that runs the office itself is the legitimate core. Keep here is not an exemption from scrutiny: the 4,471.7 millió Ft operating-cost line and the personnel envelope are fair targets for an efficiency review. Keep means the function survives the transition, not that the budget is beyond question.

Rationale

The Fejezeti általános tartalék (chapter general reserve, 100.6 millió Ft) is the chapter's contingency provision and is a Keep — a small, bounded prudential reserve is consistent with ordinary budget management.

Rationale

The Institute maintains the Nemzeti Sírkert (National Graveyard) and the registry of protected memorial sites — a bounded, finite custodial mandate. It is not a rights-protection function, but it is self-limiting: the stock of graves and memorial sites does not expand on a budget cycle. An outright cut would strand a custodial obligation toward physical heritage that has no private claimant ready to assume it; an expansion is unwarranted. Nominal freeze is the honest classification — hold the allocation flat and let inflation erode the real envelope by roughly 20-25% over a decade, during which the custodial arrangement can be reviewed against a foundation or trust model. The Institute is, like the Institute for National Strategy, named in the government's restructuring list with Veritas as successor;[^1] if that absorption proceeds, the freeze simply carries into the successor's books.

Rationale

The administrative core of the executive branch is a constitutional precondition — a government must have an office that runs it. The classical-liberal frame does not contest the existence of an executive; it contests what the executive spends money on outside its rights-protection and constitutional-precondition functions. The 15.9 milliárd Ft that runs the office itself is the legitimate core. Keep here is not an exemption from scrutiny: the 4,471.7 millió Ft operating-cost line and the personnel envelope are fair targets for an efficiency review. Keep means the function survives the transition, not that the budget is beyond question.

Rationale

The Institute conducts research, surveys and analysis on Hungarian heritage and the Hungarian communities of the Carpathian Basin. Whatever the merit of that research, it is not a rights-protection function, not a constitutional precondition, and not a protective response to involuntary harm. It is a state-funded think-tank — and a state cannot determine through a budget line the optimal quantity or direction of strategic research, because there is no price signal telling it whether the research is worth its cost. The Hungarian government itself has reached a structurally similar conclusion: the Institute is among the seventy-plus state bodies slated for elimination or restructuring, with its functions to be absorbed by the Veritas Institute.[^1] When the government's own bureaucracy-reduction programme already marks a body for closure, the classical-liberal recommendation is simply to follow through cleanly rather than fold it into a successor.

Rationale

The University trains the officer and civil-service intake for public administration, defence, law enforcement and national security; in 2025 it admitted over 2,400 new students, the largest group in its Faculty of Public Governance and International Studies.[^2] A state that maintains a defence and rule-of-law apparatus has a defensible interest in the supply of trained officers and administrators for it — that part of the mandate sits close to a constitutional-precondition function. But "the state needs trained administrators" does not establish that the state must operate a dedicated single-purpose university to produce them: public-administration, law and international-relations degrees are supplied across the ordinary Hungarian university sector, and officer training proper is the narrower, genuinely state-specific core. The honest classification is therefore a nominal freeze rather than a Keep — hold the 46.7 milliárd Ft envelope flat, let real-terms erosion apply, and use the decade to separate the genuinely state-specific officer-cadet function (which a reformed institution would retain) from the general public-administration teaching that the competitive university sector already provides. A capital line of 9,427.6 millió Ft inside a freeze warrants particular scrutiny: a frozen institution should not be carrying a near-10-milliárd-Ft annual building programme without a specific, time-limited justification.

Rationale

The Institute maintains the Nemzeti Sírkert (National Graveyard) and the registry of protected memorial sites — a bounded, finite custodial mandate. It is not a rights-protection function, but it is self-limiting: the stock of graves and memorial sites does not expand on a budget cycle. An outright cut would strand a custodial obligation toward physical heritage that has no private claimant ready to assume it; an expansion is unwarranted. Nominal freeze is the honest classification — hold the allocation flat and let inflation erode the real envelope by roughly 20-25% over a decade, during which the custodial arrangement can be reviewed against a foundation or trust model. The Institute is, like the Institute for National Strategy, named in the government's restructuring list with Veritas as successor;[^1] if that absorption proceeds, the freeze simply carries into the successor's books.