74 billion forints for new ministry offices — whose work doesn't change because the office changes.

Rationale

This line funds the central government's individual state-building construction projects — ministry buildings, public administration premises, and individually-scheduled state construction. The 2026 budget law treats these as project-by-project centrally-managed lines, the same architecture as the road programme[^1]. The classification question turns on what the buildings are *for*. Premises that house genuine rights-protection and constitutional-precondition functions — courts, the offices through which the legislature and the rule-of-law apparatus operate — are legitimate state assets, and the construction needed to provide them is a legitimate, if reviewable, capital line. But a 74.6 milliárd Ft annual line for "individual building investments," undifferentiated in the chapter, finances a programme that has in recent years been dominated by the relocation of ministries and public bodies into reconstructed prestige premises rather than by replacement of genuinely unfit working accommodation. The mechanism here is the one the chapter's structure hides best. A ministry already occupies functional premises. Rebuilding it into a more prestigious building in a more prestigious location does not accumulate productive capital — the administrative function is unchanged, the headcount is unchanged, the public service delivered is unchanged. It is consumption: the state has redirected saving from whatever the taxpayer or a market investor would have done with it into a building whose additional value over the adequate existing premises is the prestige itself. The visible result is a handsome reconstructed building; the unseen is the productive capital formation — the private plant, the housing, the equipment — that the same 74.6 milliárd Ft would have financed had it not been taxed away. For a worker at Hungary's median monthly gross wage — approximately 540,000 Ft according to KSH's most recently published kereseti (earnings) data[^3] — this single line represents on the order of 19,000–20,000 Ft a year in tax — a meaningful sum, directed at upgrading the offices of an administration whose work does not change because the offices changed. This does not condemn every project inside the line. Genuine replacement of unsafe or functionally obsolete premises for constitutional-precondition bodies is defensible. But the line as a whole, at this scale and with this composition, does not pass the capital test, and the honest classification is a Phase-Out: wind the general "individual building investment" programme down to a defensible residual confined to genuine replacement need.