Ministry of Construction and Transport

Rationale

This is the single largest line in the chapter: 307,000.0 millió Ft reimbursing the cost of rail passenger public service — the payment that covers the gap between what rail passengers pay in fares and what it costs to carry them. This is a different thing from the infrastructure-operation line above, and the distinction is the heart of the classification. Maintaining the track is keeping a network asset serviceable; reimbursing the passenger service is holding the fare below the cost of carriage and funding the difference from general taxation. The line is, in mechanism, a consumption subsidy: it lowers the price of one particular service — rail travel — for the people who use it, and funds the reduction from taxes paid by the whole population, including the majority who do not travel by rail or who travel on routes the subsidy does not reach. The within-class distributional pattern is worth naming. A general rail-fare subsidy of this size is not neutral across the income distribution: regular rail commuting into and between the larger towns is used more by employed, urban, and higher-income travellers than by the lowest-income households, many of whom are not commuting by rail at all; the funding, drawn from the general tax base, falls on every wage-earner including those in regions and occupations the rail network serves least. A worker in a small settlement with no usable rail service, paying SZJA and szociális hozzájárulási adó out of every month's wage, is part-funding a fare reduction for a commuter whose journey the subsidy makes cheaper. The classification is Phase-Out rather than Keep because a permanent, universal, cost-reimbursement subsidy of rail fares is not a state function the frame keeps — but it is Phase-Out rather than Immediate Cut for two reasons. First, a large number of households have arranged their lives — where they live, where they work — around the current cost of rail commuting, and an abrupt removal of the subsidy would strand that reliance. Second, the social-policy concern that a fare rise would fall hardest on genuinely low-income rail users is real, and the honest answer is not a universal price cap but a targeted mechanism — concessionary fares for low-income, elderly, student, and disabled travellers — that protects the people the universal subsidy is loosely assumed to protect, at a fraction of the cost. The six-year phase-out moves rail fares toward cost-reflective levels in steps, with the targeted concessionary scheme standing up alongside, so that the protected travellers keep a reduced fare and the general subsidy to all rail users unwinds.

Rationale

This line — 277,000.0 millió Ft, the third-largest in the chapter — is the bus passenger service "ellentételezés" (compensation), a separate and much larger payment than the bus "költségtérítés" (cost reimbursement) line above. The budget uses two different words for two payments to the same activity: a cost-reimbursement of 40,500.0 millió Ft and a compensation of 277,000.0 millió Ft. In the public-service-obligation framework, the "compensation" is the payment to the bus operator for running services on routes and at frequencies that the operator would not run on fare revenue alone — the loss-making rural and inter-settlement routes that a public-service-obligation mandate requires. This is the largest single subsidy in the bus network, and it is, in mechanism, a combination of two things: a genuine support for transport access in thin-demand areas, and the loss-funding of a state-owned bus operator whose cost base is not tested by competition. The classification is Phase-Out, and the reform is not the abandonment of rural transport access but the replacement of an untested, operator-level compensation with a tendered, route-level mechanism. Where a rural route genuinely needs to be supported, the support should be put out to competitive tender — the public-service obligation specified, and operators bidding for the lowest subsidy to run it — so that the compensation pays the competitively-established cost of providing the access rather than the reported loss of a single state operator. This is the standard public-service-obligation tendering model, and it separates the legitimate question (which thin-demand routes does the public want supported) from the soft-budget question (is the operator's cost base efficient). The six-year horizon allows the route network to be specified, the public-service obligations defined, and the tendering rounds run, with current services continuing throughout.

Rationale

This is one of the two largest lines in the chapter: 210,000.0 millió Ft paid as an availability fee for the motorway network. Since September 2022 the operation, maintenance, and development of roughly 1,237 km of the Hungarian motorway and express-road network has been carried out under a 35-year concession contract by a single concessionaire, MKIF Magyar Koncessziós Infrastruktúra Fejlesztő Zrt., to which the state pays a kilometre-based "rendelkezésre állási díj" (availability fee) for operating, maintaining, and developing the network. The classification has to separate two things the line fuses. The motorway network itself is durable, publicly-relevant infrastructure with a genuine network character — that is not at issue. What is at issue is the contractual form through which it is financed: a 35-year, single-concessionaire, availability-fee structure under which the state commits to a multi-decade stream of payments to one operator. An availability-fee concession is not the only way to keep a motorway network operated and maintained — the maintenance and operation of the ordinary public road network appears elsewhere in this same chapter as a directly budgeted line, not as a 35-year concession — and a structure that locks the state into a single counterparty for three and a half decades is the form most exposed to the calculation and public-choice problems the frame identifies: the fee is set by negotiation rather than by competitive price discovery on each maintenance cycle, the concessionaire's profit is structurally protected by the contract rather than competed away, and the duration removes the function from periodic competitive re-tendering for a generation. The honest classification of the financing arrangement is Phase-Out: not the abrupt repudiation of the concession — the concessionaire is a contract counterparty with rights the rule of law protects, and the contract binds while it binds — but a 10-year transition in which the network's operation and maintenance is brought back to a directly-budgeted, competitively-tendered model as the concession's terms and break-points allow, with the availability-fee envelope falling toward the genuine, tendered cost of operating and maintaining the network. The 210,000.0 millió Ft is not the cost of the asphalt; it is the cost of the asphalt plus the contractual margin of a 35-year single-operator structure, and the reform recovers the margin.

Rationale

This line — 210,000.0 millió Ft — reimburses the cost of operating and maintaining the rail infrastructure network: the track, signalling, and associated infrastructure operated by MÁV's infrastructure-management company. The published business plan of the MÁV Pályaműködtetési Zrt. shows the 2025 cost-reimbursement framework divided into an operating-reimbursement component (around 148,000 millió Ft) and a renewal-reimbursement component (around 33,000 millió Ft), totalling approximately 180,800 millió Ft — materially below the 210,000 millió Ft 2026 budget line; the business plan does not separately itemise the 2026 operating and renewal components. The rail track is genuine network infrastructure — a single set of rails between two points, not replicable competitively — and keeping the track the public owns safe and serviceable is the rail counterpart of the road maintenance and renewal lines classified Keep above. The function is kept. The classification carries the qualification that runs through the whole soft-budget-constraint question in the Hungarian rail sector: a cost-reimbursement that reimburses whatever cost the infrastructure manager reports does not by itself impose the discipline of a price. Where the operator's cost is reimbursed rather than tested against a competitively-established benchmark, the incentive to drive the cost down is weak, and chronic loss-funding can crowd out the productive capital the network actually needs. The recommendation is Keep on the function — the track must be operated and maintained — with the firm qualification that the reimbursement should be benchmarked against an independently established efficient cost of infrastructure operation, and that the renewal component should be competitively tendered, so that the line reimburses the efficient cost of running the network rather than whatever cost is reported.

Rationale

This line — 180,000.0 millió Ft — funds the availability fees on the M5 and M6 motorways, which are financed under separate, older public-private-partnership concession contracts predating the 2022 network concession. The M5 concession was concluded in 1994 and comprehensively modified in 2004; the M6 sections were contracted between 2004 and 2008 on terms of 22 to 30 years. The M6 Budapest-Dunaújváros section's 22-year concession period, counted from the start of construction, reaches its end in October 2026. These contracts are the textbook case of the political-risk and calculation problems an availability-fee PPP concentrates. The fees are predominantly euro-denominated, with the Hungarian state bearing the exchange-rate risk — contrary to the international practice in which such risk is shared — and the Hungarian regulatory authority's own analysis found that the disadvantageous financial models cost the state over 100 milliárd Ft more than planned in the 2008-2012 period alone, with the contracts deviating from international practice in ways systematically unfavourable to the state. The classification again separates the asset from the financing arrangement. The M5 and M6 are durable motorway infrastructure; the PPP concessions through which they were financed are a contractual form that loaded exchange-rate risk and a protected investor return onto the taxpayer. The honest classification of the financing arrangement is Phase-Out, and the horizon here is shorter than for the 2022 network concession because these contracts are already reaching their natural expiry across this period — the M6 section in October 2026, the M5 by 2031, the remaining M6 sections by the later 2030s. The phase-out is therefore largely the disciplined non-renewal of expiring contracts: as each concession reaches its term, the motorway it covers reverts to direct, competitively-tendered operation and maintenance rather than being rolled into a successor availability-fee concession. An 8-year horizon spans the cluster of expiry dates and treats the line as the run-off of a set of finite, expiring contracts.

Rationale

This line funds the maintenance and operation of the ordinary public road network — the non-motorway roads carried by Magyar Közút — covering surface repair, signage, winter service, and routine upkeep. A road, once built, is durable physical infrastructure with a genuine network character: it cannot be unbundled into separately-priced competing segments the way generation or retail can be split from a transmission grid, and its maintenance secures the usability of an asset the public already owns. Keeping a network the state owns in serviceable condition is a defensible state function in the frame, and the line is classified Keep. The classification is on the function, not the delivery mechanism: keeping the asset maintained does not require that the maintenance work itself be done in-house, and competitive tendering of resurfacing and upkeep contracts is the discipline that keeps the cost honest. The line also records 2,000.0 millió Ft of own revenue. Keep here means: maintain the network; tender the work.

Rationale

The ÉKM is a line ministry: it sets construction and transport regulation, administers the building code, and is the contracting authority for the network-operating payments that make up the bulk of this chapter. Building rules and the rules of the road are rule-of-law infrastructure — knowable, enforceable standards through which property is developed and traffic is ordered — and the administration of that rule-making is a legitimate state function in the frame. The line is kept. Keep does not mean exempt from scrutiny, and two features of this line warrant it. First, the "Egyéb működési célú kiadások" (other operating-purpose expenditure) line of 22,920.3 millió Ft is larger than the ministry's entire personnel allocation of 20,204.0 millió Ft. A line ministry whose principal input is the time of qualified administrators and engineers should be payroll-dominated; an "other operating" line that exceeds payroll is a transfer-and-grant channel folded into the administration title, not the cost of running the ministry, and the budget data gives no breakdown of what it funds. Second, the ministry records 38,891.0 millió Ft of own operating revenue against this title — a substantial figure for a ministry administration, most plausibly fees and charges for the regulatory and licensing acts the ministry performs. The recommendation is a zero-based review of the 22,920.3 millió Ft "other operating" line at the next budget cycle: the genuine cost of administering construction and transport regulation is the payroll, the contributions, and the dologi kiadások; whatever the "other operating" line transfers should be identified and classified on its own merits, not kept by association with the ministry.

Rationale

This is the largest railway capital line in the chapter — 44,511.0 millió Ft — and the budget names its basis explicitly: railway developments that rest on an international treaty. The treaty basis is the load-bearing fact. The classical-liberal frame treats treaty commitments as binding while they bind: where the Hungarian state has contracted, in an international agreement, to carry out a defined railway development, honouring that commitment is itself a rule-of-law obligation, and the budget line that funds it is the discharge of a contracted liability rather than a discretionary allocation. The line is kept on that ground, and on the same ground as the other railway-track capital lines — track is genuine network infrastructure. The recommendation that attaches is procedural rather than classificatory: the specific treaty and the specific development it commits Hungary to should be identified and the line's horizon set by the treaty's terms, so that a future budget cycle treats the line as the finite discharge of a defined commitment, not as a permanent railway-capital channel.

Rationale

This line reimburses the cost of bus passenger public service — the bus counterpart of the rail passenger cost-reimbursement, covering the gap between bus fares and the cost of carriage. It is classified Phase-Out on the same consumption-subsidy grounds as the rail passenger line above; the key distinction is that on many rural routes the scheduled bus is the sole public transport link, used by exactly the low-income, elderly, and non-car-owning residents the targeted concessionary scheme is meant to protect — which means the concessionary mechanism carries more of the load here than on the rail network, and the design of the targeted scheme should reflect that weight. The six-year glide and the targeted scheme run in parallel with the rail line above.

Rationale

This line funds the development of industrial parks and regional infrastructure — 40,226.9 millió Ft, almost entirely capital investment. The classification turns on what the spending builds and for whom. Where the line funds genuine general-access infrastructure — a road or a utility connection that serves a region irrespective of which firms occupy it — that element belongs with the network-renewal lines above. But the "industrial park" framing describes something more specific: the state developing serviced sites, with prepared utility connections and access, that are then occupied by particular firms. That is a state-financed transfer of a development cost that a market land-and-property sector prices and supplies on its own. A serviced industrial site has a buyer — the firm that occupies it — and the value of the servicing is capturable in the price of the site; when the state funds the servicing from general taxation, the visible result is a region with prepared sites, and the unseen cost is the taxpayer who funded a development whose benefit is concentrated on the occupying firms and the landowners whose sites were serviced at public expense. A property and land-development sector that prices and supplies serviced commercial sites already operates; the case for routing the cost through the budget rests on the assumption that the state allocates development capital to the right sites better than the firms that will actually use them — and the firms, who bear the consequence of a badly-located site, hold information about demand that no central allocator can assemble. The phase-out horizon is four years because in-flight projects — sites part-developed against a committed budget — must be completed in an orderly way rather than stranded, and the protected party is the counterparties to existing development contracts. The general-infrastructure element of the line, to the extent the budget data later separates it, is reclassified Keep and folded into the regional road and utility programmes; what phases out is the industrial-park site-servicing transfer.

Rationale

This line funds the operating cost of the toll systems — the running cost of collecting the electronic motorway toll and the heavy-goods-vehicle distance toll. Road tolling is, in the frame, one of the better-aligned things in the chapter: a toll is a price, paid by the user of the road, that brings the cost of using the infrastructure home to the person who uses it rather than spreading it across all taxpayers — it is the closest the road network comes to a market price signal. The cost of operating the system that collects that price is a legitimate cost of running a user-pays mechanism, and the line is kept. The classification carries one observation that belongs with it: the toll system as a whole — this operating line plus the company-ownership and pass-through lines — should be assessed as a net position against the 58,600.0 millió Ft of toll revenue the system generates, and the operating cost should be tested for efficiency against that revenue. A toll system whose collection cost consumes an excessive share of the toll revenue is a user-pays mechanism run inefficiently; the recommendation is Keep on the function, with an operating-efficiency review of the collection cost against the revenue.

Rationale

This line — 34,000.0 millió Ft — funds the energy cost of transport public services: the traction electricity, diesel, and fuel cost of running the rail and bus networks. The line is, in substance, a component of the operating cost of the passenger services already funded by the cost-reimbursement and compensation lines above — energy is one of the inputs into running a train or a bus, alongside crew, rolling stock, and maintenance. Carving the energy cost out as a separate support line is an artefact of how the budget responded to the 2022-2023 energy price shock: when fuel and electricity prices spiked, a separate energy-support line absorbed the increase rather than letting it flow through the operators' cost base. The honest classification is that the energy cost of a transport service is part of that service's cost and belongs inside the service's own funding line, not as a free-standing support. A separate, open-ended energy-cost-support line also blunts every incentive the operators have to manage energy efficiently — if the energy bill is reimbursed in full on a dedicated line, there is no pressure to economise on it. The line is phased out over three years by folding the energy cost back into the operators' cost base, where it sits as one input among others and is subject to the same benchmarking and tendering discipline recommended for the cost-reimbursement lines. This is a reclassification, not a service cut: the trains and buses continue to run, and their energy is paid for as part of their cost rather than on a separate line.

Rationale

This line funds capital investment in water utilities — the development and renewal of water-supply and wastewater infrastructure. The water-supply and sewerage network is the textbook case of genuine network infrastructure: a single set of pipes serving a settlement is not replicable competitively, the asset is durable, and the consequence of failure — contaminated supply, untreated discharge — is an irreversible-harm question rather than a consumer-preference question. Investment in the network the public owns is a defensible state function, and the line is kept. Two qualifications attach. First, the recurring debate in the Hungarian water sector is not whether the network should be maintained but whether the tariff charged to users covers the cost of maintaining it: where a regulated tariff is held below the cost of carriage, the shortfall reappears as a capital-subsidy line like this one, and the honest reform is to bring the user tariff toward cost-reflective levels so that the people who use the water carry the cost of the pipes, with the network element regulated and a defined support mechanism for genuine hardship rather than a universal cap. Second, as with every capital line in the chapter, the procurement should be competitively tendered. The function is Keep; the financing mix between user tariff and capital subsidy is the open question.

Rationale

This line funds the "pass-through costs and taxes" associated with operating the toll systems — by its own description a technical pass-through line, money that flows through the toll-system accounts as taxes and transferable costs rather than a programme or a discretionary allocation. A pass-through line is not a candidate for the transition taxonomy in the ordinary sense: it is an accounting conduit, and it is kept as such. The substantive question — whether the toll system as a whole is run efficiently — is the net-position question in the Key Observations, not a classification of this technical line.

Rationale

This line funds capital investment in the railway network — track modernisation and renewal under a "sustainability and modernisation" heading. The railway track is durable network infrastructure with a genuine network character: a single set of rails between two points cannot be replicated competitively, and the track is the part of the rail system where the network argument genuinely holds, as distinct from the contestable elements (passenger-service operation, freight haulage, retail). Capital renewal of track the public owns is spending on a durable asset, and the function is kept. The classification carries the qualifications that apply to every large capital line in this chapter: this is a finite build, not a recurring entitlement; the budget should show the capital programme declining toward a steady-state renewal rate rather than rolling the envelope forward; and railway capital procurement is a domain where competitive tendering is the discipline that keeps the cost honest. The function is Keep; the delivery is to be tendered and the line tracked as a finite programme.

Rationale

This line funds capital renewal of the national road network — the rebuilding, as opposed to routine maintenance, of road surfaces and structures. Like the maintenance line above, this is spending on durable infrastructure the public already owns, and renewing a road that has reached the end of its surface life is the capital counterpart of keeping it maintained. The function is kept. The same delivery qualification applies, and more sharply: a capital renewal line is exactly where procurement discipline matters most, because the work is lumpy, contract-based, and let to a small number of large contractors. The case for keeping the road network in serviceable condition does not extend to whatever margin a non-competitive procurement adds to the cost of doing so. The line is Keep on the function, with the firm qualification that renewal contracts are competitively tendered and the budget distinguishes genuine renewal from capacity expansion.

Rationale

This line reimburses the cost of suburban community transport — the commuter services linking the suburban belts to the larger towns. The mechanism is the same fare-below-cost consumption subsidy as the rail and bus passenger lines, and the classification is the same Phase-Out for the same reasons: a permanent universal subsidy of suburban commuter fares is not a state function the frame keeps, household reliance on current commuting cost is real, and the honest path is a phased move toward cost-reflective fares with a targeted concessionary scheme. Suburban commuter travel skews, if anything, more toward employed and higher-income travellers than the network as a whole, which sharpens the within-class point: the general subsidy lowers the commuting cost of suburban earners and is funded from a tax base that includes the lower-income households least likely to be making that commute. The six-year glide runs in parallel with the rail and bus passenger lines and uses the same targeted concessionary scheme.

Rationale

This line funds the operation of state-owned properties in the Budavári Palotanegyed (Buda Castle Palace quarter), managed by the Várkapitányság Nonprofit Zrt. The reconstruction of the Palace quarter is a multi-year capital programme; this line is the separate recurring cost of operating the buildings once delivered — caretaking, utilities, security, and grounds maintenance of the reconstructed palace buildings and the public spaces around them. The classification turns on what the recurring operating cost is for. Some of these buildings have a defined state use: the reconstructed József Archduke Palace is to house the Alkotmánybíróság (Constitutional Court), and the operating cost of a building that houses a constitutional institution properly belongs with that institution's own chapter, where it is funded as part of the cost of the institution. The remainder is the operating cost of a heritage property complex held for cultural, ceremonial, and tourism use — and that is not a state function the frame keeps. A palace quarter with museums, exhibition space, and public grounds is a cultural and tourism asset, and a cultural-tourism asset of this scale has its own revenue base: admission, venue hire, commercial concessions, catering, and event income are how comparable heritage estates carry their operating cost. Funding the operation of the quarter from general taxation, with no visible revenue line, means the visitor who uses the site and the taxpayer who never visits pay the same way for it. The line is phased out over five years: the operating cost attributable to buildings housing state institutions is transferred to those institutions' chapters, and the remainder is migrated onto the admission, venue-hire, and commercial-concession revenue the site can generate. Five years is the realistic horizon because the reconstruction programme is itself completing across this period and the operating model — which buildings are institutional, which are cultural-commercial — cannot be settled until the buildings are delivered and in use.

Rationale

This line funds the "Mohács 500" commemorative year and the developments attached to it — the 500th anniversary, in 2026, of the 1526 Battle of Mohács. A commemorative-year programme is a discretionary allocation in the most direct sense: it is a sum of money, decided by political officeholders, to mark an anniversary, with the recipients of the "related developments" — construction projects, events, commemorative works — chosen at official discretion. There is no rights-protection function here, no constitutional precondition, and no dependency chain tying any citizen's life plan to the line; what it funds is the public marking of a historical date, and the "kapcsolódó fejlesztések" (related developments) framing means the bulk of the 7,229.3 millió Ft is capital spending whose connection to the anniversary is the occasion for the allocation rather than an independent infrastructure need. A commemoration that a society genuinely wants is exactly the kind of activity a voluntary sector — historical associations, municipalities, churches, cultural foundations, sponsors — funds and organises; the case for 7,229.3 millió Ft of compulsory financing routed through official discretion is weak. For a worker at the roughly 540,000 Ft median monthly gross wage, the commemorative-year lines in this chapter together absorb on the order of 1,500-1,700 Ft a year in tax — not a large sum per household, but the size of the line is not the point: an anniversary marked at official discretion is a discretionary allocation whether it is large or small, and the principle scales. The line is eliminated in the 2026 cycle. Genuine infrastructure projects bundled under the "related developments" heading, if any are independently warranted, are reclassified into the relevant infrastructure chapters on their own merits; the commemorative element is not tax-financed.

Rationale

This line funds the operation of the axle-load weighing system — the fixed and mobile weighing infrastructure that enforces vehicle weight limits on the road network. Overweight heavy goods vehicles inflict disproportionate, cumulative damage on road surfaces and structures: the damage a vehicle does rises steeply with axle load, so a small number of overloaded vehicles can impose a large share of the maintenance cost that every road user and taxpayer then funds. Weight-limit enforcement is the mechanism that makes the hauliers who cause the damage bear the limit rather than passing the cost to the maintenance budget. The line is a genuine rule-enforcement function tied directly to the protection of an asset the public owns, and it is kept. As with other lines in the chapter, Keep does not preclude an operating-efficiency review of the system's running cost.

Rationale

This line funds the "other expenditure" associated with the ministry's exercise of ownership rights over the state-owned companies in its portfolio — the administrative cost of the state acting as shareholder. The state's exercise of ownership rights over the companies it owns is a real activity that has a real cost; the question the frame puts is whether the underlying state ownership of transport companies should persist, and that question belongs to the chapters of the companies themselves, not to this administrative line. As a line in this chapter, the ownership-administration cost is a bounded administrative function, and the "other expenditure" framing with no breakdown makes itemisation costly relative to the sum. The line is held at its nominal level. The deeper point — that a state holding transport companies is a state exposed to the soft-budget-constraint pathology, where chronic loss-funding crowds out productive capital — is the subject of the network-operating lines below and of the companies' own chapters; this line is the administrative residue of that ownership and is frozen.

Rationale

This line funds cultural-heritage protection tasks — the listing, monitoring, and conservation oversight of protected buildings and monuments. Heritage protection sits at the boundary of the frame. The regulatory element — the legal listing of a building and the enforcement of the restriction on altering it — is a rule-of-law function: a heritage listing is a defined, knowable encumbrance on a property, and administering that register is a modest administrative activity. The grant-and-support element — the discretionary funding of conservation work — has the structure of subjective allocation, and conservation of privately-owned heritage property has a substantial voluntary funding base in foundations, trusts, and the owners whose property values rise with the conservation. The line is held at its nominal level: the regulatory function is bounded and self-limiting, and a nominal freeze reduces the discretionary-grant share in real terms over a decade without an abrupt cut to either component, while a future budget cycle separates the register-administration cost from the conservation-grant pool.

Rationale

This line funds "centralised corporate services" — the shared back-office functions (IT, finance and accounting, procurement, administration) consolidated for the state-owned companies in the ministry's portfolio. Recent organisational changes in the portfolio have moved exactly these functions — IT, finance, accounting, procurement, and administrative work — into a shared service centre. The classification turns on what a shared service centre is. Back-office services — accounting, payroll processing, IT support, procurement administration — are ordinary commercial services with a deep, competitive private market: they are exactly what business-process outsourcing firms and accountancy and IT providers supply, at a price, to companies across the economy. Consolidating them into a state-funded centre does not create a capacity the market lacks; it relocates a priced service into a tax-financed line. A state-owned company that needs accounting and IT support can buy it — from a competitive market that prices the service and bears the consequence of doing it badly — and the cost then sits, correctly, with the company that uses the service rather than as a separate 3,800.0 millió Ft subsidy line in the ministry's chapter. The phase-out horizon is three years: the protected party is the staff of the shared service centre, a group with directly marketable skills, and the realistic transition is for the state-owned companies to procure these services and for the centre's staff to move into the private business-process sector.

Rationale

This line funds capital investment in cultural value-preservation — the conservation and restoration of heritage buildings and cultural assets. As with the heritage-protection line above, the conservation of heritage property is at the boundary of the frame: there is no rights-protection function and no constitutional precondition, and conservation has a genuine voluntary funding base, but the assets in question are a finite, already-existing stock whose loss would be irreversible. The line is held at its nominal level. A bounded conservation mandate over an existing stock of heritage assets is the kind of finite, self-limiting function the nominal freeze fits: real-terms erosion reduces the tax-financed share over a decade, and the conservation of privately-beneficial heritage property should over time draw more on the owners and foundations that the value accrues to.

Rationale

This line funds road traffic safety and related environmental tasks. The notable feature is that the line is fully self-financing: it records 3,338.0 millió Ft of own revenue against 3,338.0 millió Ft of expenditure — the activity is carried by the fees and charges it generates, not by the general taxpayer. Traffic safety regulation and enforcement is part of the rule-of-the-road function, and a self-financing line that imposes no net call on the budget is the least contentious item in the chapter. It is kept.

Rationale

The Magyar Műszaki és Közlekedési Múzeum is the national museum of technology and transport — a collection-holding institution with a custodial mandate over historic locomotives, vehicles, and technical artefacts. A museum is not a rights-protection function and not a constitutional precondition; on the frame's first questions it is a candidate for voluntary financing — admission charges, membership, sponsorship, and the donor and bequest base on which museums everywhere draw — and the line records 45.0 millió Ft of own revenue, roughly 1.7% of its cost, which indicates how little of the institution is currently carried by the people who use it. What holds this line short of a phase-out is the custodial element. A national technical collection is a finite, already-assembled stock of irreplaceable objects; the conservation of locomotives and vehicles already in public hands is a bounded mandate, not an expanding programme, and an abrupt cut risks dispersing or degrading a collection that cannot be reconstituted. The line is held at its nominal level. Real-terms erosion at typical inflation reduces its real share by roughly 20-25% over a decade without an active decision, which is the appropriate trajectory for a bounded custodial function whose operating and programming side should over time shift toward admission, membership, and sponsorship financing. The freeze is the analytically honest classification: not a core state function, but holding an irreplaceable public collection, with a standing expectation that the user-financed share rises from its current 1.7%.

Rationale

This line funds "cultural value-preservation tasks and programmes" — and unlike the conservation-investment lines above, which fund work on a defined stock of heritage assets, the "tasks and programmes" framing with no breakdown is the signature of a discretionary grant pool. The budget line names no recipients, no programme content, and no statutory formula; what it funds is decided by the allocating official. That is subjective allocation by a political officeholder: the benefit is concentrated on whichever cultural organisations and programmes are chosen, the cost is spread across all taxpayers, and the recipients acquire a structural interest in the line's continuation independent of the value of any particular grant. Cultural programming is among the activities with the strongest voluntary funding base — membership, ticket revenue, sponsorship, patron and foundation giving — and the case for a discretionary tax-financed pool, as distinct from the bounded conservation of a defined heritage stock, is weak. The line is phased out over three years: current recipients have planned activity against an expected grant, and the glide gives them a full cycle to shift onto membership, ticket, and sponsorship financing.

Rationale

This line funds the cost associated with the state's exercise of ownership rights over the Nemzeti Útdíjfizetési Szolgáltató Zrt. (National Toll Payment Services company), the operator of the electronic toll system. The line is small and technical — the administrative cost of the state acting as shareholder of the toll company — and it sits within the toll-system cluster whose net position is examined below. It is kept as a technical ownership-administration line; the substantive question of the toll system is the net-cost question taken up in the Key Observations.

Rationale

This is the chapter's contingency reserve — an unallocated sum held against in-year needs that cannot be foreseen at budget time. A modest reserve within a chapter of this size (1,500.0 millió Ft against a 1,712,429.0 millió Ft envelope, under 0.1%) is ordinary prudent budgeting, not a programme: it is not a transfer, not a grant pool, and not a function to be phased out. It is kept as a technical line. The reserve should, as the year proceeds, be allocated against genuine contingencies; an unallocated reserve that is routinely spent on discretionary additions at year-end would be a different and reviewable matter, but the line as a budgeted contingency is kept.

Rationale

This line funds "transport coordination and other tasks" — a residual administrative line covering coordination activity that does not fall under the modal lines above. The "and other tasks" framing and the absence of a breakdown make this a catch-all line rather than a specified function: it is not a rights-protection function and not a discretionary grant pool of identifiable size, but a small administrative residual whose content the budget data does not disclose. The line is held at its nominal level. The administrative cost of itemising and separately classifying a line this size would exceed any saving, and a nominal freeze lets real-terms erosion reduce its share over a decade while a future budget cycle establishes what the "other tasks" component actually funds.

Rationale

This line funds the care of historic garden heritage — the upkeep of protected historic gardens, parks, and designed landscapes. As with the other heritage lines, this is a bounded custodial function over an existing, finite stock of heritage landscapes rather than an expanding programme, and it is small. The line is held at its nominal level: the administrative cost of separately reclassifying a line this size would exceed any saving, and a nominal freeze reduces its real share over a decade while the custodial function continues.

Rationale

This line funds water-transport tasks — the regulatory and coordination functions for river navigation, principally on the Danube and Tisza. As with aviation, the safety-regulation element is a protective function, and the line is small and routine. It is kept.

Rationale

This line funds the "Visegrád 700" commemorative year and its related developments. The analysis is the same as for the Mohács 500 line: a commemorative-year programme is a discretionary allocation to mark an anniversary, with recipients chosen at official discretion, no rights-protection function, no constitutional precondition, and no dependency chain. The line is smaller, but the size of a line is not the criterion — the mechanism is, and the mechanism is identical. The line is eliminated in the 2026 cycle; the marking of the anniversary is left to the historical associations, municipalities, and sponsors that fund such commemorations voluntarily.

Rationale

This line funds aviation-sector tasks at the ministry level — the regulatory, oversight, and coordination functions associated with civil aviation. Aviation safety regulation is a protective function: the irreversibility of the harm in an aviation failure makes the enforcement of airworthiness and operating standards a matter the frame treats as a legitimate protective state function rather than a discretionary programme. The line is small and routine. It is kept.

Rationale

This line funds construction-sector tasks at the ministry level — the regulatory, standard-setting, and oversight activity associated with the building code. A knowable, enforceable building standard is rule-of-law infrastructure: it is the framework within which property is developed and within which a buyer can rely on what was built. The line is small and routine. It is kept.

Rationale

This line funds the expenditure associated with the "national planning assets" — the administrative cost of managing a defined category of state-held planning-related assets. The line is very small (42.5 millió Ft) and records its own offsetting revenue of 200.0 millió Ft. The administrative management of a defined state asset register is a bounded, routine function, and the line imposes no material net call on the budget. It is kept as a technical line.