Prime Minister's Cabinet Office

Rationale

The Nemzetbiztonsági Szakszolgálat is the technical and operational support service for the national-security community — covert technical operations, secure communications, and the technical infrastructure on which the other services depend. It is the largest single institution in the chapter at 66.2 milliárd Ft. The function is a rights-protection and external-defence support activity, and the classification is Keep. The scale of the Dologi kiadások line (16,294.5 millió Ft) and the capital lines reflects the technical, equipment-heavy nature of the work; these are retained as part of the core function rather than flagged for cut. As with the other services, Keep is compatible with — and should be paired with — robust parliamentary oversight of the service's mandate and procurement.

Rationale

This is a statutory budget for the government to advertise itself and to run "national consultation" mailings to the population. Call it what it is rather than what the line name implies. The "national consultation" is a periodic mass mailing of leading questions to the electorate, followed by an advertising campaign promoting the government's framing of the answers. The activity is not cheap, and the chapter line is not the whole of it: the first fifteen national consultations between 2011 and 2025 cost at least 119 milliárd Ft in public money, of which roughly 90 milliárd Ft — three forints in every four — went on advertising rather than on the technical mechanics of collecting opinions. The 39,470.0 millió Ft in this chapter is the 2026 budget envelope for the continuation of that activity. Consider who benefits and who pays. The visible beneficiary is the governing administration of the day, which receives a publicly-funded channel to communicate its preferred framing of national questions directly to every household, and the media-buying and creative agencies that win the campaign contracts. The cost-bearer is every taxpayer, including those who disagree with the message their money is paying to broadcast. At roughly 4 million personal income tax filers, this single line costs each approximately 9,000 Ft a year of personal income tax — a small sum individually, a deliberate one collectively: it is a transfer from the general taxpayer to the incumbent's communication operation. There is a deeper point, and it is one a reader of any political affiliation can hold. A future government of any composition would inherit the same line, the same statutory basis, and the same temptation. The objection is not to who currently administers the budget; it is to the existence of a tax-funded mechanism for the executive to promote itself. Genuine government information — how to access a service, what a deadline is, a public-health instruction — is a small fraction of this envelope and can be delivered through the ordinary administrative budgets of the responsible ministries. Persuasion campaigns and consultation advertising are not government information; they are a political activity, and political activity is properly financed by those who choose to support it, voluntarily, not by compulsory taxation of those who do not. The classification is Immediate Cut; the year-1 saving is 39,470.0 millió Ft.

Rationale

This line funds the hosting of major international sporting events on Hungarian soil — the standing budget out of which the state underwrites world championships, finals, and similar events. Hosting international sporting events is not a rights-protection function, not a constitutional precondition, and not a response to involuntary harm; it is a discretionary state choice to subsidise the production of entertainment and prestige spectacles. The economic case routinely made for it — tourism, visibility, induced spending — addresses what is visible. What is invisible is the alternative use of 38.5 milliárd Ft: the tax reductions, infrastructure improvements, or budget consolidation that the same money would have funded. The economic literature on major sports-event hosting has repeatedly questioned whether public subsidies are recouped through tourism and induced spending. An event that genuinely generates the commercial returns its promoters claim does not need a state subsidy: ticket revenue, broadcasting rights, and commercial sponsorship would finance it, and the international sporting federations and private promoters who benefit would carry the cost and the risk. This is treated as a Phase-Out rather than an Immediate Cut for one reason specific to this line: hosting agreements for major events are signed years in advance, and the 2026 budget envelope partly funds events for which the state has already given binding commitments to international federations. Abrogating a signed hosting contract mid-cycle would breach the good-faith reliance of contractual counterparties — the framework protects contracts while they bind. The realistic horizon is short: a 2-year linear run-off honours the in-flight 2026 hosting commitments in year 1 (bridge cost 19,268.5 millió Ft, the portion still contractually committed) and reaches fiscal zero in year 2, after which no new event subsidies are entered into. The protected party is the set of federations and organisers holding current signed agreements, not a body of state employees; the bridge is contract run-off, not severance. From year 2 the full 38,537.0 millió Ft is saved annually, and future events are hosted only where private finance and commercial revenue cover the cost.

Rationale

This line channels 38,024.0 millió Ft of taxpayer money in grants to non-profit associations, civil-society organisations, and public bodies (köztestületek), allocated through the Cabinet Office. The civil-society sector is the textbook case for voluntary finance. An association exists to advance the shared interest of its members and supporters; the people who value its work are, by definition, identifiable, and the natural way to finance it is the membership subscription, the charitable donation, and the foundation grant. A genuinely valued civil-society organisation can raise funds from the public that values it. When the state inserts itself as a grant-giver, three things follow, and they follow as a chain. First, the allocation decision moves from thousands of individual donors making voluntary choices to a small number of officeholders making a political one — the state cannot read the dispersed knowledge of which causes the public actually wants to support, because it has replaced the price signal (the donation) with an administrative judgement. Second, the grant creates a dependency: organisations restructure around the expectation of continued state funding, and a professional class emerges whose livelihood depends on the grant line rather than on the support of the constituency the organisation nominally serves. Third, that dependency generates a permanent lobby for the line's preservation, independent of whether the underlying activity commands voluntary support. The honest treatment is to return civil-society finance to the voluntary sphere. The classification is Immediate Cut: the 38,024.0 millió Ft is removed from the budget, and the sector is financed as civil society is supposed to be financed — by the members, donors, and foundations that value the work. The transition is real and should be named honestly: organisations that have built their operations around state grants will face a funding gap, and some will contract or close. But the test of a civil-society organisation is precisely whether the public values it enough to fund it voluntarily; a body that can only survive on compulsory transfers from taxpayers who were never asked is not demonstrating social value, it is demonstrating political access. A standing reform option, if Parliament wishes to retain a fiscal channel without the discretion, is to convert a portion of the saving into a percentage-designation mechanism — taxpayers directing a defined slice of their own income tax to a registered organisation of their choice — which preserves the link between the citizen and the cause while removing the officeholder from the allocation decision. The year-1 saving on the line as budgeted is 38,024.0 millió Ft.

Rationale

This line funds the staging of "priority state events" — official ceremonies, commemorations, and state occasions. A modest budget for genuine constitutional ceremony — the formal events that attend the functioning of the state — could be defended as an incident of running the institutions. But 26,353.6 millió Ft is not a modest ceremonial budget; it is a substantial discretionary events-production line, and the chapter gives no breakdown that would let a reader separate constitutional necessity from political showcase. The honest reading of an undifferentiated 26.4 milliárd Ft "state events" appropriation is that it is discretionary spending on occasions chosen by officeholders for their political value, with the genuine constitutional minimum a small fraction of the total. The classification is Immediate Cut. Where Parliament identifies specific events with a real constitutional or legal basis, those can be funded through the ordinary administrative budgets of the responsible institutions, at their actual and far smaller cost. The year-1 saving is 26,353.6 millió Ft.

Rationale

Counter-intelligence and the protection of the constitutional order against hostile foreign and internal threats is a rights-protection and external-defence function. The Alkotmányvédelmi Hivatal is the domestic civilian counter-intelligence service. Protecting the state against espionage, sabotage, and the covert activity of hostile foreign powers is among the narrowest and most defensible of state functions — it secures the conditions under which rights can be exercised at all. The classification is Keep. Keep does not preclude operating-efficiency review or scrutiny of the agency's mandate boundaries — an intelligence service is exactly the kind of body where mandate creep and weak external oversight are real risks — but it precludes phase-out. The personnel line is retained in full.

Rationale

The Nemzetbiztonsági Szakszolgálat is the technical and operational support service for the national-security community — covert technical operations, secure communications, and the technical infrastructure on which the other services depend. It is the largest single institution in the chapter at 66.2 milliárd Ft. The function is a rights-protection and external-defence support activity, and the classification is Keep. The scale of the Dologi kiadások line (16,294.5 millió Ft) and the capital lines reflects the technical, equipment-heavy nature of the work; these are retained as part of the core function rather than flagged for cut. As with the other services, Keep is compatible with — and should be paired with — robust parliamentary oversight of the service's mandate and procurement.

Rationale

This is a discretionary chapter-managed appropriation labelled "government sectoral policies" — a heading that, like "priority social relations", describes a category of officeholder discretion rather than a defined state function with a measurable output. Genuine sectoral policy work — the analysis, drafting, and implementation of policy in a given domain — is properly carried out and funded within the line ministries responsible for those domains, where it is visible against a departmental mandate and a departmental budget. A separate, centrally-held 16,144.9 millió Ft pool for "sectoral policies" at the Cabinet Office is a discretionary fund: its defining feature is that the Cabinet Office decides, ad hoc, what it pays for. With no rights-protection content, no dependency chain at citizen scale, and no contractual counterparties to protect, it is an Immediate Cut on principle. Any genuine policy activity it currently funds belongs in, and can be absorbed by, the relevant ministry's own appropriation. The year-1 saving is 16,144.9 millió Ft.

Rationale

The Információs Hivatal is Hungary's civilian foreign-intelligence service — the gathering and assessment of intelligence on threats and developments outside the country's borders. Foreign intelligence in support of the state's defence against external threats is a core function under the framework; the classification is Keep. The retained envelope of 35.0 milliárd Ft is held in full.

Rationale

The Információs Hivatal is Hungary's civilian foreign-intelligence service — the gathering and assessment of intelligence on threats and developments outside the country's borders. Foreign intelligence in support of the state's defence against external threats is a core function under the framework; the classification is Keep. The retained envelope of 35.0 milliárd Ft is held in full.

Rationale

This is a discretionary appropriation, allocated by political officeholders, for "priority social relations" — a heading broad enough to cover a wide range of relationship-building, sponsorship, and engagement spending at the discretion of the Cabinet Office. The breadth of the heading is the problem. There is no defined function here against which a level of spending could be tested: the chapter gives a number and a label, and the label describes a category of political discretion rather than a state activity with an output. This is the pattern the framework treats as a strong Immediate Cut on principle: discretionary allocation of taxpayer money by officeholders, with no rights-protection content, no dependency chain tying citizens' life plans to the line, and no contractual counterparties whose good-faith reliance abolition would strand. The size of the line is not the criterion; an 11,000.0 millió Ft discretionary fund and a 110 millió Ft one would both be Immediate Cuts. The year-1 saving is 11,000.0 millió Ft.

Rationale

The Cabinet Office is the staff apparatus of the minister responsible for general political coordination. A government needs an executive coordinating office; that function — interministerial coordination, cabinet servicing, the dossier work behind the legislative programme — is a legitimate part of running the executive, and the operating costs (Dologi kiadások, 1,759.3 millió Ft) and capital line (Beruházások, 580.7 millió Ft) are retained on that basis. The capital line is small enough that a nominal freeze, eroding it by roughly 22 millió Ft per year in real terms, is the proportionate treatment rather than an outright cut. The personnel line is different, and the reason is in the chapter itself. The Cabinet Office does not only coordinate; it administers the 174 milliárd Ft communication, events, and grant cluster analysed below. A substantial part of the 10,499.4 millió Ft payroll exists to run campaigns, consultations, and ceremonial spending that this analysis recommends ending. When that activity goes, the staff who delivered it no longer have a function. The honest treatment is therefore a payroll Phase-Out tied to the wind-down of the discretionary cluster: a 2-year severance-with-overlap bridge that keeps affected staff on full salary while they move to private-sector employment, and permits them to keep both incomes during the transition. The protected party is roughly the share of the office's establishment dedicated to communication and events management — a body of permanent-contract civil servants on the central-administration salary tier, whose skills (procurement, project management, public relations) transfer directly to the private market. The bridge cost is the full 10,499.4 millió Ft payroll plus 1,524.0 millió Ft of employer contributions, paid across years 1 and 2, with the line reaching fiscal zero in year 3. A residual coordinating staff would continue under the retained Dologi kiadások; the Phase-Out figure here is deliberately the whole personnel line, because the chapter does not break the establishment into coordination and communication sub-units, and the framework's discipline is to size the bridge to the protected party rather than guess a split the budget does not show.

Rationale

The Nemzeti Információs Központ is the analytical and intelligence-coordination body of the civilian national-security community — it integrates and assesses intelligence across the services for the executive. Intelligence assessment in support of national defence and the protection of the constitutional order is a core rights-protection function; the classification is Keep. The same oversight caveat applies.

Rationale

The Nemzetbiztonsági Szakszolgálat is the technical and operational support service for the national-security community — covert technical operations, secure communications, and the technical infrastructure on which the other services depend. It is the largest single institution in the chapter at 66.2 milliárd Ft. The function is a rights-protection and external-defence support activity, and the classification is Keep. As with the other services, Keep is compatible with — and should be paired with — robust parliamentary oversight of the service's mandate and procurement.

Rationale

This line funds the operation of the technical application required by data-protection law to render personal data permanently inaccessible — the secure-erasure infrastructure that gives effect to deletion and right-to-erasure obligations. Secure destruction of personal data on legal request is a property-and-privacy-rights protection function: it enforces the individual's claim over information about themselves. The classification is Keep. The line should be subject to ordinary operating-cost scrutiny — 5,000.0 millió Ft is a substantial sum for an erasure utility, and the procurement deserves the same value-for-money review any IT contract gets — but the function itself is retained.

Rationale

The Nemzetbiztonsági Szakszolgálat is the technical and operational support service for the national-security community — covert technical operations, secure communications, and the technical infrastructure on which the other services depend. The function is a rights-protection and external-defence support activity, and the classification is Keep. The scale of the Dologi kiadások line (16,294.5 millió Ft) and the capital lines reflects the technical, equipment-heavy nature of the work; these are retained as part of the core function rather than flagged for cut. As with the other services, Keep is compatible with — and should be paired with — robust parliamentary oversight of the service's mandate and procurement.

Rationale

Counter-intelligence and the protection of the constitutional order against hostile foreign and internal threats is a rights-protection and external-defence function. The Alkotmányvédelmi Hivatal is the domestic civilian counter-intelligence service. Protecting the state against espionage, sabotage, and the covert activity of hostile foreign powers is among the narrowest and most defensible of state functions — it secures the conditions under which rights can be exercised at all. The classification is Keep. Keep does not preclude operating-efficiency review or scrutiny of the agency's mandate boundaries — an intelligence service is exactly the kind of body where mandate creep and weak external oversight are real risks — but it precludes phase-out.

Rationale

The Információs Hivatal is Hungary's civilian foreign-intelligence service — the gathering and assessment of intelligence on threats and developments outside the country's borders. Foreign intelligence in support of the state's defence against external threats is a core function under the framework; the classification is Keep. The retained envelope of 35.0 milliárd Ft is held in full.

Rationale

Counter-intelligence and the protection of the constitutional order against hostile foreign and internal threats is a rights-protection and external-defence function. The Alkotmányvédelmi Hivatal is the domestic civilian counter-intelligence service. Protecting the state against espionage, sabotage, and the covert activity of hostile foreign powers is among the narrowest and most defensible of state functions — it secures the conditions under which rights can be exercised at all. The classification is Keep. Keep does not preclude operating-efficiency review or scrutiny of the agency's mandate boundaries — an intelligence service is exactly the kind of body where mandate creep and weak external oversight are real risks — but it precludes phase-out. The personnel line is retained in full.

Rationale

The Nemzeti Információs Központ is the analytical and intelligence-coordination body of the civilian national-security community — it integrates and assesses intelligence across the services for the executive. Intelligence assessment in support of national defence and the protection of the constitutional order is a core rights-protection function; the classification is Keep. The same oversight caveat applies.

Rationale

Counter-intelligence and the protection of the constitutional order against hostile foreign and internal threats is a rights-protection and external-defence function. The Alkotmányvédelmi Hivatal is the domestic civilian counter-intelligence service. Protecting the state against espionage, sabotage, and the covert activity of hostile foreign powers is among the narrowest and most defensible of state functions — it secures the conditions under which rights can be exercised at all. The classification is Keep. Keep does not preclude operating-efficiency review or scrutiny of the agency's mandate boundaries — an intelligence service is exactly the kind of body where mandate creep and weak external oversight are real risks — but it precludes phase-out.

Rationale

The Információs Hivatal is Hungary's civilian foreign-intelligence service — the gathering and assessment of intelligence on threats and developments outside the country's borders. Foreign intelligence in support of the state's defence against external threats is a core function under the framework; the classification is Keep. The retained envelope of 35.0 milliárd Ft is held in full.

Rationale

The Cabinet Office is the staff apparatus of the minister responsible for general political coordination. A government needs an executive coordinating office; that function — interministerial coordination, cabinet servicing, the dossier work behind the legislative programme — is a legitimate part of running the executive, and the operating costs (Dologi kiadások, 1,759.3 millió Ft) and capital line (Beruházások, 580.7 millió Ft) are retained on that basis.

Rationale

The Cabinet Office is the staff apparatus of the minister responsible for general political coordination. A government needs an executive coordinating office; that function — interministerial coordination, cabinet servicing, the dossier work behind the legislative programme — is a legitimate part of running the executive, and the operating costs (Dologi kiadások, 1,759.3 millió Ft) and capital line (Beruházások, 580.7 millió Ft) are retained on that basis. The capital line is small enough that a nominal freeze, eroding it by roughly 22 millió Ft per year in real terms, is the proportionate treatment rather than an outright cut. The personnel line is different, and the reason is in the chapter itself. The Cabinet Office does not only coordinate; it administers the 174 milliárd Ft communication, events, and grant cluster analysed below. A substantial part of the 10,499.4 millió Ft payroll exists to run campaigns, consultations, and ceremonial spending that this analysis recommends ending. When that activity goes, the staff who delivered it no longer have a function. The honest treatment is therefore a payroll Phase-Out tied to the wind-down of the discretionary cluster: a 2-year severance-with-overlap bridge that keeps affected staff on full salary while they move to private-sector employment, and permits them to keep both incomes during the transition. The bridge cost is the full 10,499.4 millió Ft payroll plus 1,524.0 millió Ft of employer contributions, paid across years 1 and 2, with the line reaching fiscal zero in year 3.

Rationale

The Védelmi Igazgatási Hivatal administers defence and emergency-preparedness planning — the civilian co-ordination of national defence and crisis management. Defence against external aggression, and the planning and administration that makes it operable, is a core state function. The office is small (3,336.2 millió Ft) and the classification is Keep.

Rationale

This line provides budget transfers — forrásjuttatás, a resource injection — to commercial companies in which the Cabinet Office exercises ownership rights. A transfer of taxpayer money into a state-owned commercial company is a soft budget constraint in its plainest form: it is funding supplied to a firm by something other than the firm's own revenue. The mechanism is corrosive precisely because it is routine. A company that knows the budget will top up its resources does not face the discipline a privately-financed company faces — the discipline of having to cover its costs from what customers voluntarily pay. The injection substitutes a political funding decision for a market test, and the company's management optimises toward the funder rather than toward the customer. The classification is Immediate Cut: the state should not be injecting taxpayer resources into commercial companies. Where the underlying companies provide a service the public genuinely values, they can charge for it; where they cannot cover their costs that way, the resource injection is funding an activity the market is telling the state to stop. The line is small — 1,000.0 millió Ft — but the principle scales, and the year-1 saving is 1,000.0 millió Ft.

Rationale

The Kormányzati Ellenőrzési Hivatal is the government's internal financial-control and audit body — it audits the lawful and proper use of public funds within the executive. Internal audit and financial control is part of the rule-of-law infrastructure through which the state holds its own spending to account; verifying that public money is spent as the law provides protects the taxpayer's interest in not being defrauded. The classification is Keep. KEHI is the smallest institution in the chapter at 1,222.0 millió Ft, and the function — like the external audit function — is one the framework retains as a precondition of accountable public finance, distinct from the discretionary appropriations above which it exists to scrutinise.

Rationale

The Védelmi Igazgatási Hivatal administers defence and emergency-preparedness planning — the civilian co-ordination of national defence and crisis management. Defence against external aggression, and the planning and administration that makes it operable, is a core state function. The office is small (3,336.2 millió Ft) and the classification is Keep.

Rationale

This is a regulator whose existence is evidence of the problem, not its solution. The Nemzeti Kommunikációs Hivatal was established in 2014 and operates as the central procurement body that "coordinates and oversees government advertising and PR communications procurement" — it runs the communication tenders for the entire central administration and the state-owned enterprise sector. Read the rationale at face value and follow the chain. The state spends a very large sum on advertising and PR — across ministries, agencies, and state firms. That spend is large enough, and the contracting complex enough, that a dedicated office is needed to manage the tenders. So the budget funds an office to administer the advertising budget. The office is the second-best substitute for a discipline that is missing. A private firm does not need a central-communications-procurement authority because its advertising budget is disciplined by the profit-and-loss account: spend that does not return revenue shows up as a loss, and the loss is the signal to stop. State advertising has no such signal. There is no revenue line against which to test whether a campaign worked; the "return" is a political judgement made by the same officeholders who authorised the spend. The Nemzeti Kommunikációs Hivatal does not supply the missing discipline — it cannot, because it has no profit-and-loss account either. It supplies administrative tidiness: standardised tenders, unified contracting. The underlying question — should the state be buying this advertising at all — is precisely the question the office is structured not to ask. The framework's answer is that most of what the office coordinates should not be bought. Once the government communication and consultation appropriation (analysed below) is cut, the office's coordinating workload collapses with it. The honest classification is Immediate Cut, parallel to the underlying activity it supervises. The office is small — 1,633.5 millió Ft, of which roughly 1,021 millió Ft is payroll — and the staff have general procurement and communications skills; a 12-month severance arrangement absorbed within the broader Cabinet Office transition would honour the reliance of the affected employees without a separate multi-year schedule. The year-1 saving is the full 1,633.5 millió Ft.

Rationale

The Nemzeti Információs Központ is the analytical and intelligence-coordination body of the civilian national-security community — it integrates and assesses intelligence across the services for the executive. Intelligence assessment in support of national defence and the protection of the constitutional order is a core rights-protection function; the classification is Keep. The same oversight caveat applies.

Rationale

The Védelmi Igazgatási Hivatal administers defence and emergency-preparedness planning — the civilian co-ordination of national defence and crisis management. Defence against external aggression, and the planning and administration that makes it operable, is a core state function. The office is small (3,336.2 millió Ft) and the classification is Keep.

Rationale

This is a regulator whose existence is evidence of the problem, not its solution. The Nemzeti Kommunikációs Hivatal was established in 2014 and operates as the central procurement body that "coordinates and oversees government advertising and PR communications procurement" — it runs the communication tenders for the entire central administration and the state-owned enterprise sector. The office is the second-best substitute for a discipline that is missing. A private firm does not need a central-communications-procurement authority because its advertising budget is disciplined by the profit-and-loss account: spend that does not return revenue shows up as a loss, and the loss is the signal to stop. State advertising has no such signal. The Nemzeti Kommunikációs Hivatal does not supply the missing discipline — it cannot, because it has no profit-and-loss account either. Once the government communication and consultation appropriation is cut, the office's coordinating workload collapses with it. The honest classification is Immediate Cut, parallel to the underlying activity it supervises. The year-1 saving is the full 1,633.5 millió Ft.

Rationale

The Cabinet Office is the staff apparatus of the minister responsible for general political coordination. A government needs an executive coordinating office; that function — interministerial coordination, cabinet servicing, the dossier work behind the legislative programme — is a legitimate part of running the executive, and the operating costs (Dologi kiadások, 1,759.3 millió Ft) and capital line (Beruházások, 580.7 millió Ft) are retained on that basis. The capital line is small enough that a nominal freeze, eroding it by roughly 22 millió Ft per year in real terms, is the proportionate treatment rather than an outright cut.

Rationale

Counter-intelligence and the protection of the constitutional order against hostile foreign and internal threats is a rights-protection and external-defence function. The Alkotmányvédelmi Hivatal is the domestic civilian counter-intelligence service. Protecting the state against espionage, sabotage, and the covert activity of hostile foreign powers is among the narrowest and most defensible of state functions — it secures the conditions under which rights can be exercised at all. The classification is Keep. Keep does not preclude operating-efficiency review or scrutiny of the agency's mandate boundaries — an intelligence service is exactly the kind of body where mandate creep and weak external oversight are real risks — but it precludes phase-out.

Rationale

The Nemzeti Információs Központ is the analytical and intelligence-coordination body of the civilian national-security community — it integrates and assesses intelligence across the services for the executive. Intelligence assessment in support of national defence and the protection of the constitutional order is a core rights-protection function; the classification is Keep. The same oversight caveat applies.

Rationale

The Védelmi Igazgatási Hivatal administers defence and emergency-preparedness planning — the civilian co-ordination of national defence and crisis management. Defence against external aggression, and the planning and administration that makes it operable, is a core state function. The office is small (3,336.2 millió Ft) and the classification is Keep.

Rationale

The Kormányzati Ellenőrzési Hivatal is the government's internal financial-control and audit body — it audits the lawful and proper use of public funds within the executive. Internal audit and financial control is part of the rule-of-law infrastructure through which the state holds its own spending to account; verifying that public money is spent as the law provides protects the taxpayer's interest in not being defrauded. The classification is Keep. KEHI is the smallest institution in the chapter at 1,222.0 millió Ft, and the function — like the external audit function — is one the framework retains as a precondition of accountable public finance, distinct from the discretionary appropriations above which it exists to scrutinise.

Rationale

This is a regulator whose existence is evidence of the problem, not its solution. The Nemzeti Kommunikációs Hivatal was established in 2014 and operates as the central procurement body that "coordinates and oversees government advertising and PR communications procurement" — it runs the communication tenders for the entire central administration and the state-owned enterprise sector. The office is the second-best substitute for a discipline that is missing. A private firm does not need a central-communications-procurement authority because its advertising budget is disciplined by the profit-and-loss account: spend that does not return revenue shows up as a loss, and the loss is the signal to stop. State advertising has no such signal. The Nemzeti Kommunikációs Hivatal does not supply the missing discipline — it cannot, because it has no profit-and-loss account either. Once the government communication and consultation appropriation is cut, the office's coordinating workload collapses with it. The honest classification is Immediate Cut, parallel to the underlying activity it supervises. The year-1 saving is the full 1,633.5 millió Ft.

Rationale

The Információs Hivatal is Hungary's civilian foreign-intelligence service — the gathering and assessment of intelligence on threats and developments outside the country's borders. Foreign intelligence in support of the state's defence against external threats is a core function under the framework; the classification is Keep. The retained envelope of 35.0 milliárd Ft is held in full.

Rationale

The Kormányzati Ellenőrzési Hivatal is the government's internal financial-control and audit body — it audits the lawful and proper use of public funds within the executive. Internal audit and financial control is part of the rule-of-law infrastructure through which the state holds its own spending to account; verifying that public money is spent as the law provides protects the taxpayer's interest in not being defrauded. The classification is Keep. KEHI is the smallest institution in the chapter at 1,222.0 millió Ft, and the function — like the external audit function — is one the framework retains as a precondition of accountable public finance, distinct from the discretionary appropriations above which it exists to scrutinise.

Rationale

The Információs Hivatal is Hungary's civilian foreign-intelligence service — the gathering and assessment of intelligence on threats and developments outside the country's borders. Foreign intelligence in support of the state's defence against external threats is a core function under the framework; the classification is Keep. The retained envelope of 35.0 milliárd Ft is held in full.

Rationale

The Nemzetbiztonsági Szakszolgálat is the technical and operational support service for the national-security community — covert technical operations, secure communications, and the technical infrastructure on which the other services depend. The function is a rights-protection and external-defence support activity, and the classification is Keep. As with the other services, Keep is compatible with — and should be paired with — robust parliamentary oversight of the service's mandate and procurement.

Rationale

This is a regulator whose existence is evidence of the problem, not its solution. The Nemzeti Kommunikációs Hivatal was established in 2014 and operates as the central procurement body that "coordinates and oversees government advertising and PR communications procurement" — it runs the communication tenders for the entire central administration and the state-owned enterprise sector. The office is the second-best substitute for a discipline that is missing. A private firm does not need a central-communications-procurement authority because its advertising budget is disciplined by the profit-and-loss account: spend that does not return revenue shows up as a loss, and the loss is the signal to stop. State advertising has no such signal. The Nemzeti Kommunikációs Hivatal does not supply the missing discipline — it cannot, because it has no profit-and-loss account either. Once the government communication and consultation appropriation is cut, the office's coordinating workload collapses with it. The honest classification is Immediate Cut, parallel to the underlying activity it supervises. The year-1 saving is the full 1,633.5 millió Ft.

Rationale

The Kormányzati Ellenőrzési Hivatal is the government's internal financial-control and audit body — it audits the lawful and proper use of public funds within the executive. Internal audit and financial control is part of the rule-of-law infrastructure through which the state holds its own spending to account; verifying that public money is spent as the law provides protects the taxpayer's interest in not being defrauded. The classification is Keep. KEHI is the smallest institution in the chapter at 1,222.0 millió Ft, and the function — like the external audit function — is one the framework retains as a precondition of accountable public finance, distinct from the discretionary appropriations above which it exists to scrutinise.

Rationale

The Nemzetbiztonsági Szakszolgálat is the technical and operational support service for the national-security community — covert technical operations, secure communications, and the technical infrastructure on which the other services depend. The function is a rights-protection and external-defence support activity, and the classification is Keep. As with the other services, Keep is compatible with — and should be paired with — robust parliamentary oversight of the service's mandate and procurement.