From the 2026 budget audit
2.7 billion Ft in salaries for an office that should not exist.
The Sovereignty Protection Office's payroll funds roughly 150–250 analysts, lawyers, and administrators whose job is to investigate domestic civil-society and media organisations — a function compulsory taxation should not finance.
About 665 Ft per taxpayer per year in personnel costs, sustaining a staff whose daily work is to map and characterise the lawful political activity of other citizens.
What you see — and what you don't
The seen: public-sector analysts with employment contracts they entered in good faith. The unseen: every citizen whose lawful association or journalism is the subject of those analysts' files, funded by the same taxes the citizen pays.
Objection
"You can't just abolish an office overnight — people depend on those jobs."
Answer
The reform does not ask anyone to bear the cost of a decision that is not theirs. The employees receive 24 months of full salary with the right to take private-sector work immediately during the overlap. The payroll line reaches zero in year 3 — an honest bridge for the people, not a continuing mandate for the function.
Share if you think a genuinely fair transition means winding down a body with care for its employees, not preserving the body indefinitely.
The analyst's verdict
Personnel Expenditures
Rationale
This line funds the salaries of the Office's staff. The function the staff perform is the function analysed above: it is not a rights-protection function, not a constitutional precondition, and not a protective response to irreversible involuntary harm. On the merits the line is a candidate for Immediate Cut. It is classified as a short Phase-Out for one reason only — the protected party is the Office's employees, who hold employment contracts entered in good faith and have a reasonable claim to a defined transition. The classical-liberal destination is abolition; the rule-of-law method is an honest bridge for the people whose livelihoods the abolition removes.
Transition mechanism
Severance-with-overlap. The employees keep their full state salary for a defined 24-month transition period and may take new private-sector employment during that period while keeping both incomes. The Office's staff are analysts, lawyers, and administrators with general, transferable skills; the Budapest labour market for these skill sets has historically absorbed public-sector outflows from comparable institutional restructurings, and the private-sector re-employment path is realistic. The severance is computed on the payroll component only — see the JSON schedule. Personnel plus the associated employer contributions (the next line) together are 3,127.8 millió Ft; the 24-month severance protects this payroll subset, paid out over years 1 and 2, after which the line reaches zero.
Affected groups
The Office's permanent and contracted staff. Public reporting does not give a precise current headcount; the personnel envelope of 2,734.3 millió Ft implies an order of magnitude of roughly 150-250 staff at Hungarian public-sector analytical and legal salary levels, though this should be confirmed against the Office's published staffing return before the schedule is finalised. Each affected employee receives 24 months of full salary with the right to earn a second income immediately — a transition that, named honestly, is materially more generous than the redundancy terms most private-sector workers face, and is designed so that the people doing the work are not made to bear the cost of a policy decision that is not theirs.
Sources
- 2023. évi LXXXVIII. törvény a nemzeti szuverenitás védelméről · Nemzeti Jogszabálytár (njt.jog.gov.hu) (2023)
Free Society Institute
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