From the 2026 budget audit
2.7 billion Ft in salaries — for an office that has since been dissolved.
The Sovereignty Protection Office's salary line in the 2026 budget. Parliament voted to dissolve the office on 30 June 2026 and the act took effect on 16 July, so this line is closed. The analysis had marked it for phase-out; the open question is no longer whether it ends, but where the appropriation goes.
Roughly 608 Ft per taxpayer per year — the salary line as budgeted for 2026, the year in which the office was dissolved halfway through.
What you see — and what you don't
What is seen: the office is gone and the salary line is closed. What is unseen: what becomes of the unspent balance. A dissolved institution's appropriation does not lapse by itself — it takes a separate decision, made well after the vote to dissolve.
Objection
"The office is gone, so the matter is settled."
Answer
The decision was indeed taken and the salary line is closed — that is the substantive part. But dissolution is not by itself a saving: the unspent appropriation requires its own decision. In September the government proposed transferring 2.85 billion Ft to the justice ministry; Parliament has yet to decide on it. The chapter as a whole was 6.9 billion Ft. Until the remainder is settled, ending the line and saving the money are two different things.
Pass this on to someone who thinks dissolving an institution counts for most when its budget line goes with it.
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 indicated 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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