From the 2026 budget audit
3.6 billion Ft in operating costs — the office is gone, the appropriation is not yet settled.
The Sovereignty Protection Office's operating budget — premises, IT, procurement and contracts — and the largest line in the chapter. Parliament voted to dissolve the office on 30 June 2026, the act took effect on 16 July, and the justice ministry does not carry its tasks forward as public tasks.
Roughly 796 Ft per taxpayer per year for non-salary operations — the chapter's largest item, in the year the institution was dissolved halfway through.
What you see — and what you don't
What is seen: the office closed. What is unseen: where the appropriation goes afterwards. Unspent funds from a dissolved institution do not automatically return to where they came from — they can be reallocated to another chapter, and that takes a separate parliamentary decision.
Objection
"The money obviously goes back to the budget."
Answer
That is the natural assumption, and it may be partly right — but it is not automatic. In September the government proposed reallocating 2.85 billion Ft of the dissolved office's unspent appropriation to the justice ministry; the proposal has been submitted and still has to be decided. The chapter as a whole was 6.9 billion Ft, and the submission says nothing about what happens to the rest. The dissolution has happened — the accounting has not closed.
Pass this on to someone who would like to follow where a dissolved office's budget actually ends up.
The analyst's verdict
Material and Operating Expenditures
Rationale
This is the largest single line in the chapter — larger than the personnel envelope itself — and funds the Office's non-payroll operating costs: premises, utilities, IT systems, services, the operation of the statutory research institute through which the Office conducts comparative legal analysis, conferences, and external procurement. Severance-with-overlap protects payroll, not the operating envelope. Office leases, supplier contracts, and IT subscriptions are counterparty contracts whose rights are honoured by contract run-off, not by employee transition; they do not justify a continuing budget line once the institution is wound down. The dologi line therefore reaches zero in the first budget cycle. The visible effect — an institution stops procuring premises and services — is the intended effect; the unseen alternative use of the 3,582.6 millió Ft is its return to the taxpayers who funded it, or its redeployment to a rights-protection function that survives the framework's test.
Transition mechanism
Eliminate in the first budget cycle. In-flight supplier and lease contracts run to their contractual break points and are not renewed; this is a contract-run-off cost measured in months, not a continuing programme. No new procurement is authorised.
Affected groups
The Office's landlords, IT and service suppliers, and external contractors, each of whom is a counterparty with contractual rights that run-off honours. No citizen's life plan is tied to the continuation of this operating budget.
Free Society Institute
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