Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Rationale

The MTA Library is a national research library and the custodian of significant manuscript and archival holdings, including the Academy's historical collections and the Keleti Gyűjtemény (Oriental Collection). The 8,870.6 millió Ft operating line is not ordinary office overhead; for a research library of this kind it largely reflects acquisitions, database and journal subscriptions, digitisation, and the cost of conservation. A national archival and manuscript-custody function — the physical preservation of holdings that cannot be re-created if lost — is the kind of bounded, custodial mandate that the framework treats with caution: the holdings are irreplaceable, and abrupt defunding risks irreversible loss of cultural capital that no later appropriation can restore. That is a genuine reason against an Immediate Cut. It is not, however, a reason for indefinite real-terms growth. A library's collection mandate is finite and self-limiting; the digital-subscription component in particular is contestable and should face procurement discipline rather than automatic indexation. Holding the line at its nominal level lets real-terms erosion at typical inflation reduce its real claim by roughly 20-25% over a decade, which forces exactly the prioritisation — which subscriptions, which digitisation projects, which acquisitions — that an indexed budget removes the pressure to make. The custodial core is protected by the nominal floor; the discretionary acquisitions margin is disciplined by the real-terms decline.

Rationale

This line funds the administration of the Academy as a learned society and the *tiszteletdíjak* — the honoraria paid to academicians. The personnel and honoraria components dominate: 8,081.9 millió Ft of personnel cost against 454.3 millió Ft of operating expense means this is overwhelmingly a payroll-and-stipend line. An academician's honorarium is a recurring, statutorily defined cash payment to an elected member of a self-selecting body. Described without euphemism, it is a public stipend for the status of membership in a private learned society. The society's governing function — electing members, organising sections, conferring its own honours — is the archetypal voluntary association: as noted above, comparable learned societies in the Anglo-American tradition operate on endowment and membership income. The MTA could plausibly fund its secretariat and a reduced honorarium pool the same way; what tax financing buys here is not the society's existence but the particular scale and the particular insulation of the honorarium from any market or donor test of what the membership status is worth. The honorarium is not a research grant — it does not buy a unit of research output and cannot be calculated against one; it is a transfer whose level is set administratively. A five-year phase-out reduces the secretariat to a defensibly small statutory core (the Academy is named in the Fundamental Law, and a minimal secretariat administering elections and the public-law functions of a chartered body has a thin but real Keep claim) while the honorarium pool is wound down and the membership is invited to fund member stipends from subscription and endowment income, as comparable academies abroad do.

Rationale

The Lendület ("Momentum") Programme, launched in 2009, funds research groups led by competitively selected young researchers, with the explicit aim of attracting talented scientists back to Hungary and retaining those already here. Of every line in this chapter, Lendület has the strongest functional case: it is the one item that is genuinely a competitive, peer-reviewed research-funding instrument rather than a learned-society function or an administrative pool. Awards go to research groups selected on scientific merit through an application process, and the programme is structurally sounder — competitive, merit-based, with defined multi-year group cycles — than the opaque chapter-managed pool lines elsewhere in this chapter. The classical-liberal question, however, is not whether the programme selects well — it does — but whether competitive research funding belongs in a learned society's chapter at all. After the 2019 reorganisation, Hungary's research institutes and the bulk of the research-funding architecture sit outside the MTA. A competitive grant programme for young researchers is precisely the kind of instrument that belongs in the consolidated, openly contestable research-funding system — alongside the other peer-reviewed national science-funding calls — not as a chapter-managed line inside the budget of the learned society. The phase-out here is therefore not an abolition of the function but a relocation: the Lendület instrument, with its competitive selection intact, is migrated to the consolidated research-funding body over five years, so that all competitive Hungarian research funding faces a single open contest rather than being fragmented across institutional chapters. The five-year horizon protects the grant cohorts: a Lendület award runs for a fixed multi-year term (the programme's calls run on roughly five-year group cycles), and every current group must be allowed to complete its funded term before the line closes in this chapter. This is the chapter's most consequential classification, and it is worth being explicit that the relocation must not become a defunding. Hungary's gross R&D spending was about 1.4% of GDP in 2022 — below the EU-27 average of roughly 2.2% and below Czechia's share. The convergence gap with Czechia and Poland is partly a capital-and-productivity story, and research funding that genuinely raises productivity is not the kind of spending the framework treats as rent. The recommendation is structural, not budget-cutting: consolidate competitive research funding into one contestable system so that every forint of it faces the same open peer review, rather than leaving a well-run instrument as a ring-fenced line whose location owes more to institutional history than to funding design.

Rationale

A facilities-management centre is not a research function and not a function of a learned society — it is a property-services operation: building maintenance, utilities, estate administration for the MTA's real estate. Property services are the most thoroughly contestable activity in this chapter. A market in commercial facilities management exists; building maintenance, cleaning, security, and estate administration are bought competitively by private firms and public bodies alike, and the price the market quotes for them is observable. An in-house centre with 1,122.9 millió Ft of personnel cost replaces that observable price with an administrative one — there is no test of whether the in-house unit delivers the service at or below what a competitively tendered contract would cost. This is the recurring pattern across the budget where the state owns an internal services unit: the function survives not because the in-house arrangement is demonstrably efficient but because the unit is already there and its staff depend on it. Phasing the centre out and contracting facilities management competitively converts an unpriced internal cost into a tendered one and exposes it to the discipline of rival bids. The four-year horizon reflects the realistic time to run a procurement, transition building-by-building, and honour the notice and severance owed to permanent staff.

Rationale

"Nemzeti Programok" is a 3,000.0 millió Ft chapter-managed programme line. The label is generic and the budget carries no breakdown of what specific national programmes the line funds — which is the recurring difficulty with chapter-managed pools: a round-number allocation under a broad heading, with the composition decided administratively rather than disclosed. Whatever the constituent programmes, they are scholarly or science-policy activities, and the framework's question is the same as for the szakmai feladatok line — can the state determine the optimal level and mix of "national programmes" in the absence of a competitive, peer-reviewed allocation, and does the round-number pool concentrate discretion in the administrators who set it. The answer points to a phase-out and migration of any genuine research content to competitive funding. The four-year horizon (one year longer than the szakmai feladatok line) reflects the larger envelope and the likelihood that some constituent programmes are multi-year commitments whose run-off needs the extra year. If primary-source review of the programme composition reveals specific multi-year commitments with longer durations, the horizon for those components should be set to the actual commitment term, cited — the four-year figure is the default pending that review, not a substitute for it.

Rationale

"Jóléti intézmények" — welfare institutions — in the context of a learned society's budget denotes member amenities: typically holiday and recreation facilities, guest houses, and similar provisions for the Academy's membership and staff. Stated plainly, this is a tax-financed amenity for the members of a private learned society and its employees. It is not a rights-protection function, not a constitutional precondition, and not a research activity; it is a perquisite of membership. The visible beneficiary is small and well-defined — the Academy's members and staff who use the facilities. The invisible cost-bearer is every wage-earner whose SZJA and szociális hozzájárulási adó funds the 1,270.9 millió Ft. For a worker at roughly the median Hungarian gross wage, the sum is a few hundred forints a year — a small individual figure, which is exactly the structure that lets the line persist: the benefit concentrates on an organised constituency that notices and defends it, while the cost spreads so thinly across taxpayers that none has reason to object. The size of the line is not the point; a recreation amenity for the members of a chartered society has no claim on compulsory taxation at any scale. An organisation that wishes to provide holiday facilities for its members can charge its members for them, exactly as a professional association or a club does. The function is not abolished by the cut — it is moved to the people who use it and value it.

Rationale

"Szakmai feladatok" — professional tasks — is a broadly defined chapter-managed grant line covering the Academy's substantive scholarly activities not captured by the named programmes below. Its breadth is itself the analytical problem: a loosely specified discretionary pool, allocated by administrative judgement, with no line-item visibility into what the 937.5 millió Ft buys. Where the state cannot specify in advance what a grant pool funds, neither can it test whether the funding reaches the highest-value use; the allocation is governed by the discretion of whoever administers it, and the recipients of past awards form a constituency for the pool's continuation. The substantive scholarly work this line supports is real, but its proper funders are the competitive research-funding bodies (the science-funding bodies that run open, peer-reviewed calls) and the universities and institutes that employ the researchers — not an opaque chapter-managed pool inside a learned society's budget. A three-year phase-out gives current grant-holders time to re-apply through competitive channels.

Rationale

The Területi Akadémiai Bizottságok (regional academic committees, in cities such as Debrecen, Szeged, Pécs, Miskolc, Veszprém) are the Academy's regional learned-society chapters; this line funds their secretariat. The activity — organising regional scholarly meetings, lectures, and committee administration — is learned-society organising, the same voluntary function examined under the central secretariat above. Regional scholarly societies elsewhere are organised and funded by their participating scholars and host universities; the regional universities that host these committees have a direct interest in the scholarly activity and are the natural successor funders. A three-year phase-out winds down the dedicated state secretariat and invites the regional universities and the participating scholars to absorb the modest administrative function — a small line, but the classification follows the mechanism, not the size.

Rationale

This line funds the Academy's international engagement, EU-related tasks, and cross-border (határon túli) programmes — typically membership in international scientific unions, support for Hungarian-language scholarship in neighbouring countries, and participation in EU science frameworks. International scholarly cooperation is a genuine activity, but it is again a learned-society function, and the international scientific unions to which an academy belongs are themselves member-funded bodies. Some sub-components — fixed-term international-union memberships, multi-year cross-border programme commitments — may carry commitment durations not visible in the budget line. A three-year phase-out respects any in-flight commitments while moving the recurring international-engagement function onto the Academy's own member-and-endowment funding, consistent with the treatment of the secretariat above.

Rationale

This line is a transfer to named civil organisations and foundations — the budget text lists scientific societies, the Nagy Imre Alapítvány, and the Bolyai Műhely Alapítvány. A discretionary state transfer to named private associations and foundations is, described accurately, a subjective allocation of taxpayer money by political and administrative officeholders to organisations they select. There is no market price and no calculable optimum for "how much support a scientific society or a named foundation should receive"; the figure is set by administrative judgement, and the recipients — being named in the budget — have a structural interest in the line's preservation independent of the value of their activity. Scientific societies and memorial or educational foundations are voluntary bodies; they raise funds from members, from charitable giving, and from those who value their work. The line is small, but the classification follows the mechanism: a discretionary transfer to selected private associations is an Immediate Cut on principle, and the principle does not weaken because the sum is modest.

Rationale

The Széchenyi Irodalmi és Művészeti Akadémia is a separate society of writers and artists associated with the MTA; this line funds its small secretariat. It is the same learned-society organising function as the regional committees, applied to letters and arts rather than the sciences, and the same reasoning applies: a society of writers and artists is a voluntary association whose members and patrons can fund its administration. The line is very small (37.2 millió Ft), and a learned-society secretariat at this scale could be sustained by member contributions and arts philanthropy without difficulty. The three-year horizon exists solely to give the small staff and the society a reasonable transition window; the classification rests on the principle, which scales to a line of any size.