From the 2026 budget audit
937 million Ft labelled 'professional tasks' — with no list of what it actually buys.
A broadly defined chapter-managed grant pool, allocated by administrative discretion under a heading that specifies nothing, whose past recipients have a structural interest in its continuation.
Roughly 230 Ft per taxpayer per year — 937.5 million Ft in a discretionary pool with no line-item disclosure of its composition.
What you see — and what you don't
The seen: the current grant recipients, whose awards were set by administrators without an open competitive call. The unseen: the researchers who could have competed for the same funds through a peer-reviewed process — and may well have won more productive work from them.
Objection
"The Academy needs flexible funding to support scholarly work that doesn't fit narrow competitive categories."
Answer
Flexibility is a genuine research-funding need. But flexibility administered by one institution's budget office, with no disclosure of what the 937.5 million Ft buys, is not a research-funding instrument — it is a discretionary pool whose composition is invisible to external scrutiny. Three years is enough time for current commitments to run their course and for the work to migrate to competitive, peer-reviewed calls.
Share if you think public research funding should face open competition, not administrative allocation.
The analyst's verdict
Support for Professional Tasks
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.
Transition mechanism
Linear phase-out over three years. Current grant commitments run their term; new awards from the pool cease, and the substantive work migrates to competitive, peer-reviewed funding calls. No state payroll sits on this line.
Affected groups
Current recipients of szakmai feladatok grants (who re-apply through competitive research-funding channels over the three-year window).
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