The state budget goes from postponement to postponement. Missing the legally mandated date for placing the revised budget for 2024 before the Knesset by ten days was not enough for the Ministry of Finance. According to the most recent understandings, the budget bill was supposed to have reached the Knesset secretariat yesterday (Tuesday), but at present it looks as though the delay, and the breach of The Basic Law: The State Economy, will continue for at least a few days more.
Sources at the Ministry of Finance explained that one of the main reasons for the delay is the desire of Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich to transfer allocations to coalition parties to the budget base, in other words to "launder" political budgets distributed to government ministers so that they will become permanent items in the state budget that benefit from continuity, with no need for them to be agreed anew in every budget, shielding them from public criticism of coalition party allocations. To do that, Smotrich needs approvals from the various government ministries that are affected by the coalition allocations.
According to the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Education, headed by Yoav Kisch, and the Ministry of Jerusalem Affairs and Heritage, headed by Amihai Eliyahu, are two of the ministries from which Smotrich is waiting for their legal opinions on the matter. Coalition party funds for haredi (ultra-Orthodox Jewish) yeshivas pass through the Ministry of Education, and this is a matter close to the heart of Knesset Finance Committee chairperson Moshe Gafni (United Torah Judaism), who is due to run the discussions and votes on the budget in the coming weeks.
Last month, Gafni threatened that he would not allow allocations defined as coalition party funds in the 2024 budget. Gafni did not mean cutting sectoral allocations and transferring the money to the needs of the war and of rehabilitation, but simply that the money should be transferred to the budget base. Some interpreted this as fear on the part of the haredi parties of a change in government that would lead to the loss of coalition party budgets for education institutions that do not teach the core curriculum and for grants to yeshiva students.
Besides the continuing breach of the mandatory timetable, Smotrich runs the risk of the approaching decisive date. Unless the budget is finally approved in three readings in the Knesset by February 19, the law stipulates a flat NIS 67 billion cut in the current budget, which will paralyze government activity.
Until the new budget is approved, the government runs on the budget approved eight months ago, which is not adapted to the heavy costs of the war. The original 2024 budget contained coalition party allocations amounting to NIS 8 billion, of which the government has cut NIS 2.5 billion.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on January 31, 2024.
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd., 2024.