What the Danube Institute Is Selling America
Hungarian taxpayers spent nearly HUF 1 billion building the Danube Institute’s foreign network. Danube Institute USA now presents that network to American donors as a charitable project.
Hungarian taxpayers spent more than $3 million on foreign-fellow contracts combining papers, media work, and political contacts. Danube Institute USA now invites American donors to sustain the relationships built in Budapest.
Danube Institute USA introduces itself with the cadence of a wartime telegram.
Its mission statement promises a “leading intellectual center in the United States”, although an earlier sentence places that centre in the “Unites States”. The typo is documented on the organisation’s own page. It is also the least consequential part of their sales pitch.
The more extensive claims appear on the homepage: “13 years. 80 staff. Based in Budapest.” A few lines later comes “Registered 501(c)(3). American mission.” The American charity presents the Budapest institute’s history, staff and European relationships as evidence that the new organisation already knows what it is doing.
Danube Institute USA is a separate American legal entity. Its public identity remains closely connected to Budapest. John O’Sullivan and István Kiss sit on its board; they are also the president and executive director of the Hungarian Institute. The American site invokes the Budapest operation’s fellows and thirteen-year history, while its Research and Analysis page contained no published work as of writing this on the 6th of August.
Hungarian taxpayers financed much of the record now displayed to American donors. The Batthyány Lajos Foundation (Batthyány Lajos Alapítvány, BLA), which operated Danube and received extensive state funding, paid HUF 76.76 million under foreign-fellow contracts in 2022, HUF 179 million in 2023, HUF 284.6 million in 2024, and more than HUF 389 million in 2025. The four-year total exceeded HUF 929.36 million, approximately $3 million, using the Magyar Nemzeti Bank’s official USD rate for 6 August 2026. The figure covers fellow contracts. Conference fees, travel, films, salaries, and the villa perched above Budapest sit outside it, according to Átlátszó’s review of the contracts.
O’Sullivan answered questions about spending by providing an inventory of activity. In a June statement, he credited Danube with 243 research papers, approximately 198 podcast episodes, more than 404 events, and 86 visiting fellows. He said every paper passed through commissioning, editing, and review before entering a public archive.
The totals convey abundance. They do not separate field research from commissioned advocacy, rapid political commentary, or the writing obligation attached to a visiting fellowship. Moreover, Danube publishes no figures on readership, independent citations, policy use, or cost per audience member.
As a humble Hungarian who spent two degrees studying politics and democracy, I decided to read one of the 243 papers Danube begets as research.
My lecturers had insisted on case selection, variables, competing explanations, and some account of the evidence that might weaken an argument. Melissa Ford Maldonado’s Hungary & Texas: A Comparative Perspective introduced me to a more permissive syllabus.
Hungarian taxpayers paid $8,400 for the paper. Ford, then a policy director at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and a former Trump administration official, was contracted to produce a 10-page report on Hungarian migration policy and the lessons it might offer Texas. Danube published the result in September 2024, as Átlátszó established from the contract and the published paper.
The document runs to thirty-five pages. Its conclusion appears on page 14; references and notes occupy the remainder. There is nothing suspicious about a long bibliography. The question is whether the argument supported by those references can carry the comparison promised in the title.
Hungary and Texas can certainly be compared. Comparative politics regularly places countries, states, cities, and parties side by side. The author still needs to identify the relevant similarities, explain the differences, and define the outcome being compared.
Ford devotes sections to the history, demographics, and legal position of both jurisdictions. She acknowledges that Hungary is a sovereign country operating within the European Union and that Texas is subject to federal supremacy under the U.S. Constitution. Those differences appear in the paper but do not shape its later conclusions. “Overarching authorities” becomes the phrase linking Brussels and Washington, while the separate powers and duties inside each legal order recede from view.
The comparison proceeds through a vivid scene. Hungary and Texas occupy southern frontiers, erect barriers, and enter litigation with larger political authorities. The resemblance gives Ford a recognisable story about border governments resisting distant centres of power. It provides less guidance on whether an EU member state’s dispute with institutions in which it participates can produce useful lessons for an American state challenging federal immigration law.
The paper also leaves success undefined. It describes fences, buoys, police deployments, lawsuits, and political confrontation without establishing a common measure to judge the two cases. Crossings, asylum decisions, enforcement costs, court outcomes, and the displacement of migration routes appear only intermittently.
Ford’s conclusion instead praises endurance. The policies produced fines and litigation, she writes, yet “neither has backed down”. Persistence carries the weight that results would normally bear.
Her antidote of neighbouring countries makes the political preference more unmistakable. Serbia appears beneath “A Helpful Neighbor”. Mexico receives “A Fickle, Fair-Weather Neighbor”. Serbia cooperated with Viktor Orbán’s government and is described as dependable; Mexico bargained with Washington and is described as unreliable.
Ford’s own account records repeated Mexican enforcement on behalf of successive American administrations. Mexico deployed its National Guard, restricted movement, reduced humanitarian visas, and intercepted migrants under American pressure. The paper even includes a section titled “Mexico as Migrant Enforcer.” The arrangements changed with each negotiation, yet cooperation kept returning. Ford still concludes that Texas had no partner in Mexico after several sections explaining the terms on which Mexico acted as one, so Serbia receives five stars while Mexico is criticised for changing the menu.
The argument was commissioned to move in one direction. Ford was asked to identify Hungarian lessons for Texas, which assumed that useful lessons existed and placed Budapest at the starting point. The paper bears a familiar Fidesz account of power into an American setting - a distant centre neglects the border, courts obstruct local action and continued resistance demonstrates political legitimacy.
The route ran from Budapest to Austin.
Ford’s agreement also demonstrates how the Danube Institute linked publication with a wider political purpose. Her paper provided the contract with a visible product. Other agreements included writing, media appearances, conferences, brand promotion, and the cultivation of contacts.
Christopher Rufo received $35,000 for a six-week stay in Hungary in 2023. His agreement required two lectures on critical race theory and what the contract called “LGBTQ propaganda”, along with two articles intended for Hungarian Conservative or Hungarian Review. Átlátszó could not locate the contracted articles in either publication. Rufo later wrote that Orbán had created a “conservative counter-hegemony” and urged Republicans to use state power “to advance conservative aims”.
Moreover, Jeremy Carl received $7,000 for two papers, including one on how the Orbán government had tamed Hungary’s administrative state while resisting Brussels. The Hungarian section of his bilingual contract said the papers “could serve as an example for the American right”. The English section omitted the sentence.
Further agreements made the connection between writing and relationship-building explicit. Rod Dreher’s 2023 contract combined American media work with Danube events and the cultivation of European conservative contacts. Peter Boghossian was paid to produce videos, appear in Hungarian media, and advise Danube on its brand. A fellow contracted in March 2026 was expected to identify and approach ten contacts in the United States and East Asia. These duties appear in Átlátszó’s excellent reporting on the contracts.
Evidently, the assignments were connected. Writing brought a fellow into Danube’s circle; conferences, interviews, and introductions extended the value of the arrangement. A paper satisfied part of the contract while the fellow’s reputation and contacts remained available for later events, publications, and partnerships.
Danube’s supporters describe its achievement in similar terms. On the American charity’s testimonials page, Tony Abbott calls it “an important element in Hungarian soft power”. Rod Dreher praises the institute for establishing networks of sympathetic scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals. O’Sullivan says fellowships create value through ideas, relationships, events, and public conversations.
That description fits the contracts. Danube brought foreign writers to Budapest, introduced American conservatives to European nationalists and traditionalists, placed fellows in Hungarian media, and helped arguments circulate abroad. The Lónyay-Hatvany Villa on Castle Hill became a meeting place for a movement seeking closer cross-border cooperation.
Hungarian taxpayers could still ask what each agreement bought. Danube published aggregate totals for papers, podcasts, events, and fellows, while no public contract-by-contract account paired every payment with its recipient, promised duties, completed work, and eventual audience. Several dozen past and present fellows requested that their agreements or identities remain outside public view. One wrote that “the details of my contract are an entirely private matter”.
O’Sullivan says the foundation kept detailed accounts down to train tickets. Such internal records may exist. The published archive does not allow a taxpayer to follow every payment from contract to finished work, especially where the promised publication cannot be located or the recipient’s name remains redacted.
Danube’s publishing after Hungary’s 2026 election presents another view of how its output totals accumulated.
On 20 April, eight days after TISZA ended Fidesz’s rule, Danube published what it called a “deeper reading” of the election. According to the National Election Office, TISZA won 141 of Parliament’s 199 seats with 53.18 percent of the party-list vote. Fidesz-KDNP won 52 seats with 38.61 percent.
Danube’s analysis named neither party, mentioned neither Péter Magyar nor Viktor Orbán, and gave no vote share or seat total. Its opening paragraph appeared twice. The rest dissolved into general observations about constituency effects, urban-rural divisions, and the possibility that preferences could shift during a future crisis.
Danube took a landslide and processed it into a simple memo.
The institute’s language about political power also changed after the election. On 14 April, two days after the vote, Danube held an event titled “Elections Have Consequences: Or At Least They Should”. Its programme promised discussion of the opposition that elected governments face from legacy media and the administrative state, and described the speaker as a long-time supporter of majoritarian democracy.
In the years before Fidesz’s defeat, Danube fellows had praised governments willing to replace personnel, reshape public bodies, and confront hostile centers of authority. Ford presented resistance to higher authority as a political virtue. Rufo proposed Orbán’s aligned institutions as a model for American Republicans. Carl’s contract identified lessons for the American right.
After the defeat, Dreher opened his account of leaving Budapest with “Elections have consequences”, then described an “unsettling atmosphere of vengeance” around the review of Orbán-linked organisations. O’Sullivan placed independence at the centre of Danube’s defence, saying its daily work had operated at arm’s length from government.
The records reviewed for this article do not show a minister dictating the conclusion of a Danube paper. Public funding alone cannot establish editorial command. The contracts do show an organisation repeatedly joining papers, media placement and political networking to causes promoted by the former government. When the successor government turned towards the foundation’s contracts, autonomy and restraint moved to the centre of Danube’s defence. The administrative state looked different when it arrived on Castle Hill carrying an invoice.
Danube Institute USA preserves the more combative language. Its formal mission promises research, educational publications, exchanges, conferences, fellowships and possible scholarships. It also says the organisation will help young people enter and “influence wider public debate”.
Its page on transatlantic conservatism describes the political project with greater clarity. Danube USA promises to connect populists, nationalists, traditionalists and centrists with American figures, ensuring that people “fighting the same fight on different shores” know one another’s names. It presents progressive foundations, academies, and NGOs as a coordinated globalist force before announcing: “They operate as one movement across borders. We should too.” The page concludes: “Danube Institute USA is where that coordination begins.”
Danube states its purpose openly. It seeks American donations for a transatlantic conservative movement whose relationships were developed through the Budapest Institute. Its board, public history, and fundraising language turn those Hungarian-funded relationships into the American charity’s principal credential.
So, dear Americans, a small note from the country that paid the first bill. Despite the name, Danube Institute USA has no river to clean, wildlife to protect, or riverbank history to preserve. Its preservation project concerns a political network assembled in Budapest with Hungarian public money, including fellows who presented Orbán’s use of state institutions as a lesson for the American right.
We paid for the fellows, conferences, papers, media appearances, and introductions. Some of the work was substantial. Ford’s paper was the return on one $8,400 contract; other agreements produced articles, television appearances, brand advice, and lists of political contacts. The most enduring result was the circle of writers, activists, and policy professionals who could carry Orbán’s arguments abroad after the paper had entered the archive.
That circle did not dissolve when Fidesz lost office. Danube Institute USA now submits it to American donors as evidence that the project has already succeeded. Hungarian taxpayers financed much of the history advertised on the American site, and the donation button now asks Americans to finance its continuation. Before paying the next bill, they should know exactly what we received for the first one.