Education Budget Mandatory Spending and Student Nutrition: MK 52/PUU-XXIV/2026
The Constitutional Court decided case 52/PUU-XXIV/2026 on 30 July 2026 in a judicial review of statutory content brought by an individual petitioner, Rega Felix. The petition tested Law 20 of 2003 on the National Education System and Law 17 of 2025 on the State Budget for Fiscal Year 2026. Specifically, it challenged Pasal 49(1) of Law 20/2003 and its Elucidation, together with the Elucidation of Pasal 22(3) of Law 17/2025, and asked the Court to read the constitutional education budget as covering a narrower set of expenditures than the Government had treated it as covering. The proceeding also included a provisional application, which the Court addressed separately in its operative ruling.
Legal Reasoning
The Court began from Pasal 31(4) of the 1945 Constitution, which states that the State prioritises the education budget at no less than 20 per cent of the state and regional budgets to meet the needs of national education. It quoted its own earlier reasoning in Decision 3/PUU-XXII/2024, which had already interpreted that provision as admitting no reading other than that the State must prioritise education spending in the APBN and the APBD, and that the priority must be at least 20 per cent. On that reading, the constitutional text fixes a floor and nothing more.
Turning to the petitioner's argument that unequal allocation of basic-education funds contributes to school dropout rates, the Court characterised the complaint as implementative and administrative in nature. Deciding how education funds are distributed across regions according to sectoral priorities and needs falls to government policy. The Court stated that the Constitution regulates only the minimum education budget, while the detail of what that budget is spent on forms part of the policy set by the Government and the legislature through the process of drafting the APBN and the APBD.
The Court then read Pasal 49(1) of Law 20/2003, which allocates education funds at no less than 20 per cent of the APBN and APBD without exhaustively itemising the components of education financing. According to the Court, that absence of enumeration is not a normative vacuum. It is a deliberate design choice that leaves flexibility to regulate education financing in step with an education system that is dynamic and integrated. Determining which programmes are funded, and in what order of priority, therefore belongs to the legislature acting through the annual budget law, and the Government and the House hold constitutional authority over budget policy provided they remain within the corridor of the education mandatory-spending obligation. Similar questions about the reach of the same budget statute were raised in a separate challenge to the 2026 State Budget Law.
The Court also observed that budget allocation in the APBN is now organised by function rather than by sector, so the scope of education mandatory spending depends on how the function of the education system itself is understood. Read in that light, mandatory spending cannot be confined to classroom instruction. It extends to the education ecosystem as a whole, and no rigid or exclusive list of qualifying expenditure types can be laid down without contradicting the integrated character of the system.
For the content of that framework the Court relied on Government Regulation 48 of 2008 on Education Funding, as amended by Government Regulation 18 of 2022. Under those rules, education costs comprise the costs of education units, the costs of administering and managing education, and students' personal costs, with education-unit costs in turn covering investment, operational costs for personnel and non-personnel items, education cost assistance, and scholarships. The Court read this structure as imposing no fixed restriction on the categories of need that education funding may support.
From that premise the Court connected student nutrition to the education cost framework. Meeting students' basic needs, including nutritional needs that affect physical readiness and capacity to learn, bears directly on the effectiveness of the educational process, because students in good health and nutritional condition are better able to follow instruction. Confining education funding to activities narrowly perceived as classroom learning would risk obscuring the State's responsibility for education financing as a whole and would narrow the Government's room to budget according to actual needs. The Court accordingly treated nutritional provision as an inherent component of the national education system rather than an external factor. The same posture of deference to legislative choice appears in another 2026 constitutional review decided by the Court.
The Ruling
On the provisional application, the Court rejected the petitioner's request. On the merits, it declared the petition inadmissible so far as it concerned the review of Pasal 49(1) and the Elucidation of Pasal 49(1) of Law 20 of 2003 on the National Education System, and the Elucidation of Pasal 22(3) of Law 17 of 2025 on the State Budget for Fiscal Year 2026. The Court rejected the petition for the remainder. No dissenting opinion was recorded.
Read the full decision in the official record.
Methodology: This memo summarises the official decision text and is not legal advice; report corrections to contact@crpg.info.
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