<![CDATA[Law Number 17 of 2025 on the 2026 State Budget maintains the twenty percent minimum threshold for education spending, yet channels most of that allocation to finance the Makan Bergizi Gratis (MBG) program, raising a constitutional problem that touches the imperative character of Article 31(4) of the 1945 Constitution. This study assesses the constitutionality of charging MBG financing to the education budget while clarifying the limits of the legislature's authority to interpret the scope of education mandatory spending. Employing normative legal research with statutory, conceptual, historical, and case approaches, it draws on the doctrine of constitutional mandatory spending and the theory of the Constitutional Court as a negative budgeter. The findings show that nominal fulfillment of the twenty percent threshold does not legitimize a cross-sectoral diversion of purpose; charging MBG to the education budget is unconstitutional in its allocation because nutritional benefits are not constitutive of education as confined by the Court to education directly enjoyed by the public. The legislature lacks authority to redefine a constitutional mandate through an appropriations law of an administrative (beschikking) character, whereas the Court may correct the allocation as a negative budgeter through a conditionally constitutional ruling. The novelty lies in reading the diversion as constitutional distortion and offering a purpose-fidelity test, an operationalization of the budget specialty principle (specialiteitsbeginsel) in the constitutional domain as a parameter for assessing expenditures counted as education budget. Keywords: APBN; Constitutional Distortion; Education Budget; Makan Bergizi Gratis; Mandatory Spending.]]>
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