Korea's budget ministry leaves all 140 programs of its new Future Response Fund out of performance review

Most of the exclusions are attributed to programs being "carried out by other ministries" ^[2]. That reason also describes what the fund does, which is gather spending lines from across government into one account: 61 of the 140 programs, worth 18.3 trillion won, were already running somewhere else before the move ^[5]. That is 40 per cent of the 45.4 trillion won of program spending and 44 per cent of the program count ^[3]. Park said there is no reason to classify these programs separately under the Future Response Fund and budget for them there if their performance is not properly managed ^[6]. The purpose test is the harder number. Kim Woo-chul of the Korean Association of Public Finance, working with Park's office, puts 42 per cent of the 45.4 trillion won toward capital formation and human capital ^[3], so roughly 19.1 trillion won fits that description and roughly 26.3 trillion won does not ^[1]. Twenty programs, 21.7 trillion won or 47.8 per cent of program spending, were classified as inconsistent with the stated purpose, among them 1.1658 trillion won of basic income for farming and fishing villages, 2.85 trillion won of incentives for administrative consolidation and 500 billion won of equity investment in Korea Electric Power Corp ^[4][2]. Then the financing. The 104.4 trillion won of idle cash is what remains of the 162.3 trillion won fund after program spending and a cut in new treasury bond issuance, which implies about 12.5 trillion won of reduced issuance ^[7][4], and the cash pile comes to 98.5 per cent of next year's projected 106 trillion won rise in national debt ^[8][7]. Kim called it a "grave policy error" to take on more debt to accumulate cash when the managed fiscal balance deficit is only 3.1 trillion won, likening it to drawing money in advance from an overdraft account and holding it ^[9]. The idle money is to be entrusted to private financial institutions and others at a target return of 3.85 per cent ^[10]. On 104.4 trillion won that is about 4.02 trillion won a year gross, against interest costs Park puts at 3 trillion to 4 trillion won a year, leaving a spread of somewhere between 20 billion and about 1 trillion won before any shortfall against target ^[5]; Park said the expected net gain is almost nil because there is no gap between interest rates and the return ^[11]. Kim's counter-proposal runs the arithmetic the other way: 7.8 per cent spending growth next year instead of the government's 12.8 per cent, with 26.5 trillion won of transfer and cash-type spending and financial equity investments adjusted and some new cash benefits delayed, cutting about 36 trillion won and turning the 3.1 trillion won deficit into a 33.1 trillion won surplus ^[14]. Holding 2028 growth to 5.4 per cent adds another 20 trillion won, and the roughly 53 trillion won secured over the two years pays down debt before anything is set aside in the fund from 2029 ^[15]. Hwang Sang-hyun of Sangmyung University argued that at least 50 per cent of additional tax revenue should be mandatorily allocated to cutting new deficit-financing bonds and repaying existing treasury bonds ^[12]. Song Heon-jae of the University of Seoul said the government must answer whether moving the priority for boom-time tax revenue from debt repayment to a new reserve is truly a choice made for future generations ^[13]. Every figure here comes from one side of the room. Kim's association and Park's office produced the analysis and presented it at a forum they co-hosted with the Center for Free Enterprise, titled "Future Response Fund? Future Mortgage Fund" ^[17], and the account carries no reply from the Ministry of Planning and Budget. The governance finding survives that, because the performance plan is the ministry's own document ^[2].