Lapid slams proposed state budget for favoring ‘the corrupt and the evaders’

By Sam Sokol 19 January 2026, 3:50 pm

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Sam Sokol is a former political correspondent at The Times of Israel. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"

Opposition Leader Yair Lapid leads a meeting of his Yesh Atid faction at the Knesset in Jerusalem, January 19, 2026. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Opposition Leader Yair Lapid slams the proposed 2026 state budget, calling it “a budget of the corrupt and the evaders” that “continues to exploit and destroy working people who pay taxes and serve in the reserves and keep the country alive.”

Addressing reporters ahead of his Yesh Atid party’s weekly faction meeting in the Knesset, Lapid declares that what was submitted by the government last night was “not a budget” but rather constituted “theft” by a government that is “stealing” from the middle class to subsidize “those who are neither productive nor working.”

Lapid pans the appropriation of funds for “unnecessary government ministries” as well as the inclusion of NIS 5 billion ($1.5 billion) in coalition funds, including NIS 2.1 billion and NIS 1.2 billion for the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism and Shas parties, respectively.

Haredi schools that do not teach secular core subjects will receive hundreds of millions of shekels “to raise another generation of children who will not work, and will live at the expense of our children,” he complains, arguing that services such as public transportation are suffering from lack of funds and “there are no solutions to the cost of living, no war on monopolies, no opening of markets.”

“There is no money for science, for research, for bringing [the highly educated] back to Israel, for strengthening medicine, for stopping the mass exodus of doctors. This government, as is well known, does not believe in science and progress. Instead, they will continue to pay, this year too, NIS 60 billion to [draft] evaders, instead of sending them to the army,” adds Lapid.

“Hang in there. Help is on the way,” he proclaims. “This is the last budget of the [most] failed government in the history of the country. The next budget will be in the next government and it will be dedicated entirely to working people, to young parents, to the education of their children, to the health of their parents, to what really matters.”