As a critical governance tool to guide national development, the budget and how it is determined and deployed often serve as a political weapon. The congressional quad committee had valid reasons to scrutinize Vice President and then-education secretary Sara Duterte’s appropriation and use of confidential funds.
This did not deter Duterte followers from dismissing its investigation as politically-motivated. The tables turned when the 2025 budget came under fire. The Dutertes quickly tried to recover lost ground by trying to take a leadership role in the cause of budget reform they had resisted.
Neither party comes with pristinely spotless hands. The controversies thus engaged and enraged more people ready to declare, “A pox on both houses.”
A broad-based coalition of Clergy and Citizens for Good Governance (CCGG) called for an “indignation rally” at the EDSA Shrine on January 31 to protest the abuse of the budget process. It has enlisted academics and activists, businessmen and bishops, non-government and people’s organizations, and even military professionals alarmed at the continuing cuts on modernization projects.
Information fueled indignation, as budget experts shared their dismay and alarm over the manipulation of the budget process. Former senator Frank Drilon declared the 2025 budget more “corrupted and mangled” than any he had seen in 24 years in the legislature. Former budget secretary Florencio Abad noted that all three Marcos Jr. budgets (2023-25) had suffered mangling, successively reducing funds by P219 billion, P449.5 billion, and P373 billion, respectively.
The mangler was the congressional bicameral conference committee (bicam), which conducts the final review and drafting of the budget. Once signed by the president, their versions become law.
Mangling was accomplished by shifting money from items under Programmed Funds to those that would be implemented only if the government found additional resources and, therefore, listed under Unprogrammed Funds.
Programmed Funds presumably covered costs considered priority for national security and development, as well as within government’s financial resources and capacity to implement. This shifting of funds raised the question of gainers and losers from the changes.
Unfortunately, businessman Zaldy Co, party-list Ako Bikol congressman, pleading health issues, resigned his chairmanship of the appropriations committee and may avoid accountability for explaining the rationale and history of the funds diversion.
Available data show that the bicam did not forget to increase the House budget by P29.4 billion in 2024 and 2025, while awarding a measly P3.1 billion to the Senate, lower than the P5 billion given to the President’s office.
Foreign-assisted projects suffered the biggest blow in 2024, losing P242.1 billion to general public works programs, whose flood control budget rose to P245 billion. Funds flowed from planned, strategic, infrastructure investments to projects notoriously difficult to monitor and evaluate and, therefore, more vulnerable to fraud.
In the 2024-25 social services sector, the bicam cut the PhilHealth, health, labor, and social welfare budgets by P273 billion, moving funds from tested programs to boost community empowerment and self-reliance, like 4Ps (Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program), to new, ayuda-type initiatives which received P179.6 billion.
These projects arguably addressed affirmative action, social amelioration objectives. But the transfer again took funds from projects with clear eligibility and outcome metrics to those that, lacking them, allowed politicians a greater role in their distribution as dole-outs.
Over the first three years of the Marcos Jr. administration, bicam budget cuts amounted to P1.015 trillion. It is hard to imagine what one trillion pesos means.
Consider how that amount could have affected the country’s poverty incidence. A family of five, according to the government, needs P12,000/month to support itself. A trillion pesos would have sustained such families for two years — had there been an effective way to move the money directly to the estimated 3 million families living below the poverty line, instead of leaving the funds under the control of 200 legislators.
How much of such funds would trickle down to rightful recipients becomes difficult to determine. But the system perpetuates a culture of patronage that compels people in need to plead for aid as supplicants from officials they elect into power.
Efforts to restore bicam cuts in the 2025 budget that Marcos Jr. conceded was “suboptimal” did not appease critics; they considered it also illegal. Prescind from the unproven claim of former president Duterte that the budget passed with blank items. Legal experts have focused on more contestable issues.
First, the bicam can supplement existing budget items. It cannot create new items from zero, like AKAP, which had been previously denied funding.
Second, the General Appropriations Act cannot override specific laws, such as those that limit the transfer of PhilHealth subsidies or the funds of the Philippine Deposit Insurance Corporation (PDIC) levied from banks to protect their depositors.
Third, a direct role in the implementation of funding programs — as displayed in the distribution by Speaker Martin Romualdez of ayuda funds in a shopping mall — violated the Supreme Court decision prohibiting congressional pork barrel projects.
Marcos had reason to complain about the mangling of his budgets. But his situation recalls the old lesson: “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” Blame the first deception on the deceiver, who did something he should not have done and was not expected to do. Falling prey to the same trick a second time, the victim can be blamed for lack of vigilance.
But Marcos did not complain in 2023, 2024 and, in 2025, only after public protests. When the deception succeeds a third time, should we continue to describe the deceived party as a victim? Or as an accomplice in a conspiracy to influence the 2025 elections with dole-outs?
A new Congress takes over in 2026. Should the budget shell game succeed a fourth time, who can we blame, if not ourselves? We again failed to elect in 2025 leaders we can trust. To avoid this failure is the avowed concern of the CCGG. – Rappler.com
Edilberto C. de Jesus is a senior research fellow at the Ateneo School of Government.