Corruption with no mastermind

One of the startling conclusions in Senate blue ribbon committee Chair Sen. Panfilo Lacson’s report on the flood control investigations is that the corruption uncovered there was a replica, on a grander scale, of the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) or pork barrel scam that roiled the country in 2013. That scheme, masterminded by Janet Lim Napoles, defrauded the country of P10 billion over 10 years.

Public furor erupted into mass demonstrations. The Supreme Court eventually declared PDAF and all congressional participation in project execution unconstitutional, for violating the separation of powers. Napoles was jailed, along with three senators found to have profited from their allocations. The senators were later freed; Napoles remains in jail. This time, Lacson reported, the amounts involved in just the first three years of the Marcos presidency are several times larger. The number of legislators and officials implicated is greater. Their behavior was so brazen that it seemed, to them, merely the normal exercise of their office.

What media highlighted was the senator’s finding that there was no “overall mastermind” orchestrating the entire scheme. But this was not Lacson’s main point. What he stressed was that the corruption occurred across various regions, following more or less the same modus operandi, without central coordination. It was, in short, a distributed system. In retrospect, even the PDAF scam attributed to Napoles was never a monopoly. There were many lesser-known Napoleses, not as well-connected as the queen of the pork barrel but operating by the same model.

Why does this matter? Our political culture predisposes us to look for the key person to blame. This is understandable. It simplifies what is otherwise a dense system of institutional vulnerabilities, vulnerabilities that remain unpatched precisely because they furnish the resources of political patronage. And so even when investigations reveal the systemic nature of corruption, we keep shifting our gaze toward the culprits. It satisfies the public need to assign blame. It is also, not coincidentally, what is politically expedient.

The price of this simplification is incalculable. We fail to understand what it actually takes to combat corruption. We fail to see how, over time, everyone becomes complicit in its normalization—learning to tolerate it, to underestimate its long-term damage, even as we reserve our outrage for its most shameless practitioners.

A less moralistic view would look beyond greed and focus instead on the structural conditions that enable corrupt behavior to take root, persist, and evolve. Many practices that sustain corruption are not themselves illegal. Accommodating a legislator’s request for more publicly funded projects in his district is not, per se, unlawful. It is, in fact, what constituencies expect of their representatives. What the law prohibits is legislative interference in project identification and execution. But this is a gray area, and gray areas are where corruption breeds.

When pork barrel allocations flow to favored districts without public justification, the door opens to precisely the kind of dealings we have seen in both the PDAF and flood control scandals. A legislator learns to treat the perks that attach to project execution as simply part of the privileges of office. The executive, meanwhile, dispenses pork barrel to secure legislative support for his agenda. Those he appoints know this. The late Department of Public Works and Highways Undersecretary Catalina Cabral went so far as to devise a parametric model to “rationalize” pork barrel allocations across congressional districts—a bureaucratic innovation that normalized legislative interference in project identification and execution rather than checked it.

When the President is seen as comfortable with this arrangement, content to entrust the details to subordinates, the line between executive and legislative functions is blurred. President Marcos’ complaint in his 2025 State of the Nation Address that the approved budget left little room for his own centerpiece projects had the ring of someone surprised to find that the game he had allowed had costs.

In our system of government, nearly everyone in the legislature, the bureaucracy, and I would venture even the judiciary, takes their cues from the president. That is how powerful the office is, not merely in its formal authority, but in the signals it sends and what it tacitly permits. If a president consistently demonstrates a clear and stubborn commitment to enforce the law in its spirit and letter—through the quality of his appointments, through his own daily conduct as chief executive—those below him will think hard before abusing their positions.

There was no mastermind in the flood control corruption scheme. But there was also no one in charge of resolutely protecting the system of governance from being corrupted. That absence is fatal.