How much funding goes to offices of President, lawmakers?
How much are the Filipino people spending for the Office of the President (OP), the senators and the congressmen to perform their jobs?
As it turns out, for 2025 alone, P1.3 billion in taxpayer money went monthly to President Marcos, P48.3 million to each of the 24 senators and P8.8 million to each of the 315 congressmen, according to former Budget Secretary Florencio “Butch” Abad.
The amounts are not equivalent to their salaries (which are subject to the salary standardization law), but rather to how much it costs for the offices of the Chief Executive and the hundreds of lawmakers to do their work, Abad said.
Significant increase
If the current version of the 2026 spending plan passes, there would be slight decreases for Congress, but a significant increase for the OP.
Mr. Marcos’ monthly spending will go up to P2.3 billion. For each senator it will go down to P29.8 million and it will decrease to P7.3 million per congressman.
At present, the Senate version of the 2026 appropriations gives the OP a budget of P27.4 billion. Its own budget will be slightly increased from P7.2 billion to P8.6 billion, while the the House will have P27.7 billion to spend.
‘No justification’
Why are these amounts important for ordinary Filipinos to know? It’s because public funds allocated for the OP, the Senate and the House have ballooned over the past few years “with no justification or compelling reason,” Abad said.
These increases are often drawn from cuts from other essential services, as what happened with the zero subsidy for the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. in 2025.
The budget has been under more intense scrutiny following the President’s own admission of massive corruption through kickbacks of flood control funds during the first three years of his administration.
Back in 2016—the first year of the Duterte administration—the budget for the OP was around P2.8 billion; P3.7 billion for the Senate; and P8.8 billion for the House.
Civil society monitoring
Abad, who is also part of the civil society coalition Roundtable for Inclusive Development (RFID), which monitors the national budget, said these increases were insensitive to public outrage against government excesses amid the flood control scandal.
“We need to realize how much we’re spending on these people,” he told the Inquirer last week. “And we need to put extra emphasis on why it’s important to vote wisely. Because this is how much we’re paying for them to be able to do their work.”
“And then, you find out that your senator is chronically absent or sleeps on the job. It’s a waste of public funds,” he added.
House budget increase
It’s unclear why both chambers of Congress had requested bigger budgets for 2026 compared to the proposed budget under the National Expenditure Program (NEP), the administration’s spending plan for next year.
In the case of the House, the sudden increase in its budget did not appear in the reports of the House budget amendments review subcommittee but only in the third version of the House General Appropriations Bill (HGAB).
Other causes for alarm
Much of this P10 billion increase went to the House’s maintenance and other operating expenses, which jumped from P10.7 billion in the NEP to P18.6 billion in the HGAB.
The biggest increases under this item went to communication expenses (+P1.07 billion) and to other maintenance and operating expenses (+P2.9 billion).
Other budget watchdogs like the People’s Budget Coalition (PBC) have sounded the alarm on this sudden increase because the 61-percent hike was “very steep” compared to other branches of government and worth noting since Congress controls the national budget.
While it was unclear where the increase was drawn from, a PBC analysis said it could “reflect new insertions for infrastructure, assistance programs, or internal budgets.”
The funds could have been taken from two agencies that saw major cuts in the House’s version of next year’s budget—the Department of Public Works and Highways, which was slashed by P255 billion, and the Office of the Vice President, whose proposed funding was reduced by the House to the 2025 level of P733 million.
The lack of public scrutiny into these increases, Abad said, may have emboldened lawmakers to increase funding for their offices “because they know there won’t be a lot of pushback.”
