Palace vows ‘anomaly-free’ budget for 2026
President Marcos will make sure the P6.793-trillion national budget for 2026 will be free of any anomalies, Palace press officer Claire Castro said on Monday.
Castro stressed in a briefing that the President would veto any questionable allocations in next year’s budget.
“As we have said, the President truly wants the budget to be correct and allocated to the right programs for the future and the benefit of the people,” she said.
“We can be assured, with all these things happening, that the people can expect the 2026 budget to be in order and that the President will not allow anomalous projects,” Castro added.
“The President,” she said, “already said before that if there are any mistakes or anomalies again in the 2026 budget, he will veto them.”
‘Humongous’ insertions
Senate President Pro Tempore Panfilo Lacson revealed on Sunday that “almost all” of the 24 senators in the 19th Congress had inserted at least P100 billion worth of items in the 2025 General Appropriations Act (GAA).
Lacson noted that the roster of congressmen who made similar insertions was equally lengthy.
The chair of the Senate blue ribbon committee described the individual insertions by his colleagues as “humongous.”
“I have never seen such amounts. Before the Priority Development Assistance Fund was declared unconstitutional in 2013, pork amounted to hundreds of millions. Now it’s at least P100 billion total for senators alone,” said Lacson.
The insertions were made when the spending bill reached either the “small committee” after it hurdled the second reading, or during the bicameral conference committee when members of the House of Representatives and Senate reconciled the provisions of the third reading version of their respective bills.
These amendments, discussed not in open plenary but made in closed-door meetings by only a few handful of lawmakers, were then parked under big-ticket projects of agencies, including the flood mitigation program of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH).
‘No detailed knowledge’
But according to Castro, Mr. Marcos is opposed to such practices and did not know the extent of the amendments made.
“When the 2025 budget was being crafted, the President definitely did not have detailed knowledge of what insertions certain senators had made,” Castro said.
“But now, because the President has truly seen and taken notice of what happened to the funds for flood control projects, he would make sure that these insertions would not happen again,” she added.
Directing her remarks to legislators, Castro said, “As shown by the public’s anger—something that the President also feels—we can see that they should have already learned to fulfill their mandate of being true public servants.”
Zero allocation
The Department of Budget and Management submitted to Congress in August the 2026 National Expenditure Program amounting to P6.793 trillion. It was 7.4 percent higher than the enacted 2025 budget of P6.326 trillion, and equivalent to 22 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.
For the 2025 GAA, Mr. Marcos vetoed P26.065 billion worth of DPWH projects related to flood mitigation and control for being “inconsistent” with the government’s infrastructure program.
He has ordered zero budget to be allocated to locally funded flood control projects under the 2026 proposed budget of the DPWH.
The move created a fiscal space of P255.5 billion, which will be realigned to other agencies to fund the government’s social programs.
Malacañang allayed concerns that the reallocation to other priority programs would disrupt ongoing or future flood control projects, explaining that more than P300 billion under the DPWH’s 2025 budget could still be tapped.
