Blockchaining the budget
One of the most potentially far-reaching pieces of legislation that the 20th Congress could pass is stuck in the House of Representatives, even as its Senate counterpart had already been passed by the Upper House. The Cadena bill—Senate Bill No. 1506, or the “Citizen Access and Disclosure of Expenditures for National Accountability Act,” proposes to put the entire national government’s budget trail into a publicly accessible, tamper-resistant digital system. The Senate passed it 17–0 back in December 2025, but to date, it is still pending at the committee level in the Lower House.
What would happen if it became law? First, a national digital budget platform would be established. The government would create a centralized, publicly accessible portal containing all the government’s budget information, using distributed-ledger technology, such as blockchain, the best-known of such digital ledgers. I wrote about blockchain eight years ago (see “Blockchain and farmers,” 7/17/18) and how it could curb exploitative market practices that complete transparency in the farm value chain would expose and prevent, thereby protecting farmers and consumers alike. Imagine farmers (and all players in the farm value chains) being able to access all information on transactions that happen to their products all the way from their field to the end consumer’s table, via blockchains.
Blockchain, or any distributed ledger technology, is a continuously growing list of time-stamped records (“blocks”), linked and secured via encryption, where each block contains a record of the previous block, along with data on the transactions that created the new block. Imagine a document—a record of accounts, like the detailed government budget—shared across thousands of computers in a network, with the record constantly updated with every new transaction. Once recorded, the data in any given block cannot be altered retroactively without altering all subsequent blocks. Any alteration would require that every member of the network agrees to the change, implying collusion on a massive scale that is virtually impossible. Thus, all records become permanent and incorruptible.
The idea in the Cadena bill is to put the budget in a kind of digital chain of custody, and anyone could follow an appropriation from its creation all the way through to its release and spending. It’s far more than simply publishing the National Expenditure Program prepared by the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) from budget proposals of all government entities and submitted by the President to Congress. The latter eventually passes it as the General Appropriations Act (GAA) after making various modifications to it, including those notorious insertions that have lined the pockets—er, maletas—of some of its members, and more. With the budget on blockchain, virtually every stage of the budget process would be recorded and accessible to all, well beyond the GAA’s passage. It’s recorded for all to see when DBM releases the Saros (special allotment release orders), NCAs (notices of cash allocation), and other documents leading to final release and spending of those budget funds, including to the Mary Grace Piattoses of the country.
Cadena provides for a seven-day deadline for entering any such transaction on the portal, failure of which would be easily detected because the digital paper trail is recorded permanently. Budget changes would become visible to all, and the system would retain the earlier version and record the subsequent change, and who made the change, rather than simply report the final number. The bill provides for penalties for nondisclosure and fraudulent information. Disclosure is thus an enforceable legal obligation and not just a good government practice.
But there’s an important caveat. By itself, blockchain will not magically prevent corruption. While it can make a recorded transaction extremely difficult to alter retroactively, it cannot automatically establish that the underlying transaction was legitimate. For example, let’s say the Department of Public Works and Highways pays P100 million to contractor D for a flood control project. Blockchain can make that record extremely difficult to secretly rewrite, but it cannot, by itself, determine whether contractor D actually does the work paid for, or if the project was overpriced or unnecessary, or the contractor company is owned by a congressman. We would still need vigilant groups like the People’s Budget Coalition and the Angry Nerds (thank God we have hordes of young people like them) to verify such expenditures and check them on the ground. The difference is that they would no longer have to rely on the goodness of a Sen. Win Gatchalian, who as Senate finance committee chair last year freely shared detailed budget data with them. With Cadena, the numbers would be there for them to obtain anytime.
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