New faces, same appetite for pork

The House passed House Bill No. 10858, its version of the 2027 budget, on third reading on Oct. 12. The vote was a formality. The decisions were made on Oct. 1, when a Budget Amendments Review Subcommittee (BARC) came out of a four-hour closed-door session and approved P116.32 billion in additions without one objection or a minute of debate.

The bill moves far more. Against the executive’s proposal, we count about P200 billion added to some items and the same amount cut from others, most of it from foreign-assisted projects. But even our method undercounts. We tallied the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), farm-to-market roads, health facilities, and classrooms by program, not by project, so money shuffled within a program doesn’t show. Inside DPWH, a net increase of P11.5 billion hides nearly P90 billion taken from some projects and handed to others.

Of the P116 billion that the subcommittee did announce, 85 percent went to items with a long record of patronage: “ayuda” that runs on guarantee and referral letters, infrastructure with questionable project lists, confidential funds and the House’s own budget. Last year, the share was 40 percent.

A year ago, the flood control scandal cost a Speaker and a Senate president their posts. The House has new leaders and a new vocabulary of livestreams. But read the bill and the old House is still there. Ayuda sa Kapos ang Kita Program, the ayuda program tied to the previous Speaker, vanished with him. In its place came a P10-billion Presidential Assistance to Farmers and Fisherfolk that the executive never asked for. New name, same design: a beneficiary, a referral, and a legislator allocating ayuda.

Ayuda made sense during the lockdowns. The pandemic ended, but for some reason the ayuda didn’t. The seven programs we track held P42.5 billion in the 2019 budget and P188.2 billion in 2026. From 2020 to 2026, Congress added P389 billion to them beyond the executive’s proposals.

Look at what it cut instead. In 2025 Congress zeroed out the PhilHealth premium subsidy for poor and elderly members and cut P50 billion from 4Ps, and in the same budget added P69.3 billion to ayuda. For 2027 the House found P25 billion more for Maifip, the guarantee-letter program that is supposed to patch PhilHealth’s gaps, but it added nothing for the P55 billion the executive cut from PhilHealth.

Universal health care is a right you hold whoever your congressperson is. Maifip is a favor you ask him for. Ayuda needs only a referral letter and a tarpaulin with the right name on it.

Infrastructure carries the same habit, and it didn’t start with Martin Romualdez or Zaldy Co. From 2017 to 2022, Congress gave the DPWH district engineering offices in Davao City P11.3 billion more than the executive proposed, a 69 percent markup. In 2025, a DPWH undersecretary confirmed that Rep. Paolo Duterte’s district received P51 billion in the 2020 to 2022 budgets, most of it lodged in DPWH’s central office. Documents obtained by the Inquirer put the district at P4.67 billion in the 2020 National Expenditure Program and P13.7 billion in the General Appropriations Act, and at P9.67 billion and more than P25 billion in 2021. The central office budget doesn’t make it clear which district a project sits in, so an accounting by district office undercounts Davao several times over.

When the Priority Development Assistance Fund was abolished in 2013, the appetite for pork didn’t go away. It moved into lines where it is harder to count. The 2027 House bill moves P42.3 billion out of DPWH’s central office and into the districts. The largest jump, from P414 million to P4.79 billion, goes to Ilocos Norte’s 1st district, represented by the House majority leader, the President’s son. At the district level, the House bill carries P57.4 billion for access roads, P52.3 billion for multipurpose buildings and P17.7 billion for flood mitigation structures, a year after the country learned where flood control money really went. The BARC did not publish a full project list for any of this.

The flood control scandal stripped the facade off the infrastructure budget. What it showed was not a development program with leaks. Rather, it was a pork program with a development label.

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More than a year later, nobody has been convicted. But we’ve seen this before. Pharmally, the Duterte administration’s pandemic procurement scandal, had a presidential adviser, a budget official who signed the contracts, and a company with P625,000 in capital that won more than P8 billion in deals. Most of its cases have since been withdrawn for refiling. Forgetting feeds hubris.

Civil society submitted P124.4 billion in costed proposals and asked for the abolition of patronage. Only P1.72 billion of the House’s additions trace back to these proposals. The largest ask, P76.65 billion to restore the PhilHealth premium subsidy, got nothing. The ayuda lines got P50.77 billion more and no rules or penalties against patronage.

The faces changed, but the appetite didn’t.

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AJ Montesa is co-convenor and technical advisor of the People’s Budget Coalition.