P8.1B for an overstaying agency?
Just how many New People’s Army (NPA) rebels are there remaining in their jungle hideouts?
According to Armed Forces of the Philippines chief Gen. Romeo Brawner Jr. in November 2024, the revolutionary group behind one of the world’s longest communist insurgencies was down to 1,111 members that year, from 2,200 in 2023.
The AFP’s intelligence gathering appears to have been so thorough that it was able to arrive at such a specific number.
In his third State of the Nation Address in July 2024, President Marcos had also declared that the insurgency was on its last throes.
“No guerrilla fronts remain active across the country today. Only seven weakened groups remain to be dismantled, and they are the subject of focused operations,” he said.
By December 2024, Col. Francel Padilla, AFP spokesperson, said that of the seven groups mentioned by the President, “we’re just left with one that we’re seeing if we can declare dismantled.”
The state-run Philippine News Agency would crow that “With internal threats virtually eliminated, the Philippines is shifting its focus to external defense as the administration vigorously pursues its vision of ‘Bagong Pilipinas.’”
Wrong priorities
A year has passed since those declarations, so it’s reasonable to ask whether that one holdout NPA group has been routed by now.
But if the insurgent threat has been “eliminated,” or at least reduced to remnants requiring no more than mopping up operations by the military, why is the civilian agency National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-Elcac) still slated for an P8.1-billion budget in the 2026 National Appropriations Act currently being hammered out by Congress?
Eight billion pesos may just be a drop in the multitrillion-peso proposed national budget, but that is still a substantial amount that can fund many more urgent social projects, from classrooms to rural health facilities to flood control works that actually hold up and protect lives in times of disaster.
Caritas Philippines and the Episcopal Commission on Social Action, Justice, and Peace, the social action arm of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, are opposing the proposed budget to the NTF-Elcac since it may end up wasted on wrong priorities or used for “political favors,” they said.
“Precisely because we seek genuine and lasting peace, we raise grave concern over this allocation, which is presented as a ‘reward’ for local government units and barangays declared ‘cleared’ of insurgency,” the church groups said in a pastoral statement.
A glaring question
“Peace is not a prize to be handed out, nor a favor to be earned. Peace is the fruit of justice,” they stressed, adding that “without confronting political dynasties, corruption, landlessness, insecure work, and weak accountability, development initiatives, no matter how well-intentioned, will not bring lasting peace.”
To these objections, NTF-Elcac Executive Director Ernesto Torres Jr. has pushed back by saying that the P8.1-billion allocation was not a “reward for peace,” but a development fund for projects handled, controlled, and implemented not by NTF-Elcac but by regular government departments.
These line agencies, such as the Education, Social Welfare and Development, Public Works and Highways, Health, and Agriculture departments, provide remote barangays and long-neglected areas in the country programs that are designed as “corrective intervention—belated state action to address historical exclusion and governance failure,” said Torres.
Torres’ statement sought to demolish the church groups’ argument, but it also raised a glaring question: If the line agencies are themselves doing the work—and they are already given their respective billions of pesos in allocations in the proposed national budget—why is the NTF-Elcac duplicating their work with a separate fund facility?
Costly middleman work
Why are the projects for farm roads, water facilities, health care, electricity, irrigation, etc. to be accomplished under the NTF-Elcac budget not simply folded into the main, larger projects of these departments?
By Torres’ argument, the NTF-Elcac is doing redundant, costly middleman work. And if the Marcos administration is to be believed about the moribund state of the communist insurgency, then the NTF-Elcac must be seen as likewise a spent presence, an agency that has outlived its usefulness. A task force formed to combat an adversary must, by logic, also wind down if its target has been supposedly immobilized.
In addition, the NTF-Elcac has had a disreputable reputation for the Red-tagging sprees of its past officials, which had earned them reprimands from the Office of the Ombudsman and the Supreme Court.
At this point, whether its proposed budget is for rewarding NPA-free barangays or bankrolling countryside infrastructure, there is no justification for giving this overstaying—long-controversial but now seemingly purposeless—office yet more billions of the people’s money.
