Shame or conscience?

“Hindi na sila nahiya” (they have no shame), declares a paper initiated by the People’s Budget Coalition (PBC) now making the rounds and gathering signatures of support, calling out the House of Representatives for moving backward on budget transparency. The executive and the Senate, in contrast, have moved tangibly in that direction. The Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) has published each of its proposed projects online. The Department of Budget and Management is working with civil society to improve its budget transparency system. The President had already signed off on these initiatives for better budget transparency. Meanwhile, the Senate has kept its doors open to budget monitors, continuing Senate President Sherwin Gatchalian’s openness to civil society scrutiny of the budget as Senate finance committee chair last year.

But not so with the Lower House, which PBC reports to be moving in reverse. It has not digitized its budget process, making monitoring work much more difficult, in stark contrast to how the Senate has handled it. Last year, Gatchalian even shared detailed budget data in computer-readable format that could be readily processed and analyzed by thousands of “Angry Nerds” (as they call themselves) in various parts of the world–tech-savvy young Filipinos volunteering to apply their data analytics expertise to scrutinize the national budget. Backed by the diligent analysis of these Angry Nerds, the PBC flagged billions of pesos allocated as “hard pork,” or discretionary infrastructure funds hidden within the DPWH budget. The PBC warns that these opaque line items and unprogrammed appropriations bypass standard planning processes and are highly vulnerable to manipulation, ghost projects, and local patronage.

Upon close scrutiny of the budget that has taken shape in the Lower House, the PBC counts P1.06 trillion in “red-flag” items. These refer to budget lines that are prone to political patronage and abuse, broken down as follows: P210 billion in “ayuda”-style doleouts that politicians tend to intervene in; P695 billion in lump sum infrastructure with no specific projects identified; P43 billion for political offices (Office of the President and Congress); and P112 billion in unprogrammed appropriations. Still another P84 billion was added by the House (see below).

As the Lower House worked on the National Expenditure Program, or the budget proposed and submitted by the executive for Congress’ deliberation and approval, the PBC faced closed doors and was kept in the dark on how changes were being made. But the PBC describes the changes that emerged as nothing short of a “bastardization” of the budget. The ayudas alone were expanded by half, from P140 billion proposed by the departments concerned to a whopping P210 billion. With the 2028 elections nearing, it’s easy to suspect lawmakers of planning to use these funds to essentially buy votes—with money that belonged to the taxpayer-voters in the first place! The House also doubled local infrastructure programs in the DPWH without publicly verifiable programs of work or attachments.

During a livestream on Oct. 1, the amendments panel read out its proposed changes to the national budget amounting to P116 billion resulting from numerous modifications, insertions, and deletions. But the PBC noted that the committee report released five days later had total changes that had ballooned to over P200 billion. No explanation or accounting accompanied the over P84 billion in additional changes. To make way for its insertions and additions, they cut the budgets for education, health, transportation and disaster response. And they are again causing a major problem by substantially reducing the budget cover for foreign-assisted projects, notably the Metro Manila Subway and the North-South Commuter Railway. The subway, which was originally meant to be operational as of last year, has already been stretched out all the way to 2032, as of the last report.

That total of P1.06 trillion in PBC’s red-flagged budget allocations comprises 15 percent, or P15 out of every P100, of the total P7.2 trillion budget for 2027. But note that P2.7 trillion of that will just pay for government debt in both interest and principal amortization payments, leaving only P4.5 trillion as the operational budget. Based on this, the red flags amount to a much higher percentage of P1 in every P4 (24 percent). It’s also worth noting that as a percentage of actual projected government revenues of P5.21 trillion, debt service payments will already eat up more than half (52 percent) of that. With a budget of P7.2 trillion, it will thus incur a deficit of P1.7 trillion, which means even more borrowing that will further raise the already heavy debt burden on the budget.

If shame will not stop lawmakers, can their consciences ever do?

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