If the Marcos Jr. regime were really interested in crafting an annual national budget that is genuinely transparent, viable and stripped completely of largesse, then its should agree to subject the entire process to people’s oversight.
This is necessary since the yearly general appropriations bill is funded by taxes, fees, and revenues generated from government operations, regulatory functions, or local or foreign borrowings, which means that the public ultimately pays for everything, not the lawmakers, not the bicameral conference committee (BCC) that inserts whatever it wants into the national budget in violation of legislative rules and constitutional prohibitions against the BCC’s adding or subtracting budget items in the general appropriations bill (GAB.)
There is nothing intrinsically right in the lame excuse offered by Speaker Ferdinand Martin Romualdez that the notorious AKAP fund “distributed” to poor families was “receipted” and thus above-board. The corrupt intent of distributing money or services in the name of lawmakers smothers whatever false generosity Romualdez or his cohorts have in mind. It is as corrupt as Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio distributing cash to her fictitious informants, snitches, and sycophants with snack brand surnames and refusing to answer questions by lawmakers as such an action would add more cases to her mountain of cases. Those who commit graft often complain loudly about “injustice.”
It is as corrupt as the reported scheme of a lawmaker to gift his friends and ward leaders with P10,000 each through the AKAP fund, with the recipients passed off as “indigents” as “verified” by a local government unit (LGU.) It doesn’t matter whether the cash given out was in Valenzuela City, Abuyog, Leyte, Maitum, Sarangani or Cabugao, Ilocos Norte. There is no justice when public funds are recycled as bribes for the May 2025 elections.
What makes the private appropriation of public funds more insidious is that the AKAP is being promoted as a one-time “social justice” program. It is all synchrony and no diachrony when you insist that a puny windfall would help reduce poverty levels and push indigents up the social ladder. It doesn’t wash and it doesn’t add up. Remember what Karl Marx said of capitalism: “Teach a man to fish, but the fish he catches aren’t his. They belong to the person paying him to fish, and if he’s lucky, he might get paid enough to buy a few fish for himself.” AKAP is a ridiculous social justice program since it rewards the poor for being poor and staying poor throughout their lives. And “social justice” is remembered by lawmakers only during an election year.
The anomaly only became bigger warts on the faces of BCC members when they approved P26 billion for themselves to fund AKAP, with P5 billion for the Senate and P21 billion for the House of Representatives. Already excised from plenary deliberations at the Lower House, the AKAP returned as the ghost appropriation that sneaked into the BCC deliberations to punish taxpayers. As designed, the AKAP was supposed to help those who don’t earn the minimum wage, which should mean covering more than 60% of those employed, if the NEDA cares to admit. Yet, nothing in the doleout scheme creates a solitary job. This is the greater scandal at a time when Neda director general Arsenio Balisacan is bragging that the Philippines will graduate from the status of a poor developing nation into a progressive country. Previous NEDA chiefs said the same thing based on the argument that the country has become credit-worthy, that it is borrowing more to pay its amortization and interest payments to lenders. It sucks.
Then there is this profoundly unintelligible tacking of an additional P289 billion to the budget of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) when the department did not ask for it and when the agency is being battered for failing to reduce flooding in Metro Manila despite “completing” 2,500 flood control projects since 2016 when Mark Villar took over the portfolio. That’s the problem when every canal built is described as a “flood control project.” Meanwhile, the cherished Davao City sinks when rivers overflow, sharing the annual tragedy of Metro Manila.
Consider the graft that attends the P289 billion extra allocation for DPWH that boosted its 2025 appropriations to P1.113 trillion. Dividing P289 billion by the 23 senators and 220 or so congressmen and you have an average of P1.42 billion to dangle to each lawmaker. Yet, you only have 23 BCC members, all of them responsible for all the insertions that the lesser mortals of the two houses are not privy to. Dividing P289 billion by 23, the windfall is P12.5 billion each. At a maximum commission of 40%, each BCC player nets P5 billion. Those content with moderating their greed and are alright with a discounted 20% take, will pocket P2.5 billion. Does the Marcos Jr. regime want this massacre of public finance to end? Or does it merely want to just junk all the hidden Marcos cases? For real justice to attend their budget process, just open it to universal scrutiny.
