House ratifies P6.7-T budget for 2026

MANILA, Philippines — The House of Representatives ratified the bicameral conference committee report on the proposed P6.7-trillion 2026 national budget on Monday, December 29, despite objections from lawmakers who warn the spending plan remains riddled with "pork barrel" allocations in the form of unprogrammed appropriations.

The Senate is expected to ratify the report later Monday afternoon. Once both chambers approve, the enrolled bill will be transmitted to Malacañang, where President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is expected to sign it on January 5.

Lawmakers expressed their support or objection through a voice vote or viva voce. Minority lawmakers who opposed the bicam report publicly laid their reasons for doing so in statements released to the media, as they were not given the chance to take the floor. 

The ratification comes after weeks of deadlock that forced Congress to extend its session calendar. The bicam proceedings were repeatedly suspended over disputes on the Department of Public Works and Highways budget, with the Senate and House at odds over roughly P45 billion in cuts based on alleged overpricing in the agency's construction materials price data.

The bicameral conference committee finally wrapped up its deliberations at early morning December 18 after talks that stretched to over nine hours. Bicam members signed the over 4,000-paged report on Sunday, December 28 — giving the rest of the House and the Senate only one day to review the document before Monday's ratification. 

Brief session 

The House plenary reconvened Monday for less than 10 minutes to ratify the bicam report. While loud "ayes" could be heard in favor of the budget, audible "nays" also rang out in opposition.  

According to standard procedure, lawmakers can only vote to approve or reject the entire reconciled version of bicameral conference committee reports. Objections to certain allocations or the nitty gritty details are assumed to have been ironed out before the report is finalized by the bicam. 

Some lawmakers who opposed the report shared their reasons in statements sent to the media.

House Deputy Minority Leader Rep. Antonio Tinio (ACT Teachers) said he voted against because the budget still fails to address the needs of Filipinos and is not a "people-centered budget." 

"There is no funding for genuine agrarian reform and national industrialization. While funding for education, health, housing, and other social services is lacking, funds were poured into pork, fascism, foreign interests, and debt payments," Tinio said in a statement.

Tinio identified several types of pork in the 2026 budget: presidential pork, vice-presidential pork, allocables, hard pork, soft pork, generals' pork, and a new category he called "LGU pork."

The bicam inflated what Tinio referred to as the "LGU pork" — the Local Government Support Fund — from P16 billion in the National Expenditure Program to P57.87 billion, the largest in history. 

The bicam specifically increased Financial Assistance to LGUs from P5 billion to P37.5 billion and the Growth Equity Fund from P1 billion to P11.3 billion. Both are lump-sum funds that can be used for infrastructure and aid.  

The budget also retains the P8-billion Barangay Development Fund under the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, which Tinio described as "generals' pork."

Tinio also flagged a new P15.33-billion Disaster Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Assistance Program for LGUs, which he described as a new form of presidential pork barrel that can be used in areas affected by calamities, epidemics, or armed conflict over the past two years.  

"In total, LGU Pork in the 2026 National Budget amounts to P73.2 billion," Tinio said.

Standby funds still there. To the surprise of no one, unprogrammed appropriations remain in the budget at P243.4 billion, which minority lawmakers like Tinio have repeatedly called to abolish due to the lack of safeguards for the standby fund.   

This, Tinio said, remains to be "one big presidential pork barrel fund."

Rep. Leila de Lima (Mamamayang Liberal) also took aim at the inclusion of the standby funds, saying this should not just have been reduced but removed altogether, citing a Supreme Court opinion that questioned their constitutional basis for lacking definite revenue sources and effectively surrendering Congress’ power of the purse to the executive.

The unprogrammed funds "have no place" in the General Appropriations Act, De Lima said in a statement.

Bicam transparency amid DPWH scandal

What made this year's bicam process different compared to previous years was the greater public scrutiny.  

For the first time in the history of Congress, the proceedings were livestreamed — a break from the tradition of so-called backroom deals where select House and Senate members would typically hammer out  budget differences behind closed doors.

The decision to open the bicam hearings to the public came amid simmering public fury over billions of pesos in alleged ghost flood control projects at the DPWH. Criticism of the 2025 budget has centered on insertions made late in the budget process by a bicam “small committee,” a mechanism critics say allowed questionable flood control projects to pass largely unchecked into the final spending plan.

But this year's bicam process also hit several snags. Deliberations were temporarily suspended in mid-December after a deadlock between the Senate and the House over cuts to the DPWH's budget, particularly how to apply revised construction material price data to trim spending. 

The Senate’s insistence on deeper reductions based on its own cost adjustments clashed with the positions of the House and DPWH. At one point, proceedings stalled as conferees awaited additional data from the DPWH to justify the cost computations.

On December 15, the proceedings were suspended amid a brief impasse when several senators objected to hearing DPWH Secretary Vince Dizon's presentation. Senator Pia Cayetano argued the bicam should be reserved for lawmakers only, calling it a "purely legislative exercise." 

Ultimately, senators relented and allowed Dizon to present after House lawmakers argued that the bicam, as a congressional committee, could summon officials when clarification was needed.

By the end, the bicam had gone for the deep cuts to the DPWH's budget: the corruption-rilled department was allotted P529.6 billion for 2026, gutted by more than P350 billion from its original request of P881 billion. 

This final amount is also lower than both the House's (P624.48 billion) and the Senate's (P570 billion) proposed budget for the department.

While Dizon made a last-minute appeal to restore P45 billion that the Senate had initially slashed, senators refused to back down entirely. But they did agree to recalculate. After two days of recomputing costs for 10,000 projects using more accurate construction materials data that Dizon provided, they determined the actual cut should be P20.7 billion — not the P45 billion they had originally proposed.

Most of the P20.7 billion went to PhilHealth to cover years of government under-remittances. The remaining P4.2 billion went to the national disaster fund.

Dizon publicly accepted the outcome, saying the agency would "make do" with a budget 40% less than originally proposed. 

While acknowledging the livestreaming of bicam proceedings as a “historic step,” De Lima said transparency alone does not amount to reform.

“Transparency becomes hollow when what it merely broadcasts is the return of opaque, discretionary, and patronage-driven spending,” she said, warning that key decisions were still made off-camera and outside public scrutiny.

— with reports by Dominique Nicole Flores