EDITORIAL - Indulging gluttony

After impounding P89.9 billion in “savings” of the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. along with billions more from other state-firms to finance the new congressional pork barrel, Finance Secretary Ralph Recto is now trying to control the monster the government itself has created.

Facing a Senate panel yesterday, Recto reportedly appealed to his former colleagues to refrain from further bloating the unprogrammed appropriations in the national budget for 2025. The unprogrammed appropriations are the latest incarnations of the congressional pork barrel, which the Supreme Court had ordered stopped.

The unprogrammed appropriations are supposed to be funded only with higher or new taxes, but the Marcos administration found a new source of funding: government-owned and controlled corporations. The GOCCs lump together revenue-generating agencies such as the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. with PhilHealth, which is so cash-strapped it cannot even fully roll out the Universal Health Care program.

Recto continues to passionately defend the impounding of the P89.9 billion in PhilHealth funds to finance the pork barrel, saying the money does not come from PhilHealth members’ contributions but from government subsidies that the state health insurer failed to utilize. What should have happened, with a surplus in PhilHealth funds, was to cut members’ contributions or expand services. Instead premiums were even raised beginning this year, and PhilHealth services cannot be expanded enough.

Lawmakers have become experts at using people’s money to finance pet projects for which they will claim credit in aid of reelection. During the bicameral conference on the 2024 General Appropriations Act, the lawmakers inserted at the last minute a whopping P449.5 billion in the unprogrammed appropriations proposed by Malacañang, bringing the new total to P731.4 billion. With no new or higher taxes to finance this, the government then had to impound even PhilHealth funds. As of June, P138.55 billion released by the budget department had reportedly gone to unprogrammed appropriations.

Now the government is worried that the new pork barrel allocation will become even bigger in 2025, and Recto is trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube. The government is proposing only P158.7 billion in unprogrammed appropriations for 2025 – lower than the P281.9 billion it had originally proposed for 2024.

But what’s to stop lawmakers from again bloating this proposed amount during the bicameral conference? What’s the use of GOCCs if their funds can’t be impounded for partisan purposes? Having tasted lechon, will lawmakers still settle for merely chicharon? As the nation continues to see, lawmakers’ hunger for pork is insatiable, and the administration has dutifully indulged the gluttony.