Choking on pork

Of course Malacañang sees nothing wrong with the congressional pork barrel. The Office of the President has its share of "pork" in the national budget — special funds that need no auditing.

In fact Palace officials are asking Congress to restore P8 billion in the proposed 2006 budget for the Kalayaan Barangay program and Kilos Asenso Support Fund, which lawmakers believe is presidential pork.

Presidents come and go, the Senate may be abolished and the nation may shift to a parliamentary system, but you can be sure nothing will come between our lawmakers and their pork barrel. Taxpayers will just have to live with it.

Last year, amid warnings about a looming fiscal crisis, there was a lot of noise about congressmen slashing their pork allocations. There were furious warnings that Speaker Jose de Venecia was in danger of losing his post. Skeptical people smelled a moro-moro – another publicity-generating farce at the House of Representatives. Now we know; there’s a reason why there is so much public cynicism in this country.

When justifying their pork barrel, lawmakers and Palace officials should stop treating Filipinos like movie has-beens and athletes who would flunk the elementary achievement test if it had been administered during their time.

Instead legislators and policy-makers should try to take the stigma out of pork, by promoting transparency and accountability in the way projects are selected, funded and implemented.

I’m not on ecstasy; I’m just suspecting that there might be a new breed of lawmakers willing to display more responsibility in the disbursement of public funds.

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Lawmakers should stop insulting the public’s intelligence by insisting that they don’t benefit personally from the congressional pork.

This is pure hogwash. What they mean is that the public funds don’t go into their personal bank accounts, although you can be sure they wouldn’t mind if there was some way this could happen.

What they wield is the power of the purse, which in this land of political patronage is just as valuable as having hard cash in one’s personal bank account.

Lawmakers get to pick which projects will get priority in the disbursement of funds from a chunk of the national budget. This year, the amount of pork that is likely to be approved – unanimously, it seems, by both chambers of Congress – is over P7.1 billion. That’s a lot of money at the personal discretion of lawmakers.

Congressmen and senators get to pick the roads, bridges, development projects, special sectors and non-government organizations, parks and even basketball courts that deserve funding from their so-called Priority Development Assistance Fund or PDAF.

In other countries, public works and development projects have signs declaring, "This is where your taxes go."

In this country, congressmen and senators put up giant billboards, often bearing their grinning faces, declaring that a particular project was financed through their share of the PDAF.

That’s a lot of people grateful to the lawmaker for his generosity – or at least that’s what he’s hoping to reap by agreeing to use his PDAF for a particular project.

That gratitude is invaluable come election time, which in the case of congressmen and half of the Senate membership is every three years.

This year’s congressional pork will be invaluable for preludes to re-election campaigns in 2007. There is no way lawmakers are going to cut a centavo of their proposed pork this year.

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Since we have no choice but to live with it, we might as well try to improve the pork barrel system.

The idea behind the congressional pork is that lawmakers – House members in particular – are more familiar with the needs of their respective constituencies.

Giving equal pork allocations to all lawmakers is also supposed to insulate districts that voted for the opposition from deliberate neglect by a vindictive administration or ruling party.

In the case of party-list congressmen, who also won’t give up their pork, the idea is that the constituencies they represent – usually marginalized sectors – do not suffer from government neglect.

These are actually valid arguments for the pork barrel system.

There is another valid argument for the pork barrel: it takes away decision-making over a portion of public funds from graft-prone agencies such as the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH).

The question is whether those taking over some of the decision-making functions are themselves clean.

As a senator once famously said, it’s a question of which thief gets to control public funds.

And there lies the problem in this system.

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A scrutiny of pork barrel allocations over the years will show that several lawmakers have used their allocations to finance roads, bridges and other public works that will benefit real estate development projects owned by their spouses and other relatives as well as big campaign donors.

Public works officials have also complained that for pork-funded projects, lawmakers often pick contractors that do no meet qualifications set by the DPWH. This is one of the reasons why we have substandard roads that disintegrate in the first heavy downpour or curiously collapse after a few months.

The pork barrel system has become the biggest hindrance to coordinated, long-term planning for a modern national road network. What we see instead is a patchwork of road improvements, piecemeal asphalting, bridges leading to nowhere – or to a resort built by a lawmaker’s relatives.

In the case of left-leaning party-list representatives, certain administration officials have publicly voiced suspicions that some of the congressmen have been using their pork allocations to finance anti-government activities.

Administration officials, however, did not push aggressively for a probe or audit of the funds, possibly because they didn’t want the presidential pork to be subjected to similar scrutiny.

There must be a way of rationalizing the selection of projects for pork barrel funding. And there must be a way of keeping taxpayers regularly informed about where their money went.

But neither Malacañang nor Congress is interested in promoting transparency and accountability in the system. We’re stuck with pork.