EDITORIAL - Budget reforms

Deliberations on the 2026 national budget begin next week following the submission by the executive of the P6.793-trillion National Expenditure Program or NEP to Congress yesterday.

After drawing flak for the 2025 General Appropriations Act, described by critics as the most corrupt national budget ever, lawmakers have announced several reforms to prevent a repeat of the GAA scandal.

Among these are the livestreaming of the budget deliberations at the House of Representatives and allowing members of civil society groups to sit in as observers.

Senators have yet to agree to the livestreaming. But the chair of the Senate finance committee, Sherwin Gatchalian, has said he will not allow last-minute budget insertions during the bicam.

Under the NEP, education will get the highest budget allocation as mandated by the Constitution, while confidential funds will be slashed by 11 percent from the previous year.

The subsidy of the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. has been restored, while no funding was allocated for the pork barrel-type aid scheme, the Ayuda para sa Kapos ang Kita Program.

AKAP – seen as a tax-funded dole-out in aid of lawmakers’ 2025 election campaigns – was also not in the NEP for this year. But it was inserted with a P26-billion allocation during the bicam, with P21 billion for House members and P5 billion for senators.

Ayuda programs – covering a wide range of needs from health care, food, jobs and emergency assistance – have long been used by politicians for patronage at taxpayers’ expense. Can lawmakers keep their hands off the aid programs?

In 2013, amid the scandal over the misuse of the Priority Development Assistance Fund, the Supreme Court had prohibited pork barrel allocations and similar types of earmarking of projects after the GAA enactment.

Lawmakers, however, soon found ways of going around the prohibition, giving themselves and local government executives wide discretion over the use of public funds with little accountability. These included the confidential and intelligence funds granted to civilian agencies, and the unprogrammed appropriations, both of which have ballooned exponentially in recent years.

In 2024, Congress introduced a scheme to finance the unprogrammed appropriations, by inserting a provision in the GAA that the Department of Finance implemented through a circular, ordering the impounding of supposed savings of all government-owned and controlled corporations including PhilHealth.

Many of the members of the 20th Congress were also part of the previous Congress, and bear the responsibility for crafting the most corrupt budget ever. Whether they can keep their hands off the tax-funded cookie jar, now that the nation is watching, remains to be seen.