My spellchecker does not accept the word “unprogrammed.” This machine has a better grasp of semantics than many of our legislators.
“Unprogrammed” makes no logical sense. It should be taken as an unaccredited synonym of “invalid.”
But here we are, condemned to living with a word that has no right to be there. This is because a significant portion of our national budget goes under the heading of “unprogrammed appropriations” (UA).
While the 2026 national budget was being deliberated, a number of legislators struck brave poses, saying they will never allow UA to be enacted. This was after we discovered UA was the method used to conceal hundreds of billions of pesos inserted into the budget document and destined for corruptible projects that lined the pockets of the corrupt.
All those brave poses meant nothing. UA remained in the budget document. Legislators mumbled about this category of appropriations being a convenient accounting device to include expenditure items for which no money was available just yet. Whatever happened to the constitutional guidance that government can only allocate money it already has?
UA has not always been the peril to transparency and accountability that it has become.
During the tenure of Rodrigo Duterte, the UA was a negligible item in the budget. In 2016, 2017 and 2018, UA was a uniform two percent of the total budget. In 2019, on the eve of the pandemic, the share of UA went up to 5.4 percent. In 2020, this stayed up at 5.3 percent. In 2021, with the pandemic still lingering, the share of UA went down to 3.9 percent.
In 2023, with Bongbong Marcos as president, the share of UA spiked to a mind-boggling 11.2 percent. That share amounts to P588.1 billion. Of that total, 64 percent or P378.2 billion was for loan proceeds destined for foreign-assisted projects.
Why was funding for foreign-assisted projects moved to the UA?
These projects, negotiated for years with friendly foreign governments and multilateral institutions, had the most predictable financial flows. They had well-defined timetables that were always closely monitored by the lending governments. By placing our counterpart funding in the UA, the mischievous crafters of the budget introduced an element of unpredictability to well-grounded projects.
Failure to raise the counterpart funding meant inordinate delays in the projects, mounting costs, crippling commitment fees and, in a word, exasperation from well-intentioned governments that lend us money for strategic projects.
During the presidency of Fidel Ramos, the DBM dealt rationally with counterpart funding for projects undertaken with official development assistance (ODA). A Foreign Assisted Projects Support Fund was established. The appropriation for this fund covered “foreign exchange and peso requirements for foreign-assisted projects, including contingencies arising from fluctuations in the exchange rate.”
That was as straightforward as can be. There was no room for embarrassing delays and no space for politicking with the projects. The ODA projects were not reliant on standby funds or in the ability of our finance officials to borrow in order for projects to proceed. There was no uncertainty here.
Everything changed when the wiliest (and greediest) politicians decided to move foreign-assisted projects to the UA column. This created fiscal space for corruption-prone projects (especially those with doubtful economic benefit) to achieve certainty in funding. Stuff such as flood-control projects enjoyed priority to whatever funds were in the national treasury.
By moving foreign-assisted projects into the UA column, our legislators pressured the executive branch to find the yet non-existent funding for ODA projects. Missing the schedule for raising the counterpart funding for strategic (and well-studied) projects would be a source of great national embarrassment.
It is a simple huckster’s trick: make sure the available funds go to pet projects and make it the national government’s problem to beg or borrow the money for the strategic undertakings.
The administration was either a sucker or a silent partner to this commandeering of scarce public funds. This game played by those who wielded power over the purse was too brazen to have gone unnoticed by the Marcos presidency. It had to be totally inept or completely in cahoots with the syndicate of plunderers. The evidence that will eventually surface will tell us which is which.
By simply switching the columns under which strategic and pet projects were listed, the entire funding dynamic changed. Corrupt contractors can actually advance kickbacks for doubtful projects that were nevertheless assured of funding. Meanwhile, ODA projects faced funding uncertainty.
In the 2026 General Appropriations Act, for instance, Bongbong Marcos chose to exercise token vetoes on items listed under the UA column. All the vetoed items were commitments made by the national government and never suspect as sources of corruption.
There is a way to avoid recurrence of this embarrassing predicament. A separate fund to support foreign-assisted projects must be reestablished. This will free strategic projects from political uncertainty.
Eventually, this entire UA category must be expunged from the national budget. It is a category that has no right to exist in a fiscally well-managed government. Congress has no business approving spending items for which there is no clear source of funding.
Even more urgent, those who wield the power of the purse with such impunity should spare the executive branch the misery of scrambling to find the money for appropriated but “unprogrammed” items. This speaks of uncoordinated government.