Palace, House collude in P1-trillion pork

The political elite is provoking people to revolt.

The House of Reps inserted P1.017-trillion pork barrels in the President’s proposed 2027 national budget. This means kickbacks galore.

But Malacañang says it’s alright so long as pork – which the SC outlawed in 2013 – benefits the people. How can kickbacks be good?

Only last week the SC declared unconstitutional Congress’ padding of the 2024, 2025 and 2026 budgets. Yet the applicants for new chief justice say that lawmakers who increased the President’s budget in breach of the Constitution enjoy presumption of good faith.

People doubt if the three government branches still check and balance each other. People’s trust in leaders is waning. Trouble looms.

The 2027 budget totals P7.2 trillion. Fourteen percent is pork, the 5,500 researchers and data analysts of People’s Budget Coalition uncovered. Breakdown:

• P210 billion “soft pork” in the form of political “ayuda;”

• P695 billion “hard pork” or politicized infrastructure and

• P112 billion “shadow pork” or Unprogrammed Appropriations.

Coalition co-convenors AJ Montesa and Kenneth Abante begged senators Monday to slice off the fat. Slim chance.

The P210-billion “soft pork” consists of:

• AKAP (Ayuda para sa Kapos ang Kita Program) given in lump sums to lawmakers and disbursed through DSWD;

• MAIFIP (Medical Assistance to Indigent and Financially Incapacitated Patients) stolen from PhilHealth for disbursement by lawmakers via guarantee letters for hospital bills of begging constituents;

• TUPAD (Tulong Panghanapbuhay sa Ating Disadvantaged/Displaced Workers) disbursed via DOLE to unemployed and indolent political wards and

• Presidential Assistance for Farmers and Fisherfolk cash aid doled through DA.

Those were first concocted in 2024 for use in the 2025 congressional-local elections. They’re being revived in 2027 for political “pa-pogi” in Election 2028.

“Hard pork” means infrastructure works not proposed by the President but inserted by congressmen through the committee on appropriations. Those are lump sums with no documents or project studies in the budgets of four agencies:

• DPWH for fake or substandard flood controls, highways and bridges. Congressmen get up to 50-percent kickbacks; P1.7-trillion flood works already was plundered in 2016-2025;

• DA as farm-to-market roads, some of which seem more like farm-to-ocean because of false map coordinates in and across waterbodies.

Examples: P23 million in Nueva Ecija but with coordinates in Benham Rise, P30 million in Cebu with coordinates in Celebes Sea, P55 million in Quezon with coordinates in Brunei Sea, P100 million in Negros Occidental with coordinates in Nigeria, P7-million multipurpose building in Misamis Oriental with coordinates in Algeria.

Sec. Francis Tiu-Laurel says the thousands of farm-to-market roadworks didn’t come from DA so they didn’t check the coordinates. Such check can easily be done using artificial intelligence, which People’s Budget Coalition did and thus discovered the scam:

• DOH for health centers in barangays where such projects have just been finished and

• NIA for irrigation canals that it never proposed because unconnected to water sources.

The 7,000 “projects” inserted in DPWH alone totaled P190 billion. Biggest inserter was House Majority Leader and Bongbong Marcos’s son Rep. Sandro Marcos, Makabayan bloc Rep. Tony Tinio exposed. BBM initially proposed P400 million for Sandro’s Ilocos Norte 1st District. The appropriations committee bloated it more than 12 times to P4.8 billion.

Other big takers: appropriations committee chairwoman Nueva Ecija Rep. Mikaela Suansing, P3.91 billion, and vice chairmen Bulacan Rep. Augustina Pancho, P3.5 billion, and Isabela Rep. Joseph Tan, P3.1 billion.

The SC days later declared unconstitutional the 2024, 2025 and 2026 budgets. It said Congress increased the Unprogrammed Appropriations proposed by BBM, in breach of Article VI, Legislative Department, Section 25 (1).

VP Sara Duterte blamed BBM for signing into law those three years’ budgets. Malacañang spox Claire Castro said BBM had no culpability.

BBM’s actions belied Castro. He ordered solicitor general Darlene Berberabe to appeal the SC ruling in order to exonerate him.

Asked Tuesday about Sandro’s P4.8-billion bonanza, Castro said insertions aren’t wrong and can even benefit the people: “If a congressman’s projects are well-executed and the allocated funds are used properly, who would oppose this, especially when these funds are sufficient to improve a district.”

Castro contradicts the SC. In illegalizing pork barrels in 2013, the SC set three identifying features: (1) ambiguous lump sums for (2) projects at the discretion of individual lawmakers instead of Congress as a body, and (3) implemented by them instead of the executive. These violate constitutional provisions on separation of powers and accountability.

Critics were hoping that BBM would veto the budget illegalities. But Castro’s words show it won’t happen.

Retired generals and colonels are restive. “It’s our responsibility to the nation to stand against corruption, misuse of power and breaches of public trust,” 73 of them signed so far under Alyansa ng Nagkakaisang Mamamayan.