‘Hindi na sila nahiya’

The tragedy of this nation of 117 million is not that we find ourselves dealing with one crisis after another – from the Middle East war-induced global oil crunch and our geopolitical conflict with China to the Super El Niño and the skyrocketing cost of living in the Philippines. The list goes on.

Ours is a tragic tale even worse than a Greek tragedy. It’s the fact that our politicians, congressmen in particular, still have no qualms and absolutely no shame in tinkering with the government’s budget for 2027 to serve their own interests.

One would think that lawmakers would at least show some semblance of having learned from the looting of flood control funds – and not because some perpetrators are in detention – but because the scandal revealed how badly Filipinos were affected.

But tragedy of tragedies, hindi na sila nahiya, as the non-government watchdog People’s Budget Coalition said of lawmakers who passed the P7.2-trillion budget that accommodated the House’s whims.

As a result, the budget saw funding cuts for education, transportation, health care and disaster preparedness.

“Hindi na nahiya, hindi na natuto,” is how the People’s Budget Coalition and Roundtable for Inclusive Development described members of the House of Representatives.

This came after the House once again inserted billions into programs that perpetuate political patronage, such as the Department of Social Welfare and Development’s Assistance to Individuals in Crisis Situations, the Department of Health’s Medical Assistance for Indigent and Financially Incapacitated Patients and the Department of Labor and Employment’s TUPAD program.

Indeed, a year after the trillion-peso flood scandal, the 2027 budget is again turning out to be "a playground for patronage and corruption," as the
watchdogs said.

The House also doubled local infrastructure allocations under the Department of Public Works and Highways without publicly verifiable programs of work or supporting documents.

These are some of the red flags raised by the budget watchdogs in a joint statement:

“The House moved P199 billion within the budget without the amendments report required by its own rules. This was done in a bill spanning nearly 4,000 pages that reached lawmakers at 1:57 a.m. and was approved that same evening.

“On Oct. 1, the amendments panel read out its proposed changes to the national budget during a livestream, totaling P116 billion. Yet, when the committee report was released on Oct. 6, the total had ballooned to over P200 billion in changes with no accompanying explanation or accounting of the over P84 billion in additional amendments. We’ve been misled and many news reports continue to cite P116 billion. This is the evil we warned about: a livestream does not equate to transparency.”

Futhermore, for every P100 in the national budget, more than P15 goes to questionable ayuda and potentially dubious spending, they said.

“P1,060 billion of the House budget now sits in red-flag items. These are budget lines that are prone to political patronage and abuse: P210 billion in aid and discretionary funds, P695 billion in infrastructure, P43 billion for political offices and P112 billion in unprogrammed appropriations. The House added P83.5 billion to these. The patronage group alone grew by half, from P140 billion to P210 billion. These allocations entrench pork barrel politics, where politicians control access to services, robbing people of dignity and forcing them to beg for benefits they are entitled to under the law,” the groups said.

The budget cuts were meant to accommodate the red-flag items.

“The biggest cut, P130 billion, fell on foreign-assisted projects: the Metro Manila Subway, the North-South Commuter Railway, bypass roads and flood mitigation in major river basins. These are loans which the country has already signed. Cutting the budget does not cancel the loan. It delays the project and the country pays more than a billion pesos in commitment fees and penalties. What the House did was take the borrowing room set aside for trains and national roads and use it for hand-outs and local projects,” the groups also said.

Season 2

It’s as if we’re entering Season 2 of the flood-control scandal, which in essence was really about the bastardization of the budget.

Former House speaker Martin Romualdez and former Ako Bicol party-list representative Zaldy Co were tagged as the purported masterminds of the flood-control mess. Romualdez has been removed as speaker and is currently in detention while Co is believed to be somewhere in Europe, hiding from authorities.

One would think that with the changes, we would finally see a reformed House, passing a better, pro-people budget deliberated on with accountability and transparency.

And yet, that is not what happened.

Whispers in the grapevine point to the incumbent House leaders.

How did this happen under House Speaker Bojie Dy and Majority Leader and presidential son Sandro Marcos?

It’s now up to the Senate to scrutinize the budget and correct the shameless funding cuts for critical projects.

And ultimately, President Marcos should veto amendments and insertions that would again put taxpayers’ money into the pockets of lawmakers and fund patronage politics through unlimited ayuda.

Otherwise, he will not just sign a tinkered budget measure, but also sign away – yet again – the country’s future.

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