(Is Congress back to business as usual?)
By Cardinal Pablo Virgilio David
Thank God for our vigilant budget watchdogs! I am particularly grateful to Ken Abante and his fellow volunteers in the People’s Budget Coalition, who have been painstakingly scrutinizing the proposed P7.2-trillion national budget, line by line, project by project. Their findings, as presented in Ken’s recent interview with Christian Esguerra on Facts First, are deeply disturbing.
Apparently, Congress has not learned its lesson from the flood control scandal. The same questionable practice of inserting projects into the national budget, without proper documentation, feasibility studies, or technical justification, appears to be happening all over again.
Consider what the coalition has uncovered in the House-approved budget:
7,054 newly inserted projects worth approximately P190 billion, including 6,196 Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) projects worth P172 billion.
1,881 DPWH projects worth P93 billion deleted from the original executive proposal, apparently to make way for a different set of priorities.
Projects with questionable geolocations, including farm-to-market roads supposedly located in the sea, and Philippine infrastructure projects whose coordinates point to Algeria or Nigeria!
Possible overpricing, including farm-to-market roads costing more than P30 million per kilometer, and solar panels priced far above the estimates cited by independent engineers.
But what troubles me most is not just the staggering amount of money involved. It is the opacity of the process itself.
The House supposedly conducted a transparent budget amendment review. But according to the coalition, civil society observers and even the media were excluded from the actual proceedings. The livestream was delayed by several hours. Worse, the amendments publicly announced during the hearings reportedly did not match the much larger amounts that eventually appeared in the approved House version.
At the very least, shouldn’t every insertion identify the legislator who proposed it, the justification for the project, its exact location, and the supporting technical documents?
Hindi ba pera ng taumbayan ang pinag-uusapan natin dito?
What is particularly alarming is how closely this resembles the modus operandi associated with the previous House leadership under Speaker Martin Romualdez and Congressman Zaldy Co, whose budget practices have come under scrutiny in connection with the massive flood control scandal.
This time, the responsibility for explaining the House-approved budget rests with the present leadership, particularly the Appropriations Committee chair, Rep. Mika Suansing, Speaker Bojie Dy, and Majority Leader Sandro Marcos.
Of course, an insertion is not automatically evidence of corruption. Some projects may be legitimate and necessary. But legitimacy must be demonstrated, not merely asserted. And the burden of explanation belongs to those who inserted and approved these projects, not to the citizens who are asking questions.
I hope the Senate will subject these questionable allocations to rigorous public scrutiny, and that the President will veto projects that cannot be properly justified and documented.
We cannot afford another flood control scandal.
Hindi puwedeng business as usual na naman. Hindi puwedeng gawing personal na alkansiya ang pambansang badyet.
Our budget is not the private property of politicians. It is the people’s money, entrusted to government for the common good.