Goodbye to PDAF?

As promised, lawmakers have deleted the lump sum Priority Development Assistance Fund or the much reviled PDAF from the 2014 General Appropriations Act. The GAA is expected to be ratified by the two chambers of Congress for enactment by President Aquino before the year ends.

Lawmakers had promised the abolition of PDAF as we know it, and the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional any interference by Congress in the disbursement of public funds after the enactment of the GAA.

Also gone is the complete discretion exercised by lawmakers in the utilization of their pork barrel allocations, which allowed them to use their PDAF for the purchase of consumables such as fertilizers for non-farming areas. The discretion, combined with weak state auditing, also allowed the funneling of public funds to personal accounts through bogus non-government organizations.

Don’t expect lawmakers, however, to let go so easily of their control over billions in public funds. The Constitution specifies their role in drawing up the annual GAA, and they are going to use that provision to the hilt.

Lawmakers have not kept their post-PDAF moves a secret. The SC ruling barred them from interfering in the utilization of the GAA after its enactment, so lawmakers now have their say before the passage of the budget bill.

Members of the House of Representatives realigned their PDAF, amounting to P19 billion, to the departments of health, labor and public works as well as the Commission on Higher Education.

The Department of Public Works and Highways got the lion’s share of the realigned PDAF, amounting to over P9 billion. The amount must be used by the DPWH for projects earmarked by congressmen, the detailed list of which is reportedly an inch thick.

Over at the Senate, 15 senators gave up their PDAF of P200 million each (what happened to the rest?) – the same allotment for Vice President Jejomar Binay. The resulting reduction from the proposed GAA: P3.2 billion, for a lower total of P2.264 trillion.

GAA provisions requiring prior consultation with lawmakers in fund disbursements were stricken out.

But now the two chambers have revived the Joint Congressional Oversight Committee on Government Expenditures. We don’t know how this will work, although lawmakers have said they intended to focus particularly on the utilization of rehabilitation funds, amounting to P100 billion, for calamity-stricken areas.

The oversight committee was activated in the past to monitor the implementation of the conditional cash transfer program. Supporters of the CCT led by the World Bank had designed the program in such a way that it would be kept out of the clutches of politicians. The supporters hoped to hit two birds with one stone through the CCT: easing abject poverty and weakening Pinoy patronage politics. From the start, however, politicians have tried to change this, with mild success in some areas such as Cavite.

P-Noy, meanwhile, is retaining the massive lump sum allocations for his office, for use – with his full discretion – as quick-response funds during calamities.

It remains to be seen whether calamities include impeachment cases filed against the President. Emergency discretionary funds have come in handy for quashing such complaints in previous years.

The buzz is that there is currently vigorous lobbying for the SC to throw out petitions challenging the constitutionality of P-Noy’s Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP), which has been painted in the same light as the PDAF.

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Expats from several advanced economies where budget deliberations are closely watched – and understood by the public – have told me they found the Philippine pork barrel system remarkable, and unthinkable in their societies.

Their lawmakers are involved in the passage of the national budget, the expats say, but no one gets to earmark pet projects for funding, with each lawmaker allotted a specific amount of projects.

The pork barrel is one of the biggest reasons why politics is a booming family business in this country. Imagine having control over the utilization of millions of pesos every year – money that you never toiled to earn. Imagine having the right to pick projects funded by other people’s money, which benefit first and foremost your relatives and cronies.

Lawmakers like to emphasize that they don’t actually get their hands on cold cash under the pork barrel system. But having the power to use the cash can be just as good as owning it – especially if you exercise full discretion and lack of public accountability over its utilization.

The power to earmark projects alone, which includes the privilege to pick the contractors, can mean immense profits in the form of commissions or “gifts” for lawmakers.

Obviously the pork barrel is particularly useful for purposes of reelection. The campaign for a fresh term – or for one’s handpicked successor, usually a spouse or child who can perpetuate the dynasty – starts almost from Day One of a lawmaker’s three-year term.

Now the PDAF (as we know it) has been abolished. Can lawmakers really say goodbye to all that?

Not without a spirited fight.