EDITORIAL — Destabilizers

The petitioners are known to be allied with a group that has openly called for the ouster of President Marcos. But the concerns they have brought to the Supreme Court in connection with the 2025 General Appropriations Act are shared by many others who are not affiliated in any way with the Dutertes, their ally Davao City 3rd District Rep. Isidro Ungab and Marcos’ first executive secretary, Vic Rodriguez.

Commenting on the petition to declare the GAA unconstitutional, the President said he couldn’t find the “damned blank items” in the budget measure – over 4,000 pages long – that he signed into law before 2024 ended. Of course he wouldn’t, because the 28 blank items were in about 13 pages of the bicameral conference committee report on the GAA. Most of the blank items were for projects of the Department of Agriculture.

Apart from the blank items in the bicam report, the petition is questioning Congress’ denial of subsidy to the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. and bloating of the budget for the Department of Public Works and Highways, whose allocation became higher than for the entire education sector. To the education sector, Congress included the appropriations for learning institutions that used to be part of other executive departments, among them the Philippine Military Academy, Philippine National Police Academy, National Defense College of the Philippines, Philippine Public Safety College and the Local Government Academy.

Even the Philippine Science High School, which is an attached agency of the Department of Science and Technology, was lumped under the education sector for funding.

Congressmen and senators drastically reworked the National Expenditure Program prepared by the executive and awarded themselves hefty increases in their allocations, tripled their new pork barrel under the unprogrammed appropriations, cut the conditional cash transfer funding by P50 billion and created an unconditional aid program whose distribution they can claim credit for during the campaign period, the Ayuda sa Kapos ang Kita Program.

AKAP duplicates the purposes of another unconditional aid program that politicians also use for self-promotion, the Assistance to Individuals in Crisis Situations or AICS.

Since the enactment of the mangled budget, Malacañang has been scrounging for sources of funding to ensure that affected programs and projects of the executive agencies will still push through this year after lawmakers impounded the funds for their personal purposes.

This mangling of the NEP painstakingly prepared by the executive and the abuse of the congressional power of the purse are destabilizing the country. The nation cannot afford to see this destabilization repeated. Instead of presidential condemnation, the issue deserves to be challenged by more people before the Supreme Court.