Pork

I once intently observed a friend patiently scrape the fat off the lechon skin he was about to consume. The sight made me sad. It was a futile exercise.

The same may be said about the 2025 budget signed yesterday with little aplomb. Some of the most obvious fat was scraped off to ward off the critics. But, on the whole, this remains the most scandalous pork barrel budget we ever had.

Having passively allowed the legislators to mangle the national budget to fund patronage but not progress, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. could not muster the boldness to return this monstrosity back to that branch of government for recasting. The politicians will still get their pork – albeit with the thin veil of closer monitoring by the agencies of the executive branch.

Presidential review of the budget bill is a weak chisel. The best the President can do is to veto some line items. He cannot restore funding for agencies that truly need them.

Whatever his reservations about the budget may be, the President is captive to it. After the bill passed the bicameral conference committee shortly before the holidays, the Chief Executive was hostage to it – unless he dared return the bill and inevitably force reenactment of this year’s budget.

Marcos made it immediately clear that reenactment was out of the question. From then on, it was evident the presidential review process will be limited to a few cosmetic changes that does not substantially alter the character of this Frankenstein of a budget.

Administration officials try to assure us that “implementing guidelines” will soon be issued to ensure that expenditure of the allotments will be prudent. Such guidelines, we know from long experience, consistently failed to rein in plunder.

The main consideration in the signed budget bill appears to be to spare the administration from constitutionality questions that could open the door for the Supreme Court to intercept this pork barrel spending program.

The most vulnerable element of the bicameral committee version is the fact that public works allocations exceeded the allocations for education. The Constitution commands that education enjoys the largest share of public spending.

Unable to unilaterally allocate more funds for education or restore what Congress cut, all the President could do was to veto public works projects that are of questionable validity. But this is mere accounting changes.

The historical reason why our infrastructure is so far behind those of our neighbors is that Congress always insisted on dispersing public works projects to the congressional districts. This produced micro projects rather than strategic projects directed by the national agencies. It also explains why so much of our public works budget is lost to kickbacks.

I recall one former senator who spent all his pork barrel allocations to pepper his province with roadside waiting sheds – all of them bearing his name prominently as is the norm. While these waiting sheds were arguably a public good, even if they were grotesquely designed, they did not have strategic impact on our economic growth.

In the end, the only way we could modernize our ports and airports is to privatize them. The same is true for our expressways and our power generation systems. Today, we are belatedly trying to renationalize the power grid system, which is majority owned by Chinese companies who refuse to sell their shares.

The signed 2025 budget does not restore funding for the DepEd’s computerization program. This means that the next generation of Filipinos will remain without the skills necessary to thrive in a new economy where routine jobs will be eaten up by artificial intelligence.

Our military modernization program will remain underfunded. Legislators have always been hesitant to fund military modernization because procurement of large items here involves government-to-government negotiations. That means there is little room here for kickbacks to fund patronage politics. Because our military remains poorly armed, we are losing territory we claim as ours.

Our legislators found the gall to defund major legacy projects of this administration. Among these are projects supported by official development assistance but which require counterpart funding. This undermines the nation’s credibility as we seek more development assistance from friendly countries.

The subsidy for PhilHealth was removed in the budget bill. The President cannot restore this unilaterally. Yet he promises upgrading PhilHealth benefits. The added benefits could put our national health insurance system in peril of bankruptcy.

There are some good arguments for the conditional cash transfer program. All these arguments derive from the fact that the money is conditionally transferred. Beneficiaries are required to keep their children in school or bring them for health checkups. Some social good comes out of this.

For some strange reason, our legislators decided there should also be an unconditional cash transfer program. They moved billions to a program called AKAP – criticized as a vote-buying project. The signed bill promises closer scrutiny over the unconditional dispersal of money. That is hardly reassuring.

The line items vetoed notwithstanding, the corrupted 2025 pork barrel budget could still face constitutionality suits. It remains the possibility that the Supreme Court, instead of the President, could still rescue us from this horrendous appropriations act.

Despite all the disappointing news of the last few days, there is still reason to hope the New Year might still be better than the old.

I promise not to scrape the fat off my lechon skin tonight.