It's budget season once again, and the talk of the town is the secret funds being lobbied for by nearly every national government office.

Confidential and intelligence funds are trending, the buzzword in the news in the "ber" months, at least until the 2024 budget is signed into law.

Seeing the leniency on the reporting and the gargantuan amounts of these confidential and intelligence funds, it seems that each office is asking for its own "war chest" to quell insurgencies, terrorists, communists, and the like.

This begs the question: With the billions thrown into these confidential and intelligence funds every year, what secrets have we uncovered, or have we gotten any smarter?

The answer lies with the heads of the offices where Congress lodges these funds. On the propriety of their utilization, given the broad discretion for spending the same, this can be justified to be a political question.

It is undisputed that these confidential and intelligence funds are legal. The question is whether one national government office may transfer a portion of its funds to another, while the budget is in effect.

Such is what happened between the Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, and this legal conundrum will be thrown up to the Supreme Court in only a matter of time.

How the Supreme Court will settle this gray area shall pave the way for future practices. As we say in Constitutional Law, this may be considered judicial legislation. We saw similar cases in how the Supreme Court ruled on the partylist system and the PDAF allocations for lawmakers, post-Napoles scandal.

With the partylist, the Supreme Court's interpretation of who are marginalized and underrepresented paved the way for more partylists entering the fray, to which we can attribute the diversity (or lack of it) representation in the House of Representatives today. As for the PDAF, we no longer see anyone questioning the "pork barrel." Infrastructure projects continue, and everyone is still getting a piece of the pie.

The way it is going, national government offices, even local government units, must be more careful justifying their requests for confidential funds. It was reported that 28 agencies are requesting confidential funds for various reasons.