There is something beautiful and sweet happening in Congress. Their bicameral committee has a surprise Christmas gift for the Filipino people. Their usually secret bicameral talks on the final version of the 2025 national budget will be open to the public!

The annual audit report of the Commission on Audit for the calendar year ended 31 December 2023, being released on 1 to 31 December 2024, has indeed removed or minimized points of conflict and misunderstanding among the parties concerned on matters pertaining to accounts, like confidential and intelligence funds. The differences are diminishing and heads are cooling off.The deliberations by the congressional bicameral committee on the final version of the proposed P6.352-trillion national budget for 2025 will be open to the public for the first time since 1986.

Included in the discussion on the yearly outlay is the deliberation on the controversial Ayuda sa Kapos ang Kita Program (AKAP), Sen. Grace Poe said on Monday.

“Our colleagues are welcome to ask questions in the open,” Poe, who chairs the Senate finance committee, said. She added that members of the Senate and House of Representatives contingents to the bicam have allowed the media to cover their deliberations.

Many people from various sectors of society had called on Congress to be more transparent by opening the budget discussions to the public after the bicameral conference began its deliberations last 28 November.

Poe said the bicam has set its next meeting for Wednesday. Besides the AKAP, the decision of the House to reduce the budget of the Office of the Vice President (OVP) by P1.3 billion was among the items in the next year’s spending plan of the Marcos administration.

Last month, senators approved the P733-million outlay for Vice President Sara Duterte’s office in less than 10 minutes, adopting the House version that reduced the original P2.03-billion proposal.

Duterte, however, secured a promise from her allies in the upper chamber — Senators Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa and Christopher “Bong” Go — to either give additional funds to the OVP or restore its original budget request during the period of amendments.

Duterte said OVP personnel were hopeful their budget would be increased to allow the office to retain its employees and continue its programs.

The House leadership had allotted P39- billion to bankroll the AKAP next year, a move the Senate overturned by funneling the proposed allotment to the senior citizens retirement pension fund, the college assistance program, child care assistance, and livelihood programs for farmers and fishermen.

Bicameral meetings behind closed doors encouraged the pork barrel laws, such as the Community Development Fund, the Priority Development Assistance Fund, the Disbursement Acceleration Program, and the various congressional insertions that bestowed personal, lump-sum allocations on legislators to fund specific projects they themselves determined.

Nothing would please the Filipinos more than for Congress to banish even the slightest idea of endowing themselves with a huge slush fund.

For a government to grant a person the discretion to spend the money of the people gives rise to personality-based politics, which is no different from a feudal culture where the decrees of kings were considered the will of God.

The British culture in Bongbong, of coolness in the face of adversity, is serving him well as President of the Republic of the Philippines. He looks like one living Longfellow’s A Psalm of Life: “Trust no future, howe’er pleasant! Let the dead Past bury its dead! Act, — act in the living Present! Heart within, and God o’erhead.”