The pork barrel items in the budget, which have progressively been bloated yearly, are the responsibility mainly of the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) due to the system of checks and balances, a system that requires only a post audit.

Former Senate president Franklin Drilon said the pork barrel in the budget accumulated to P731.4 billion between 2024 and 2025, which he said, the DBM had the responsibility to disclose.

He said the P731.4 billion comprised P449 billion in pork barrel funds from the 2024 General Appropriations Act (GAA) and an additional P347 billion in the 2025 GAA.

Reprehensible is Congress’ practice, in collusion with the DBM, of bumping off regular items such as appropriations for the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps), which was placed under unprogrammed items that the government still needs to find funding for.

The veteran legislator said that compared to the pork barrel in the 24 years that he spent in Congress, the pork in the past two years was unprecedented.

“It’s monstrous,” he said. “This is a staggering amount that the public needs to check. Taxpayers have a right to know where their money is being spent.”

Since the CoA can only check how the funds were spent in a post-audit, the implementing agencies and the DBM are responsible for monitoring the release of the funds.

Any increase in appropriations and new budgetary items introduced in the 2025 national budget would only be released once the agencies concerned comply with the requirements.

The insertion of pork barrel projects starts during the crafting of agency budgets, while 11th-hour insertions are made during the bicameral conference committee meetings that draft the final version of the budget.

In the insertions, prerequisites are imposed by the DBM for the release of funds for the pork barrel items.

“The problem is how do we know if these requirements are being followed. It is not clear and not visible to the public,” Drilon said.

Thus, he said, the DBM must publish “all the insertions and the pork barrel projects subject to later release.”

“I’m not saying that the inserted projects are bad. All I’m saying is to tell the people what was added,” he said.

Drilon had earlier called on President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to ensure that all Congress-introduced items in the 2025 General Appropriations Act were labeled “for later use” to prevent the pork barrel from being exploited for election-related activities in the runup to the May polls.

Drilon said that a core group in the bicam decides on the inserted items that are later glossed over due to the sheer volume of the budget documents, which are often thousands of pages long.

In the Ayuda sa Kapos Ang Kita Program’s P26-billion allocation, President Marcos, in his veto message, said a list of conditions was needed to be complied with for the release of the dole for Filipinos with insufficient incomes.

Drilon, however, said that due to the lack of a pre-audit of projects, the agencies are responsible for checking the conditions attached to their implementation.

Under the directive of the President, certain conditions are to be determined by the Department of Labor and Employment, Department of Social Welfare and Development, and the National Economic and Development Authority for the AKAP’s implementation.

Drilon said that is when the CoA’s post-audit function should take over since the agency can disallow the release of funds and require the agency to reimburse it.

In the drafting of the National Expenditure Program, or the President’s budget, the unprogrammed funds build up and since these are not included in the computation of the total budget, the items become a conduit for the pork barrel.

Under the Constitution, Congress is not allowed to increase the amount of the President’s budget, except for the unprogrammed funds which the Executive would have to look for the funds to implement them.

By juggling the budget, however, pork barrel items are assured of funding while key projects such as railways and critical social programs become conditional on the sourcing of funds.

The DBM and other agencies are complicit in such a massive theft of public funds.