PDAF then, unli pork now

A copy of the 2025 General Appropriations Bill, which contained blank items, was signed by 14 senators, which may indicate where the anomaly occurred.

The bicameral conference committee report was subject to ratification and was not the final document; however, once it was submitted to the plenary of the two chambers of Congress and ratified, it could not be amended.

The report at the plenary was only subject to rejection or ratification. It could no longer be subjected to a debate, according to Senator-elect Ping Lacson.

If there was an objection, the bicam would have had to be reconstituted to address the issue.

What should have been done after the senators caught the blank items before the budget was ratified was to return it to the bicam.

Fixing the budget bill should have been done even if its passage was delayed and extended beyond the end of the year, which would have resulted in a reenacted budget.

“What was more important was to correct the errors, such as the blanks, which should not have been in the General Appropriations Bill,” according to Lacson.

In the 2019 budget, Lacson related an attempt to slip through P5 billion worth of projects in the enrolled bill, or the final version to be submitted to then President Rodrigo Duterte. The items were not in the bill ratified by the upper chamber.

“We notified the President through Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea,” Lacson said.

He recounted that a meeting was held among the senators and then Minority Leader Frank Drilon suggested that Senate President Tito Sotto make an annotation stating that his signature was only for the ratified version of the bill.

Thus, it was Malacañang that reviewed the bill and an additional P20 billion in insertions was identified.

The example of Lacson indicates that the attempt to insert pork barrel projects was made prior to the enrolled bill, which may explain the blank items in the 2025 budget measure exposed by Davao City Rep. Isidro Ungab and former President Rodrigo Duterte.

Thus, the debate continues on who filled in the blanks. Lacson is pointing at the House, as it is where the enrolled bill was printed, but some House members claimed it was in the Senate through the bicam report.

Most of the blank appropriations were items for the Department of Agriculture — for the Philippine Coconut Authority and the Bureau of Fisheries.

What was strange was that the copy of the bill which contained several blank items — that was given to Lacson — had the signatures of 14 senators.

The blanks were found in the Senate version. Senator Chiz Escudero and some other senators, however, denied the existence of the document with the blank items.

Pinpointing responsibility could be achieved by comparing the bicam report with the enrolled bill.

The bicam had no minutes of the meeting or transcripts so what went on was known to only two persons, which made the push of Speaker Martin Romualdez for the meeting to be made public only logical.

The House and Senate contingents in the bicam appeared only during the opening of the meeting, then they formed a small group composed of only two legislators and their staff.

The pork barrel had been resurrected in the 2025 budget in a different form to circumvent the 2013 Supreme Court ruling on the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF).

Under the PDAF that the SC ruled was unconstitutional, each senator was given P200 million and members of the House P70 million for projects that were not identified.

The projects were pinpointed post-enactment, which the SC said violated the Constitution.

In the National Expenditure Program (NEP), legislators insert provisions into various agencies, which is allowed since the implementing agencies are consulted.

Thus, unlike the PDAF where the pork barrel was limited, now the legislators insert their projects in the NEP and the bicam amendments in a seemingly unrestrained manner.

The result is an unrestrained pork barrel through the congressional insertions.