President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. could not have been any clearer in his last State of the Nation Address (SoNA) when he said he would not allow any deviation from the National Expenditure Program (NEP) for 2026. That sounded, at least for a moment, like a line drawn in the sand. No insertions, no last-minute sleights of hand, no pet projects smuggled in the dark recesses of bicameral conference committees.

And yet Congress appears to be tone deaf, if not outright defiant. In the House of Representatives, some lawmakers are again making the case for resurrecting their favorite project — the Ayuda para sa Kapos ang Kita Program (AKAP) — even after it received zero allocation in the 2026 NEP. The echo of the President’s warning has yet to die down but already the House is itching to test the boundaries of the presidential veto.

The problem is not simply AKAP itself. Cash aid for “near poor” families sounds benign, even noble. Who would object to handing out P3,000 to P5,000 to struggling households? But in politics, it is never the surface story that matters; it is its subterranean current.

Derided for fomenting a culture of mendicancy, the program has drawn backlash for abruptly obtaining P26.16 billion in this year’s General Appropriations Act despite not being explicitly listed in the 2025 NEP, raising suspicions of unlawful “budget insertions” by Congress. That episode left the unmistakable odor of pork in the air.

That clash was over the 2025 budget; now, with deliberations on the 2026 NEP underway, lawmakers are again testing how far they can push the President’s resolve.

For those with long memories, the parallels are hard to miss. Congress insists it can “realign” funds of agencies with low utilization rates. That may sound technical, but critics call it by its proper name: a novel way to sneak the Priority Development Assistance Fund — or pork barrel — back into circulation. It is the same beast with a different hide.

Nor is this suspicion helped by recent revelations that some members of Congress had profited handsomely from substandard flood control projects. Billions were poured into dikes, walls, and drainage systems that collapsed at the first drop of rain.

President Marcos himself came short of admitting corruption in these congressional projects when he axed P16.7 billion worth of them from the 2025 budget. And yet, the House seems unshaken, already scouting for new streams of funding for AKAP as though nothing had happened.

This is the danger of the so-called congressional “power of the purse.” Left unchecked, it becomes less a tool of fiscal oversight and more a blunt instrument for patronage. Cash aid programs, after all, are easy to politicize. They create grateful constituents, they breed dependency, and they offer lawmakers a ready stage for theatrics — handing out envelopes under the pretense of compassion. What they rarely create is long-term economic upliftment.

Which is why this battle matters. For Marcos, AKAP is not merely a line item to strike out; it is a litmus test. If he blinks, if he allows the House to ram through billions in pork by another name, he will have surrendered the moral high ground he staked in his SoNA. Worse, he will have confirmed the suspicion that his vetoes and warnings are nothing more than political theater.

The President has three years left in Malacañang. They will either be remembered as the years he broke the cycle of congressional pork — or as the twilight of another presidency eaten alive by the very corruption it promised to stop.

In the end, Marcos has to choose: kill the pork or watch it kill him, figuratively of course, as a kingmaker in 2028.