Charter breach very clear

Charter breach very clear | Daily Tribune

Davao City Rep. Isidro Ungab recently revealed a continuing violation of the Constitution requirement that the education sector should always get the lion’s share of the national budget.

Based on Ungab’s account, the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) released additional funds from the Unprogrammed Appropriations (UA) of the 2024 and 2025 national budgets to the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH).

Technically, the 2024 and 2025 budgets were able to comply with the law’s requirements by placing some items in the UA, which are not included in the yearly General Appropriations Act (GAA).

However, a debate has begun over the releases from the UA, as these now form part of the budget.

Ungab said the DBM’s additional fund releases to the DPWH, allocated to infrastructure, were higher than the funds earmarked for the education sector.

This year, Ungab said, the DBM has released P58.545 billion from the UA to the DPWH as of 31 August 2025. He pointed out that this increased the DPWH’s total allocation from P1.088 trillion under the 2025 General Appropriations Act to P1.148 trillion.

Ungab stressed that the entire education sector had a mere P984.57 billion allocation under the 2025 GAA and received an additional P9.89 billion under the UA for a total of P994.46 billion.

The DPWH’s higher funding allocation in the 2025 national budget is a violation of the Constitution, which mandates that the highest funding be allocated to education.

Ungab stressed that the DBM should have exercised restraint in granting additional releases to the DPWH, noting that the 2025 budget remains under challenge before the Supreme Court.

Any further increase in the DPWH budget from the UA will only widen the gap between infrastructure and education spending. This undermines the constitutional imperative of prioritizing education.

“Article XIV, Section 5(5) requires assigning the highest budgetary priority to education,” Ungab noted.

Most of the UA releases were for foreign-assisted projects, which proved Ungab’s earlier assertion that Official Development Assistance (ODA) projects were placed on the back burner. The transfers created a fiscal space in the budget, which was then filled with DPWH projects, primarily for flood control proposed by members of Congress.

Ungab said the use of the UA was only part of a bigger anomaly in which automatic appropriations and new appropriations mangled automatic provisions under 14 special laws.

Congress should not have altered the automatic appropriations, as they were approved through specific laws. I don’t know where they obtained the funds to augment these since some of these had already been released.

Out of 27 agencies, the budgets of 26 were mangled. Only the DBM’s was not touched. And its program appropriations were increased.

Thus, in the 2024 and 2025 budgets, the pet projects of legislators were given priority over the well-structured ODA projects.

The total budget of the DPWH in the 2025 budget, including the unprogrammed appropriations, is now P1.147 trillion, compared to the education sector’s budget of P994 billion.

The breach of the Constitution was never more apparent than in the perversion of the 2024 and 2025 budget laws.