All in cahoots

All in cahoots | Daily Tribune

Investors are not buying the scenario currently being peddled about the perversion of the yearly budgets — the brazenness of which was exposed in the flood control scandal — and that is that the Executive was not involved in it.

Industrialist Ramon “Boy Blue” del Rosario added his voice to the call for answers on why politicians continue to treat public funds as fair game.

To him, it’s about the greed that permeates the entire political system, where “everybody is in on it.”

The greed epidemic that afflicts those in government became ingrained as “the way they did it was there was something for everyone.”

“The congressmen and the senators would connive with the executive branch so there were percentages given to everyone along the way, including the contractors, and that’s the system that evolved. And because everyone was getting a share, everyone was tight-lipped and it just grew and grew and grew until it became the monster that it is now,” Del Rosario said.

It was allowed to happen; he expressed skepticism about the highest level not being a part of it.

“I’m sorry to say, even the President, when he said ‘Mahiya naman kayo,’ that’s a little strange because it was his budget to begin with,” Del Rosario pointed out.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. should have been aware of what was going on in his government, and he had the power and the opportunity to veto many items in the GAA that he may have found suspicious.

Moreover, the failure of government agencies to call his attention to the anomalies in the budget also raises suspicions.

“It should have been brought to his attention by the DBM (Department of Budget and Management) and the different department secretaries whose budgets had been mangled so he could have acted on it at least with full information,” Del Rosario underlined.

If it was not a conspiracy, then it was inefficiency. “If (the President) did not have the information, then his department secretaries were not doing their job,” he said.

It is incumbent on the leadership to make sure that the mangling that happened in 2025 will not be repeated in the 2026 national budget.

According to Del Rosario, the government can still stop specific projects in the 2025 budget that are spurious.

“Let’s review those projects. For example, flood control is not something that you do out of the blue. Speak up and say that there’s P230 billion of pork barrel insertions in the proposed 2026 budget.”

Watchdogs “who make it their business to understand what’s taking place” have found thus far P230 billion in proposed appropriations next year in the House version of the budget.

“We’re speaking out now precisely to say, ‘Wait a minute. You’re going to do it all over again.’”

In the proposed appropriations for next year the pork barrel appears to have been switched from infrastructure to social programs, where Del Rosario said, “There are all kinds of items that make it sound like these are highly needed programs to assist the underserved people.”

In reality, they’re designed to be pork barrel-type projects.

Advocates for giving nothing to the unprogrammed appropriations (UA), where the pork barrel projects are parked, said the UA items could be transferred and placed in rules-based programs.

The proponents of pork have acquired the creativity to spin the budget to miraculously produce lump sum funds that they can partake of.

The pork barrel was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2013 and that ruling should be strictly followed.