Discounted pork

Discounted pork | Daily Tribune

The 50-percent slash in the cost of building materials for government projects is nothing but part of a syndicated move to maintain the pork barrel, albeit with a discount.

In a 2013 ruling, the Supreme Court declared the pork barrel and any similar schemes in the national budget unconstitutional.

Recently, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. required all agencies involved in infrastructure projects to reduce the cost of building materials by half — billed as a move to help the government realize savings and purge corruption.

Budget watchdogs believe the move is meant to preserve the use of infrastructure to generate the pork barrel through the notorious unprogrammed appropriations (UA).

The strategy is to clip the pork barrel to a relatively modest amount compared to the voracious numbers in the 2024 and 2025 national budgets.

The 2026 National Expenditure Program (NEP) revealed a trend: the allocation for flood control projects was slashed, while the budget for railways was increased.

Due to the maneuvers before the elections to prioritize legislators’ pet projects, many rail projects were delayed, as their funds were redirected to the UA.

A budget analyst said that in the proposed 2026 allocations, an agreement, or a quid pro quo, between the executive and the legislative branches took place.

“So it seems this is part of a syndicate based on the pattern, so when you look at the flood control projects, you will notice from the first budget of the Marcos administration, they do not reduce the amounts from the previous year’s allocations. What they do is either they match the previous year’s allocations for flood control or increase it at the level of the NEP, and then it balloons once the budget deliberations begin,” the analyst said.

The devil is always in the details, and Congress, despite its promise of reforms, has plenty of room to adjust the budget.

When the bicameral conference committee (bicam) version, which is the final copy of the budget in the legislature, is completed, “many of the things that we need to watch out for have already been decided among the lawmakers,” the analyst said.

“Budget monitors also doubt the President is totally ignorant of all of these shenanigans in the budget process,” he added.

It would be hard for the President to escape responsibility because, at the end of the day, he’s the one who signs the budget, and he has the veto option on dubious line items.

In the 2025 budget, the President vetoed some flood control projects, but adding up all the flood control projects he approved and signed in the General Appropriations Act since 2023, the total amounts to about P1 trillion.

The obfuscations made — from the fanfare over the Independent Commission for Infrastructure, the promise to jail those involved in the scandal, to the slash in materials costs — are all meant to show the public something is being done while maintaining the status quo.

As long as the pork barrel storeroom, which is the UA, remains, the budget manipulation will continue.