The state of confusion inflicted on Filipinos, apparently imposed for an underhanded purpose, is getting worse by the day, making it hard to sift truth from propaganda.

A former top-level official indicated that everything that is transpiring has its roots in the quality of the country’s leader, who has failed to show consistency and sincerity.

Topnotch lawyer and PDP Laban stalwart Ferdinand Topacio summarized, during his guesting on Straight Talk, that the administration is a ship full of holes that needs an immediate overhaul to keep afloat.

Removing top government officials will have a momentary effect on the public and will not turn around the plunge in confidence.

Early on, different groups have indicated that the problem is not about revamping the Cabinet but about applying a lasting, if not permanent, solution to the root of the problem: the budget process that breeds corruption.

Budget watchdogs, for instance, believe that the forced resignations of Budget and Management Secretary Amenah Pangandaman and Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin came too little and too late.

Both officials were tagged in the flood control scandal, which precipitated a crisis that sank the public confidence in the government to an all-time low.

Instead of the whitewash that the administration resorted to, the officials should have been made to testify in the investigations on the budget anomalies.

However, Pangandaman and Bersamin were considered dead weight that should be removed to buy time for President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

The two were among the Cabinet members considered part of the President’s inner circle, particularly in the crafting of the annual appropriations.

They had offices inside Malacañang which, by proximity alone, made them the ones he met with and worked with the most.

The Executive Secretary is even called the “little president,” which means he executes all his orders within the Palace. So the resignation was a crucial development.

“They were the ones who were made to leave. It doesn’t appear that these were resignations stemming from them losing confidence in the President and deciding to leave, but the opposite,” according to the former top-level official at the Palace.

It was packaged as resignations out of delicadeza after their names came up in the ongoing turbulence. If delicadeza was the basis for resignations, it should have gone higher up.

Senator Ping Lacson, meanwhile, postulated that some people in government dropped the President’s name, implying that his subordinates were the culprits — which sounded like a desperate smokescreen.

This does not get him off the hook, however, since allegations that Marcos is a weak leader — following Lacson’s attempt to bail him out — surfaced.

It does not take rocket science, so to speak, to pinpoint Marcos’s fault in the corruption mess that happened under his watch since he signed the yearly budget laws that contained the insertions, and all his allies seemed to have dipped their fingers in the gravy.

Thus, the options for Marcos are becoming slimmer by the day, and the political capital he earned from winning the election by a majority vote is being used up.

Instead of instituting credible reforms to strengthen the government’s defenses against irregularities, the administration seems intent on stepping on the gas and pursuing its political rivals through legal cases.

Such a display of desperation will only further alienate the Filipino public.