The defects of the Unprogrammed Allocations (UA), chiefly their lack of transparency, should be familiar to Executive Secretary Ralph Recto, who, as deputy speaker of the House in 2022, criticized the bloated UA proposal in the 2023 budget.

The National Expenditure Program (NEP), or the President’s budget, proposed P580 billion in UA for 2023, largely in the form of lump-sum allocations that critics regard as outright pork-barrel funds.

Recto apparently relented to his peers later, since the UA for 2023, which received Congress’ approval, ballooned to P807 billion. The amount remained intact when President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. signed the budget for his first full year.

In an August 2022 interview, Recto exposed the proposed P580 billion UA in the NEP for 2023, which he said was composed of lump-sum appropriations.

“It is a standby authority for the president to spend. In effect, we are allowing the president to spend roughly P5.8 trillion and not P5.2 trillion,” he explained.

The NEP sought a P5.2-trillion budget, but Recto considered the UA as part of the proposed spending plan.

To Recto’s credit, he has a good appreciation of what is going on in the budget, as he said that the UA afforded the President the ability to borrow to fund the UA.

Recto said that while he was not against the UA, he criticized the lack of detail in the items it contained.

“All I’m saying is that let’s provide more details. Where is this money going to be spent? Which infrastructure projects, and which social projects, are we going to fund next year?”

He knew as early as the first year of the Marcos administration that the UA is a gray area that can be the source of available funds.

“If the budget next year (2023) essentially is flat as far as the programmed appropriations are concerned, then the government will not be stimulating the economy, and then you have the UA, which is the growth potential in the budget,” he acknowledged.

In the proposed 2024 budget, Recto, as a leading House member who was part of the bicameral conference committee, was among the proponents of the insertion that authorized the Department of Finance to sweep government-owned and controlled corporation (GOCC) “excess funds” to fund the UA of P731 billion.

After the budget was passed, President Marcos appointed Recto as Finance secretary. He immediately issued a directive for GOCCs to surrender idle funds to the national treasury, targeting, in particular, P89.9 billion from the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (PhilHealth) and P107 billion from the Philippine Deposit Insurance Corp.

Recto, in defending the DoF directive, said he was only implementing what was provided in the 2024 budget, which he helped craft. The Supreme Court (SC) subsequently ruled as unconstitutional the added provision in the 2024 budget and the DoF directive to implement it.

SC Associate Justice Ramon Paul Hernando, in a separate opinion in the decision junking the Recto maneuver to draw P89.9 billion from PhilHealth, said the UA was unconstitutional because the projects it listed were not supported by a budget of expenditures and funding sources.

The Constitution is explicit about the GAA being based on a budget of expenditures and financing sources, he said.

Retired Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio said PhilHealth was targeted “because that was sure, there was money there. If they just relied on excess revenues from taxes, non-taxes and dividends, that was not certain. So what they did was they added another item, another source — the excess funds of GOCCs.”

Now Recto is the little president, and it’s all about being rewarded for facilitating the exploitation of the UA to satiate the hunger for pork of the Palace and its minions in Congress.