Pork, patronage localized

After the distraction created by the International Criminal Court hearings, which gave the besieged Palace some relief, suspicious maneuvers are again taking place on the 2026 national budget.

In an apparent move to take the heat off the perpetrators of the biggest scandal involving the pilfering of funds from the budget, mainly through the rechanneling of flood control appropriations, P1.19 trillion in lump sums was disbursed to local governments.

Under the guise of the automatic National Tax Allotment (NTA), the lump sums are similar in character to the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) earmarked in the national budget for individual members of Congress, amounting to roughly P70 million per representative and P200 million per senator.

The Supreme Court (SC) voided the PDAF as unconstitutional in a landmark 2013 ruling.

Under the scheme, legislators identified projects in their districts, endorsed fund releases and influenced their implementation.

This created a patronage machine: funds flowed at congressional discretion, often with weak oversight.

Now that same contraption is directed at local government officials, with the Palace deciding who gets a slice of the huge pie first.

The pivot is facilitated by the Mandanas-Garcia SC ruling that took full effect in 2022.

The decision reinterpreted Section 284 of the Local Government Code, indicating local government units’ (LGUs) “just share” was not 40 percent of internal revenue taxes but 40 percent of all national taxes.

This automatically rechanneled hundreds of billions directly to provinces, cities, municipalities, and barangays.

The NTA, formerly the Internal Revenue Allotment, allows LGUs to spend allocations according to their own development plans and devolved functions, including health, agriculture, local roads, and flood control.

The P1.19 trillion in NTA that the Department of Budget and Management is releasing would constitute the largest fiscal transfer in Philippine history.

Governors and mayors now owe allegiance to the administration that gave them control of far larger discretionary pools than any members of Congress ever did.

Patronage shifted from national legislators to local chief executives, without the same level of national-level scrutiny.

LGUs have a poor record of the efficient use of funds, as many of them run surpluses despite the widening budget deficit of the national government.

Money overflows, but the programs to spend this productively are missing.

The wise use of the funds is essential, as reflected in the flood control scandal, where even good projects were not integrated.

The rechanneling of pork, without oversight, is simply trading congressional lump sums for more expensive, better-disguised local counterparts.

Two years to the 2028 day of reckoning, resources are poured into the LGUs, while members of Congress are assured of their fair share through budget insertions.

Transactional politics has never been more brisk than under the Marcos regime.