In the recent Supreme Court oral arguments on the consolidated petitions challenging the Unprogrammed Appropriations (UA) in the 2024 to 2026 General Appropriations Acts (GAA), the conspiracy was exposed.

Billed as a modest “standby” fund for windfalls and foreign-assisted projects, the UA had become a brazen P449.5-billion shadow budget inserted by the Bicameral Conference Committee after both houses of Congress had passed the President’s figures.

The practice was fiscal fraud peddled as flexibility. The numbers alone were damning. The President’s National Expenditure Program proposed P281.98 billion in UA for 2024.

The House and Senate versions kept it there, then behind closed doors the Bicameral Conference Committee expanded it to P731.45 billion, which was rewriting the national budget after the fact.

At the same time, Congress moved roughly 303 billion in programmed items — the Armed Forces of the Philippines modernization, universal tertiary education, personal benefits, pensions, Marawi compensation, fire trucks and even local government support — into the UA column.

The result? Programmed spending shrank on paper, Congress stuffed new insertions into the “saved” space, and the UA column became a parking lot for patronage projects that would be released at the Executive’s convenience via Special Allotment Release Orders (SARO) once the Bureau of Treasury certified an “excess.”

This was the new pork barrel, more sophisticated and far larger than the old Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF).

The Supreme Court’s resource persons, or amici curiae, Professor Solita Monsod, former Department of Budget and Management Secretaries Benjamin Diokno and Florencio Abad and former Senate President Franklin Drilon, laid out in brutal detail how the UA had ballooned into a mechanism that weakened congressional oversight, blurred accountability and perverted prioritization.

Pre-positioned slush funds, triggered by selective interpretations of “excess revenues” that no longer even required meeting the total revenue target, were thus created.

The constitutional violations were textbook. Article VI, Section 25(1) prohibits Congress from increasing the appropriations recommended by the President.

Article VII, Section 22 makes the President’s budget of expenditures and sources of financing the legal foundation of the GAA.

Article VI, Section 25(4) demands that special appropriations be supported by funds actually available or new revenue proposals.

Yet here we had a hybrid creature: part of the GAA but treated as exempt from the ceiling, with post-enactment executive discretion to decide when, and which, items actually got funded.

The Solicitor General’s defense that the UA was merely “aspirational priorities” with strict triggers collapsed under the evidence.

In effect, the experts said that terms had been loosened to allow lump sums, and Program, Activity and Project (PAP) items were parked in the UA to create fiscal space for congressional inserts.

The economic damage was initially manifested in the debt service, which now eats up 45 percent of revenues. Deficit and debt-to-GDP targets had been missed year after year.

The Philippine Development Plan’s growth, health, education and poverty targets were slipping while opportunity costs mounted.

Monsod stated that when prioritization is perverted to maximize private gain rather than public welfare, the poor pay twice: through wasted taxes and forgone classrooms, hospitals and roads.

In the 2013 ruling that invalidated the PDAF, the SC drew the line at lump sums and post-enactment discretion.

The Court must draw more definite rules on the UA from its current structure, which is prone to abuse.

Congress and the Executive have proven they cannot be trusted with the UA loophole.

If the Court fails to act, it will ratify the most sinister fiscal gimmick: the creation of a shadow budget dressed in constitutional clothing.