A conspiracy through sneaky accounting led to the manipulation of the Unprogrammed Appropriations (UA) in the national budget, injecting hundreds of billions of pesos in pork barrel into the outlay. This practice persisted despite public outrage.

In his amicus curiae appearance before the Supreme Court last Tuesday, former Senate President Franklin Drilon delivered a surgical dissection of how the UA, once a legitimate fiscal safeguard, had been systematically perverted into a tool of executive overreach.

What began as a constitutional standby mechanism, under the Marcos administration, mutated into a disguised expansion of the national budget, Drilon argued, through deliberate misinterpretation and creative accounting.

Historically, the UA mirrored the National Expenditure Program (NEP) with only modest deviations.

Such a fiscal relation vanished when the unprogrammed portion of the General Appropriations Act (GAA) began ballooning far beyond the President’s submitted ceiling. Items previously included in the programmed budget, such as for regular agency operations, personnel benefits and recurring expenses, were migrated to the UA.

The items were predictable operational costs that belonged in the base budget. By reclassifying them, Congress and the executive together created a parallel spending track immune from the normal discipline of appropriation.

Funding the UA is tied to overall excess collections over the Budget of Expenditures and Sources of Financing (BESF) targets, but the new language, when Mr. Marcos took the reins of government, loosened the trigger to “any” revenue source exceeding its estimate, even a single non-tax item, regardless of whether aggregate national revenue targets were met.

Drilon branded this “a very wrong and malicious interpretation.” Agencies played specific roles in pulling off the budget’s sleight of hand.

The Bureau of the Treasury’s certification of “funds actually available” was issued piecemeal, even when the government’s overall fiscal plan was in deficit.

The standby authority became near-certain funding, and the UA list swelled with items that would otherwise require fresh congressional approval or painful reprogramming.

Drilon was blunt about the institutional collusion. While conceding that classifying items as programmed or unprogrammed was an exercise of the power of the purse, he warned that legislative wisdom had faltered.

The executive, for its part, embraced the low threshold because it delivered spending flexibility without breaching the President’s recommended budget ceiling on paper.

Under the Constitution, the final budget amount should not exceed the President’s proposal under the NEP.

Based on the practice over the past three years, the programmed mandates were sidelined, while the UA items were funded first.

The rationale for the urgency of the funding was that the unprogrammed items were mostly priority projects, such as the delayed subway construction, which were relegated to the UA to make room in the budget for the pet projects of the members of Congress.

The scheme was allowed to give President Marcos leverage over members of Congress.

The UA thus operated as a shadow general appropriation, expanding executive discretion.

Drilon, however, did not call or its abolition. Instead, he urged the Supreme Court to restore the original safeguard: defining “funds actually available” by aggregate BESF performance, not isolated windfalls.

Only a genuine surplus after the entire programmed budget was covered should unlock unprogrammed releases.

Anything less, he indicated, transforms a contingent tool into a fiscal trick to revive the outlawed pork barrel scheme.

By exposing how the administration and its congressional partners have gamed the system, Drilon has placed the real question before the justices: will the Court tolerate the perversion, or will it enforce the constitutional boundaries the political branches have chosen to ignore?

The SC must stop the UA from being a Marcos instrument for unchecked spending.