Greed holds budget hostage

The Palace’s role in distorting the budget since the current administration took power in 2022 was laid bare during the Supreme Court’s first oral arguments on petitions challenging the constitutionality of Unprogrammed Appropriations (UA).

Since 2023, Malacañang has treated the national budget not as the people’s money but as its own private automated teller machine.

The instrument of choice: the once-obscure, now-infamous UA.

Under the 1987 Constitution, the UA was designed as an emergency valve for genuine fiscal windfalls but has been twisted through loopholes in the Charter that allow the President to rewrite the legislature’s spending decisions.

A lineup of previous budget officials, economists, and a distinguished former senator exposed the fiscal perversion.

The 1987 Charter was designed for accountability, demanding that the national budget be a financed fiscal program, anchored on the President’s Budget of Expenditures and Sources of Financing (BESF), a component of the National Expenditure Program.

Revenues must match expenditures. Congress cannot exceed the President’s proposed ceiling, and it follows a deliberate sequence in which the President proposes, the Legislature appropriates, and the Executive implements.

No shortcuts are allowed — in the yearly budget, where deficits have been the norm for four decades, and genuine surpluses are rarer than honest politicians, the conditions to trigger the UA rarely exist.

The old tricks resorted to in the Marcos years were cherry-picking dividends from government-owned and controlled corporations or isolating non-tax revenues and calling them excess funds.

Revenue must be judged holistically against the entire BESF, not through creative accounting, the Supreme Court’s resource persons or amici curiae indicated.

Isolated gains do not create surpluses, but they create excuses.

And excuses are exactly what the Palace wants. Once the General Appropriations Act is passed, the executive suddenly discovers it alone gets to decide which projects live and which die.

Which senator’s district gets the road, which mayor’s pet project gets the cash, and which opposition stronghold gets zero?

Congress passes the law; the President decides whether it will ever be obeyed.

The perversion of the UA proved so effective that it ballooned beyond fiscal reality.

The UA no longer waits for real surpluses but is treated as an expandable slush fund that effectively blows past the constitutional budget ceiling, thus circumventing the constitutional bar on the final budget amount exceeding the President’s proposal.

The result is opaque, discretionary spending with minimal transparency. The Constitution has handed the President flexibility through supplemental appropriations, backed by funds actually available or new revenues raised through legislation.

That route keeps power where it belongs, with Congress. The use of the UA circumvents the legislative route and prevents messy debate through a naked reconfiguration of the power of the purse.

The Constitution vested power in the people’s representatives to prevent a single branch of government from playing god with public funds.

By perverting the UA into a backdoor spending authority, the executive has seized de facto control over the legislative power of the purse.

The Supreme Court had drawn the line before through a declaration that constitutional safeguards were not suggestions.

When the executive turns “unprogrammed” into “unaccountable,” the budget ceases to be the people’s instrument and becomes the Palace’s toy.

It is insulting that it needed the Supreme Court to act for Congress to reclaim its power over the purse, which was stipulated in the 2014 ruling voiding the schemes to create the notorious Disbursement Acceleration Program.

Nowhere in the Constitution does it state that the President is entitled to a credit card with no limit. It is time for the SC to stop the nefarious practice.