Raise ‘IHUAS’ banner
The BESF, Hernando insists, can contain only program appropriations and automatic appropriations. It cannot include unprogrammed ones.
Daily TribuneThe BESF, Hernando insists, can contain only program appropriations and automatic appropriations. It cannot include unprogrammed ones.
It’s about time a member of the High Tribunal made a categorical statement about the Unprogrammed Appropriations (UA) which the crooks in government used as a pork barrel conduit.
Supreme Court (SC) Associate Justice Ramon Hernando drew the line during Tuesday’s oral arguments on the national budget.
He declared a crusade to remove Unprogrammed Appropriations from the budget before revealing his personal acronym for them — “IHUAS” for I Hate Unprogrammed Appropriations.
In his separate concurring and dissenting opinion in the Pimentel case, he had written plainly: The UA in any form is unconstitutional.
The Court, in the Pimentel case, partly upheld the validity of the UA, ruling that it was not inherently unconstitutional, but its use must be strictly tied to actual revenue sources or financing conditions.
The Executive cannot activate them freely or arbitrarily without meeting those conditions.
He doubled down during the SC consultation, and every Filipino who has watched public funds disappear into shadowy “flexible” pockets or suitcases, would echo Hernando’s candid reasoning.
Article VII, Section 22 of the Constitution commands the President to submit, within 30 days of the opening of Congress, a budget of expenditures and sources of financing (BESF).
The BESF, Hernando insisted, should contain only programmed appropriations and automatic appropriations. It cannot include unprogrammed ones.
The Constitution speaks of a BESF, not a vague “net” or a wish list of contingent spending.
Article VI, Section 25(2) seals the deal: No provision or enactment shall be embraced in the General Appropriations Bill unless it relates specifically to some particular appropriation therein. The budget must be rigid with purpose-specific spending.
The framers designed a budget process that requires that every peso is justified, debated, and tied to a concrete purpose before it leaves the Treasury. The UA shatters that discipline. It is the fiscal equivalent of a blank check slipped into the back pocket of the Executive, available “when revenues permit,” when political allies need rescuing, or when election season demands sudden largesse.
It mocks the very idea of congressional oversight and renders the BESF a polite excuse.
When the government’s counsel, the Solicitor General, invoked “fiscal flexibility,” Hernando pounced on her with surgical precision.
Flexibility, the justice noted, comes from the word “flex,” which also means “to bend.”
“Are you advocating bending the Constitution?” he asked.
The SolGen retreated because once you accept that unprogrammed funds can live outside the BESF yet still be spent under the umbrella of “flexibility,” the constitutional framework is surrendered.
Specific spending is replaced with optional outlays and fiscal sleight of hand.
For too long, the UA has been the quiet enabler of waste, patronage, and executive impunity. It allows billions to be realigned without the messy inconvenience of congressional debate or public scrutiny.
Hernando has now placed the practice on constitutional trial. He has reminded the Court and the country that the budget is a sacred covenant between the people and their representatives involving public funds.
The Constitution does not bend, and neither should the budget. Hernando’s stance is not an act of judicial activism but of honesty, restoring the rigid, purpose-specific discipline that the framers demanded and that every taxpayer deserves.
Every citizen who believes public funds must be accounted for before they are spent should adopt Hernando’s IHUAS.