Orals tagged ‘Moby Dick’

The syndicated scheme for siphoning off public funds was laid bare during the Supreme Court’s recent oral arguments on the constitutionality of Unprogrammed Appropriations (UA).

The UA, it emerged, was used as a conduit for a legislative slush fund, a racket that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. can hardly claim ignorance of.

What surfaced in the proceedings was the systematic plunder, cloaked in the bureaucratic language of fiscal flexibility and contingent funding.

If the Ombudsman and the other investigating bodies had only paid attention to the SC’s public consultations, they would have had a clear path to hauling in the big fish — or the largest ocean creature “Moby Dick.”

The UA, which are funds released only when revenue targets are exceeded, or foreign loans materialize, were conceived as a sensible fiscal cushion.

The idea was to set aside a standby authority for genuine windfalls so that the government would not be caught flat-footed.

“The new pork barrel was obviously obscenely larger in scale. The UA was chosen to hide lump sum appropriations,” amicus curiae and former National Economic and Development Authority director general Solita Monsod pointed out.

Congress, particularly through the bicameral conference committee, turned the UA into what Monsod bluntly called the new pork barrel.

Priority programs that had survived reviews by NEDA, regional development councils, and the Development Budget Coordination Committee — such as health worker compensation, free tertiary education, Armed Forces of the Philippines modernization, and counterpart financing for the subway project — were stripped of guaranteed program funding and relegated to the contingent category.

The fiscal space vacated by these essential programs was then filled with legislators’ pet projects, including flood control initiatives that swelled the Department of Public Works and Highways budget by some P200 billion.

The word “flood control” deserves particular scrutiny. These were not modest drainage improvements quietly inserted between line items.

They were massive congressional insertions that bypassed the government’s own planning and review bodies, inserted without NEDA endorsement, and awarded under circumstances that surprised budget watchdogs and the Supreme Court itself.

The irony is that flood control projects, supposedly designed to protect Filipinos from nature’s worst, had instead become among the most reliable vehicles for draining the public treasury.

Substandard constructions, ghost deliveries, and inflated costs have been the recurring harvest of these legislative plantings.

The Bicameral Conference Committee (Bicam), a body that operates with minimal public scrutiny, no floor debates, and no independent expert review, became the engine room of the shadow budget.

Programmed priorities went in one end and legislators’ preferences came out the other, cloaked in the language of contingent appropriations so that their release remained formally dependent on revenue conditions that, in practice, the executive could validate at its discretion.

Another friend of the court, former Senate President Franklin Drilon, noted that “the violations were not found in the text of the law but in the arithmetic.”

The most consequential question, which the Court appeared too polite to ask directly, was what did President Marcos know, and when did he know it?

The administration has positioned itself as a late-arriving reformer, after the President exposed the flood control scandal and vetoed seven of 10 unprogrammed items in the 2026 budget, reducing the total from P363 billion to P150 billion, while he declared the UA as “not blank checks.”

The bicam does not operate in a vacuum sealed from presidential awareness.

A President who signed three consecutive budgets that included a new pork barrel scheme cannot, in good conscience, claim ignorance of its architecture.

Mr. Marcos bears political responsibility and it was all over the SC exchanges.