Abominable UA’s origin

Abominable UA’s origin | Daily Tribune

The abuse centers on the power of the purse, specifically the legislative pork barrel and the executive’s power to choose which programs to fund and when to release the funds. The Supreme Court struck down the PDAF on 13 November 2013.

Former Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Winnie Monsod, in a presentation before the SC, said policymakers had two choices after the SC ruling: to take the high road by institutionalizing reforms or to devise a new mechanism to revive the pork barrel.

Monsod, a University of the Philippines (UP) School of Economics professor emeritus, said the obvious choice for the opportunistic members of Congress was to devise a system to resurrect the invalid scheme.

A pivotal moment was the 2019 General Appropriations Act standoff over P95 billion in insertions, which led to the budget’s reenactment. Monsod said it was then that contractors entered the picture.

In 2019, the House made significant realignments, itemizations, and amendments to the enrolled bill before transmitting it to the Senate.

These included breaking down lump-sum appropriations (especially in health facilities and other areas) into specific projects and shifting funds.

Then President Rodrigo Duterte intervened, meeting with Congress leaders and warning against signing anything illegal. The government operated under the reenacted 2018 budget for months, delaying the launch of new programs.

From 2022 onward, a more sophisticated scheme, infamously called the “Baseline Balanced Management (BBM)” formula, was adopted by the Department of Public Works and Highways during the term of the controversial DPWH Undersecretary Cathy Cabral.

The entire DPWH infrastructure budget then became a de facto pork barrel as projects were chosen during the preparation of the National Expenditure Program (NEP), before Congress could even deliberate on it.

Pork projects accounted for 50 percent of the DPWH’s NEP, and legislators could propose projects outside their districts by paying a six-percent “parking fee” to the district representative under the so-called standard operating procedure.

The Unprogrammed Appropriations (UA) then became the vehicle for hiding lump-sum insertions, including the SAGIP (Strengthening Assistance for Government Infrastructure and Social Programs) under P300 billion in 2024 and the BIP (Budgetary Insertion Program), which were essentially lump sums inserted during Bicameral Conference Committee deliberations on the budget, which was beyond congressional scrutiny.

The UA ballooned to P800 billion, far beyond what was originally proposed in the NEP.

To fund the ballooning UA, the government exploited “excess revenues” or actual collections above projections, a phenomenon that conveniently began appearing starting in 2021.

A 2024 provision allowed funding from government-owned and -controlled corporations’ (GOCC) reserve funds, which was later removed for the 2025 budget after SC intervention.

Monsod argued that the perversion of the budget caused immeasurable damage: the GDP fell and the deficit-to-GDP ratio declined.

In short, both the budget and the national development plan failed — and the country is paying for it.