At 32, Budget Secretary Kim Robert C. de Leon becomes the youngest Budget Secretary in history and he arrives under the harshest of spotlights.

He takes the helm in the twilight of the Marcos administration, with the 2028 elections already casting their shadow.

His appointment is also a Palace optic. De Leon is meant to be the DBM’s clean break from the P1-trillion “Floodgate” mess, a fresh face to bury an ugly chapter.

The new budget chief’s credentials show that he is a product of the University of the Philippines system and is a technocrat rather than a political appointee in the traditional sense.

His resumé is rooted in public finance and governance reform, meaning he carries no political baggage from the “Floodgate” scandal.

The challenge before him is concrete: the DBM was the institutional conduit through which billions were siphoned from the national budget.

Will De Leon finally hold the agency accountable for its role in the corruption mafia, or will the questions dangle?

De Leon must help untangle a web of corruption that reaches to the highest levels of government and answer the defining question: Did his predecessor, Amenah Pangandaman, act on her own, or was she carrying water for the President?

It would be interesting to see how De Leon, with his zeal and the perceived ideals of youth, would treat the smoking gun in fugitive congressman Zaldy Co’s bombshell, which the Marcos administration has totally ignored.

Co’s narrative, in a video testimony in November 2025, indicated that the chain of command linked the DBM to a presidential direction.

Co was the chairperson of the House Committee on Appropriations when the largest budget heist occurred, making the 2025 General Appropriations Act the most corrupt in Philippine history, according to retired Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio.

Co claimed the manipulation of the spending plan began with a call from Pangandaman in late 2024, when the bicameral conference process started.

Pangandaman told him the President had ordered the insertion of P100 billion in projects, even advising him to confirm the instruction with Undersecretary Adrian Bersamin of the Presidential Legislative Liaison Office.

In a meeting, Bersamin supposedly handed Co a list of projects worth P100 billion, which supposedly came directly from Marcos.

In a letter to the President, Co quoted Pangandaman as saying, “Your Excellency’s instruction was ‘to proceed’ and that we must follow.”

Co explicitly tagged Marcos as the orchestrator of P100 billion in insertions in the graft-ridden 2025 budget, and alleged that the President received P25 billion in kickbacks, an allegation Marcos said he “won’t dignify.”

Yet the fingerprints of the Palace and the DBM were all over the scandal scene, primarily in the substandard and, at times, ghost flood control projects.

The scandal’s machinery runs through the congressional budget insertions and the Unprogrammed Appropriations (UA), both of which pass through the DBM.

DBM releases funds through Notices of Cash Allocation (NCA) or Special Allotment Release Orders (SARO).

In 2025, P783 billion in insertions required SAROs before release.

“Let us be clear: we will not allow the budget to be abused again for another flood control scandal.” Strong words from De Leon, but words alone won’t cut it.

The real test is whether he will demand full transparency from the DBM and expose Pangandaman’s true role in the Floodgate scandal.

How long before the Palace breaks him?