Exorbitant secrecy
In a single decade, the confidential and intelligence funds of one office grew more than thirteenfold, without any corresponding national threat serious enough to explain the surge.
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In a single decade, the confidential and intelligence funds of one office grew more than thirteenfold, without any corresponding national threat serious enough to explain the surge.
It is said that numbers do not lie; people do.
In 2016, the last year of Benigno Aquino III’s presidency, the Office of the President spent P734 million in confidential and intelligence funds.
A year later, under Rodrigo Duterte, the figure jumped to P2 billion. By the time Duterte left Malacañang in 2022, it had climbed to P3.8 billion. When Ferdinand Marcos Jr. took over, the allocation grew to P4.8 billion in his first budget. This year, 2026, it stands at P9.7 billion.
In a single decade, the confidential and intelligence funds of one office grew more than thirteenfold, without any corresponding national threat serious enough to explain the surge.
What grew instead was the appetite for money that no one has to explain.
An intelligence fund is set aside supposedly for gathering information related to national security, law enforcement, or counter-intelligence work such as surveillance, payments to informants, covert operations and similar activities where secrecy is essential.
In the government budget system, it’s typically paired with but is legally distinct from “confidential funds.” The two get lumped together in casual usage as in the transcript, “confidential and intelligence funds,” but they serve different purposes.
Former Senate President Franklin Drilon said the bloating of the President’s secret fund deserves equal, if not more, attention than the concerns tackled in the ongoing impeachment trial.
The number that should also alarm the public is the trajectory of the amount of such funds across the government. Total confidential and intelligence funds hit P12.3 billion in 2024 and P10.286 billion last year.
That is money spent with none of the receipts, itemization, or scrutiny required for government purchases.
Drilon said confidential funds should be allocated only to agencies with an actual mandate to gather intelligence.
The Office of the Vice President has no such mandate. It never did. Leni Robredo did not have these funds but Jejomar Binay reportedly did.
Vice President Sara Duterte spent over P612 million of it in a matter of months, and when the Commission on Audit (CoA) went looking for where the money went, it found line items that belonged under other agencies such as medical assistance, food assistance, travel, Christmas parties, and tree planting. None of it involved intelligence work. The circumstances of this are now the subject of the Senate impeachment trial.
The VP’s defense is that the funds were somehow exempt from the ordinary liquidation rules that bind other confidential expenditures.
The CoA disagreed, which was the crux of the recent arguments raised in the impeachment court, which revolved around the interpretation of Joint Circular 2015-01 that was supposedly stretched to accommodate whoever was spending the money.
Drilon, who conceded the funds may have been mostly pocketed, suggested the tightening of the rules even for the discretionary fund of the President.
Somewhere between Aquino’s P734 million and Marcos’ gargantuan P9.7 billion lies a decade’s worth of school buildings left unbuilt and malnourished children left unfed.
Confidential and intelligence funds grew more than thirteenfold in a decade — with no war, no commensurate threat, and no explanation for the staggering increase.
Why such a colossal lump sum exists in the first place demands an explanation. Yet none has been given, despite years of public anguish over money spent beyond the scrutiny of the public.
