The spending plan needed to put on a show because the flood control scandal blew the lid off a practice that had become normal: using the UA as a side door for pork, insertions and projects no one asked for and few could trace.
The administration has a new budget with an old promise. “People-centered,” they call it. We have heard this before, in 2023, 2024 and 2025. Each year the words stay the same, but the fine print does not.
The Department of Budget and Management (DBM) just handed Congress a P7.2-trillion spending plan for 2027. It is bigger than last year’s by P407 billion. The government says it is disciplined.
It pointed to the trimmed Unprogrammed Appropriations (UA), the fund that lawmakers used to call standby money but which the public now knows by a harder name: the shadow budget.
For 2027, that fund is pegged at P111.984 billion — just 1.5 percent of total spending. The lowest share since 1991, DBM said. A number meant to reassure, but the fund remains and Congress has a free hand to adjust it.
The shrinking of the UA in the National Expenditure Program (NEP) is not proof of reform but of pressure.
The spending plan needed to put on a show because the flood control scandal blew the lid off a practice that had become normal: using the UA as a side door for pork, insertions and projects no one asked for and few could trace.
A trillion pesos in alleged anomalies, tied to Department of Public Works and Highways contracts, dragged the names of the highest officials into the scandal.
The public was outraged and the number went down. That is what changed, not the mechanism and the mindset, which means that the crooks in government will merely look for another way to skin the cat.
The UA still exists; the fund may be smaller, but the door is still there. And a smaller door is still a door, if nobody is watching who walks through it.
There was no fix applied as the “budgeting code” that is supposed to lock down the UA, to spell out exactly when it can be used and for what, is still being drafted.
The bill would be a promise inside a memo, reviewed by a Palace official, awaiting the President’s blessing.
Meanwhile, the men and women named in the flood control mess still walk free of final judgment. No one of consequence has gone to jail since the Ombudsman said it was still investigating.
The pace of the probe is also based on where the political leaning lies.
Congress, which received this budget, has offered no binding rule that stops the next bicameral conference committee from doing what past ones did in the dark.
The UA ballooned from P251 billion in 2022 to over P800 billion in 2023 through the Bicameral Conference Committee, proving that the UA number in the President’s budget is not a fixed amount.
A people-centered budget does not hide behind a number that shrank because it got caught, but it is one where every peso has a name, a purpose, and a paper trail.
The UA still means “we’ll decide later, quietly” for pork insertions.
The modus operandi remains intact. The shadow budget only has a new coat of paint.
The people were taken for a ride before and they are again being led to climb into the same vehicle of deception.
