Now it’s phantom pork

Now it’s phantom pork | Daily Tribune

The money did not vanish. It reappeared under the Local Government Support Fund, in a line called financial assistance to local government units worth P34 billion.

The old pork, which the Supreme Court struck down in the 2013 Priority Development Assistance Fund ruling, left a paper trail. Legislators picked the public works projects, and names sat on the line items.

A road or a bridge could be traced back to a congressman’s district and a contractor identified; thus, it was visible pork.

The new lump-sum version has no names, lists or recipients until the money actually moves and is spent in 2027. Ask who gets it today, and the honest answer is nobody knows or nobody is saying.

Under the old PDAF regime, legislators told the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) which projects to fund after the budget had already been passed or as a post-enactment intervention.

The High Court killed it because lawmakers had no business directing spending after their job of appropriating was done.

This time, DBM still releases the funds, but on paper the discretion belongs to the executive branch. Legislators do not sign a list nor send a formal request.

A congressman does not need his name on a document to get his district funded. A phone call will work.

A quiet understanding with a regional DBM officer gets the money flowing. A pledge of support ahead of a floor vote works better than any post-enactment insertion because it leaves nothing to strike down. The High Tribunal’s decision only voids a fund with a name on it.

The mechanism employed in the 2027 budget, a public finance specialist said, works around the High Court’s decision by making pork invisible.

Another layer of pork is the Unprogrammed Appropriations (UAs). Lawmakers and budget watchdogs have called this pot the receptacle of pet projects, money released only when triggers are met — revenue targets, loans and so on.

Calls to scrap it have intensified, but the pushback has been fierce and constant from both the Executive and the Legislative. Nobody fights that hard to protect a fund unless the fund still feeds somebody.

The public works budget, long notorious as a pork factory, was reduced, with some of the money redirected to infrastructure projects that still required congressional support. The rest went to local government assistance and, quietly, to UAs.

New labels were affixed, mostly bureaucratic-sounding terms engineered to look like routine housekeeping but designed to survive the SC’s prohibitions.

The budget for the year before the presidential elections appears designed to solicit votes and line the pockets of the crooked, all while pretending to serve the public interest rather than voracious greed.