Instead, the budget is kept voluminous and splits a single road repair project into a half-dozen items, maintenance here, rehabilitation there, flood control somewhere else, none of them labeled with the street or town they belong to.
In the National Expenditure Program (NEP) submitted to Congress, the proposed Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) budget runs to 772 pages, making it difficult for ordinary citizens to sift through and spot hidden appropriations.
The solution is surprisingly simple: for every congressional district, show the total net allocation and list every project, with the proponents’ names, on a single page.
A fisherman should be able to turn on his phone and see what his district received and what it is supposed to buy. He should not need a researcher, a lawyer, or a friend at the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) to make sense of it.
Instead, the budget is kept voluminous and splits a single road repair project into a half-dozen items, maintenance here, rehabilitation there, flood control somewhere else, none of them labeled with the street or town they belong to.
Now multiply that by every district, every agency, every fund. The result is a document created not to inform people, but to wear them out. At some point, the complication is exposed for what it really is: a way to hide shenanigans.
The defenders then always say the same thing: the projects are already in the NEP. True, but that’s not the point. No one said the information was missing. The question is whether an ordinary Filipino can actually find it, without a patient accountant to help.
A budget people cannot read is not transparent. It is only technically public; it requires time and patience to dig through, which is not accountability.
What also disappears in the haze are the partylist allocations. The non-district representatives are also entitled to pork allocations. So where does their money go; for whose community’s benefit?
This fits the plot of the flood control scam: insertions dressed as line items, ghost projects hiding behind classifications that are hard to audit, until a whistleblower or a typhoon forces the government to publish a project list after the fact.
It boils down to asking the public to check if these projects actually exist in their communities, crowdsourcing fact-checks after the money is gone, instead of providing a clear public ledger before a single peso is released.
The Supreme Court settled the constitutional principle over a decade ago in the 2013 Priority Development Assistance Fund ruling: a post-enactment insertion of legislator-identified projects is a pork barrel that the Constitution forbids.
A budget too complicated to read is the same pork in a different disguise. So when a lawmaker asks, on the record, for a one-page district summary and receives the same answer, “it’s already in the NEP,” that answer is not enough.
Transparency that requires an expert to unlock is not transparency at all. It is a locked door with the key hidden inside.
Simplify the budget. Publish it by district. The suspicion of hidden pork disappears when there is nowhere left for pork to hide.
Until then, every extra item in the budget should be treated as a pocket deliberately sewn on for something to be tucked inside.
