Did pork come back smarter?
So what exactly died? Because this sounds like the pig is doing fantastic and is apparently more clever now.
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So what exactly died? Because this sounds like the pig is doing fantastic and is apparently more clever now.
Senators supposedly needed P500 million worth of roads each. Not a mayor. Or a governor. Not the DPWH. Senators.
Ex-DPWH honcho Manuel Bonoan said senators in 2024 each had P500 million worth of priority projects under what he called a leadership fund. Some big committee chairs had P1 billion.
Huh? P1 billion for what exactly?
Not “their districts.” Senators have no districts. House of Representatives members have districts. Senators represent the entire country.
But let’s be ridiculously generous.
Suppose Alan Peter — we’re not accusing Alan of anything; he is innocent in this story — we’re borrowing Alan because everybody knows Alan.
Suppose the gentleman from Taguig says, “I’ll put my P500 million in Taguig.”
Have you seen Taguig? BGC has sidewalks nicer than the Osmeña Highway.
You can buy a P400 salad on High Street, very New York, and nobody complains. But maybe, just maybe, somewhere else in the Philippines the money is needed more.
So Alan supposedly says, “Fine. I’ll put it in Samar.” Very generous, Alan.
One thing: What the hell does Alan know about a road in Samar? Did Alan wake up one morning thinking about drainage in Catbalogan?
Was he lying in bed, whispering, “Hey, Lani, I have a fantastic feeling about a basketball court in Barangay Tukalanipao?”
No. The DPWH has thousands of people whose job it is to know which bridge is dying. But now Alan supposedly has P500 million. Somebody please find Alan a pothole.
A road here, drainage there, bridge over there. OK, that’s P300 million. Anything else, sir?
This is national infrastructure planning now? Do we go hunting for things to build just because the money is there?
If a bridge in Samar is the country’s greatest infrastructure investment, fine! Put the money in Samar. All of it. If Samar needs P24 billion, by all means give Samar P24 billion.
But if Bonoan is right, a town could need a drainage system more desperately than another town needs a basketball court, and it would still lose out because its need does not have a senator.
Needs shouldn’t depend on who has political connections. Otherwise, the senator becomes the person everybody has to beg from. Mayor wants a bridge? Go to the senator. That’s extraordinary power for someone who does not run your town.
A senator’s job is supposed to include asking the DPWH, “Where did the money go?” It gets a little awkward when it was the senator who told the DPWH, “Put it over there.”
Who’s checking whom?
We’ve seen this before: a congressman, a personal pot of public projects, government agencies spending it. We even had a name for it. Pork barrel. PDAF. Janet Napoles.
Strange. Because the pork barrel was supposed to be dead.
So what exactly died? Because this sounds like the pig is doing fantastic and is apparently more clever now.
The old way: President proposes budget. Congress inserts senator’s project.
The new way, according to Bonoan: DPWH incorporates legislators’ priority projects while putting together the executive budget.
They didn’t insert the pork. They built the budget around the ham. Malacañang submits the NEP to Congress, which then scrutinizes it.
The senator can say: “We didn’t insert that!” Correct. It arrived inserted. The President ends up proposing the senator’s idea back to the senator.
The leadership fund was said to have been created to protect the DPWH from Congress: The price of protecting its own projects was giving politicians room for theirs.
Marcos says he knew nothing about it. What kind of President is always the last man to know?
Maybe Bonoan is wrong. Maybe this fund never existed.
What if nobody needs Bongbong to know? Nobody tells. Government moves. The President finds out later.
The most dangerous pork barrel may be the one nobody has to approve anymore. And the weakest President may be the one nobody thinks to ask.
Powerful enough to sign everything, important enough to appear on everything, somehow innocent enough to know nothing.
So maybe Marcos runs the government. Maybe. Maybe he runs the part of the government that people let him.
