Leadership fund, root of all evil
District congressmen got a baseline of P500 million each, partylist representatives from P120 million to P150 million.
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District congressmen got a baseline of P500 million each, partylist representatives from P120 million to P150 million.
Accounting for how billions of pesos meant for flood control and infrastructure found their way into politicians’ pockets has become the holy grail in the search for truth after the corruption scandal broke.
The story begins with Manuel Bonoan, the former Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) secretary. In an affidavit submitted in a malversation case, Bonoan described what he called a “leadership fund,” which was portrayed as a reincarnation of the pork barrel system outlawed by the Supreme Court in 2013.
Every year, the executive branch drafts its budget proposal, the National Expenditure Program (NEP). Congress and the Senate then revise the proposal during deliberations, with the final version becoming the General Appropriations Act, or GAA.
In 2023, Bonoan said, lawmakers gutted foreign-assisted infrastructure projects in the NEP by nearly 90 percent, then inserted that money into roughly 8,000 new projects of their own choosing.
In his written testimony, Bonoan said he brought the matter to President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., who appeared alarmed but directed him not to stop the practice. Thus, legislators were given access to discretionary funds built into the budget from the outset.
That became the leadership fund. Instead of having the senators fight for insertions during the budget deliberations, Bonoan gave them allocations upfront, in the NEP itself.
Senators got between P500 million and P1 billion each, totaling about P24 billion. District congressmen got a baseline of P500 million each, partylist representatives from P120 million to P150 million. Multiply that across roughly 250 districts and the House allotment alone approached P125 billion.
Lawmakers were receiving close to P150 billion in guaranteed allocations before the budget ever reached Congress for debate. That figure does not include what gets inserted afterward.
Under the Priority Development Assistance Fund, senators received P200 million a year while each member of the House got P70 million.
Sources said the fund used a parametric formula to spread the loot evenly. It was thereafter abused.
It inspired a genius at the DPWH to institutionalize the practice of quietly inserting lawmakers’ allocations into the national budget.
The late DPWH Undersecretary Catalina Cabral, who met a tragic fate, began offering allocations directly to senators and congressmen. A leaked text message showed her offering P500 million even before a Senate member had been sworn in.
From there, the numbers only grew. Zaldy Co, the House Appropriations Committee chairperson, allegedly inserted projects across multiple districts while running his own construction company, reportedly taking a cut of around 25 percent on projects he helped fund.
Former Senate president Chiz Escudero allegedly steered P142 billion in insertions to friends in 2025, including P9 billion to his own province.
Legislators may insist that an insertion is not corruption in itself. But in practice, insertions have become the workaround to the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling that outlawed the pork barrel.
The corruption lives in the kickbacks, and DPWH insiders estimate that this eats up 70 percent, sometimes all, of a given project’s value.
What matters now is the 2027 national budget, currently before Congress. The pattern is familiar enough that citizens with the skills to read a budget line by line — accountants, statisticians, auditors — have a real role to play to stop the daylight robbery.
The euphemisms change: pork barrel, then allocables, and now leadership funds. But the mechanism remains the same.
Elected leaders, supposedly the guardians of the public welfare, carve up public money before the citizens ever get a say in how it should be spent, using the DPWH as the vehicle.
Legislators and their cohorts in the Executive, all voracious for pork, have perfected the art of carving up the budget — and then claiming innocence after the heist.
