Poll-centered budget
The people this budget appears centered on are those running for office in 2028 who will need something to hand out between now and then.
Text size
The people this budget appears centered on are those running for office in 2028 who will need something to hand out between now and then.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., in his message accompanying the National Expenditure Program (NEP), used the words “unwavering, resilient and prosperous” to support his budget proposal for next year.
While the words impress, the budget is about numbers, and the 2027 P7.2-trillion NEP tells a different story from what the President does.
Debt service will rise by P659.3 billion to P2.7 trillion, a 17.3 percent jump. Infrastructure will increase by P178 billion, or 13.8 percent, much of it running through the Department of Public Works and Highways, the same agency that gave the nation the flood control scandal, where questions about where the dikes, drains and money went remain unanswered.
The military will get P28.6 billion more, or a 6.8 percent increase.
Then look at which spending items were cut compared with this year’s spending plan. Health will lose P95.7 billion — almost 22 percent in one year, in a country still paying off the pandemic.
Education was slashed by P68.5 billion, social welfare by P26.5 billion, and housing by 37 percent.
Surprisingly, despite the drumbeating about raising farm productivity, the budget for agriculture was pared by P36.6 billion. The country is thus expected to continue importing rice and other farm products from places with less rain and less soil.
The budget priorities show the administration chooses debt over doctors, concrete over classrooms, and guns over grain, according to Ibon Foundation executive director Sonny Africa.
The 2027 total budget will grow by P407 billion, most of it for salary increases for civil servants, soldiers and police, and the Local Government Support Fund, the same pocket suspected of receiving the bulk of pork lump sums moved after the flood control fiasco.
Africa said this budget leans toward austerity for social services while favoring debt payment and the military, befitting a government that puts elite interests above the people’s welfare.
Austerity does not fall evenly; it falls on the poor first and hardest.
Why does the DPWH get roughly P112 billion more next year despite its unresolved corruption issues, while other crucial development agencies such as the Department of Education, Department of Health and state universities get less?
Budget officials point to “absorptive capacity” for the allocations to agencies, meaning agencies that used up their budgets get more the following year.
What the administration is staring at, however, is a presidential election in 2028. Everyone who wrote this budget knows it. Infrastructure money does not always run through clean channels.
Some of it runs through congressional wish lists, through the LGSF, the same fund the Bicameral Conference Committee (Bicam) leaned on last December to bury pet projects of legislators amid the hype of livestreamed deliberations.
Economist JC Punongbayan described what is happening in the NEP as a shift from hard to soft pork, with money moved out of roads and bridges and into “financial assistance,” “ayuda” and cash doles that congressmen could hand out with their names on the envelopes.
So when President Marcos and his economic team call this budget “people-centered,” the fair question is: Whom are they referring to? It is not the sick, who stand to lose a fifth of the health budget.
They are not the students whose schools will receive less next year than this year. Nor are they the farmers, whose already meager support is set to grow even thinner.
The people this budget appears centered on are those running for office in 2028 who will need something to hand out between now and then. By that measure, “people-centered” does not mean the public but those who control the money.
The budget message speaks of an “unwavering commitment.” The real question is: Commitment to whom?
