Pork-ridden budget

Pork-ridden budget | Daily Tribune

This is pure patronage. A former Department of Budget and Management (DBM) senior official said these programs become a debt of gratitude owed to a politician instead of the right of every taxpayer.

The Commission on Higher Education’s Tulong Dunong scholarship fund is the same story. CHEd offers scholarship programs, but lawmakers keep adding new ones that must pass through their offices first, creating a dependency on them.

Budget analysts describe a pattern. In the NEP, a line item starts small, sometimes at zero, and by the time the General Appropriations Bill comes out, it has ballooned.

A former House speaker took a program worth nothing in the NEP and inserted P26 billion into it before the General Appropriations Act (GAA) was signed. The Executive is now repeating this sleight of hand across dozens of small funds in the NEP.

The Local Government Support Fund (LGSF), under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s discretion, shows the same growth spurt.

Watchdogs say it quadrupled last year. The catch is the LGSF is listed as a lump sum in the GAA. No one can trace which town got how much or how the money was spent. The public can’t get a full accounting.

The huge sums move with no paper trail, one year before a national election, raising eyebrows.

The NEP also includes physical infrastructure projects, dressed up as “convergence” programs between agencies under the Growth Equity Fund (GEF).

It was supposedly built to help fourth- and fifth-class local governments handle the services devolved to them after the Mandanas-Garcia ruling gave localities a bigger share of national tax revenue.

For years, Congress starved this fund, cutting the Executive’s proposed P10 billion to almost nothing because its rules were strict about which low-income towns could qualify for it.

The pool has now started collecting the pet projects of legislators, such as flood control infrastructure, multipurpose halls and sports stadiums. These are small, scattered, local edifices that are easy to point to on the campaign trail.

Then there’s the free-for-all Financial Assistance to Local Government Units fund, which suddenly grew to P38 billion.

Budget watchers noticed it grew right after the flood control scandal made it politically dangerous to hide pork within the Department of Public Works and Highways budget. So the pork moved into a fund for local governments, dressed as devolution policy.

If devolution was truly the goal, insiders ask, why wasn’t it funded properly years ago? Why only now, right before an election?

Soft and hard pork now dodge scrutiny by hiding inside lump sums, vague “assistance” labels and last-minute congressional insertions.

The polls-centered budget doesn’t eliminate pork — it just camouflages it.