Pork carte blanche
A reenacted budget widens the opportunity for patronage money, and it does so with less legislative oversight attached.
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A reenacted budget widens the opportunity for patronage money, and it does so with less legislative oversight attached.
Pressed for time, along with the need to clear the path for the crucial 2028 elections, the temptation of a reenacted budget, effectively giving President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. broad authority over 2027 spending, looms large.
Former Senate President Frank Drilon has seen the legislative and executive branches up close and knows where the political horizon lies.
He served as a senator-judge in two impeachment trials, first that of President Joseph Estrada and later that of Chief Justice Renato Corona, and knows what an impeachment proceeding can do to a legislative calendar.
It consumes, he explained on DAILY TRIBUNE’s online program Straight Talk. “Wala na kayong magawa na ibang trabaho,” he said. You can’t do other work.
With the Senate trying a sitting Vice President while deliberating a national budget of P7.2 trillion, Drilon is telling anyone who will listen that a reenacted budget for 2027 is not a remote possibility. It is, in his words, “within the realm of political possibilities.”
A reenacted budget, he said, will give the executive “carte blanche” over government spending.
It describes what the law actually does the moment Congress fails to pass a new General Appropriations Act on time. And this year, for the first time in recent memory, that failure looms.
The Senate is trying to do two things that each demand its full attention, at the same time, with the same fast-receding number of legislators.
It is sitting as an impeachment court trying the Vice President. It is also deliberating a national budget that watchdogs warn is riddled with pork.
The House had compressed its own budget process to roughly 53 working days, but the Senate has less leeway because senator-judges cannot simply appear in the impeachment chamber for four-hour sessions and then walk out unburdened.
They have to study evidence. They have to understand the law being argued. That work does not pause so the budget can proceed.
The Constitution allows the use of the prior year’s budget to continue if Congress does not pass a new one.
No new expenditures can be authorized, however. Whatever was not funded last year will not be funded this year either, which is worrying.
Under a reenacted budget, the only real restriction on the executive is that an item already spent cannot be spent again, but the discretion over which unfinished allocations get funded and how shifts almost entirely to Malacañang.
An administration that might otherwise answer to a newly passed, newly scrutinized appropriations law instead inherits the old one, with wider latitude to interpret it as it pleases.
A reenacted budget, thus, widens the opportunity for patronage money, and it does so with less legislative oversight attached.
A structural fix for the annual budget problem is Drilon’s proposal for a two-year budget cycle, so that a single congressional emergency, an impeachment trial, a leadership crisis, or any of the disruptions the dysfunctional Senate has encountered lately cannot by itself trigger a lapse into reenacted spending and the executive latitude that comes with it.
The Senate, despite the unprecedented chaos surrounding it, is now juggling the impeachment trial and the passage of the 2027 budget within the same compressed months.
If the budget process fails, the result will be a presidency operating with fewer constraints on public money than it should have, precisely when public trust in how that money is spent is most fragile.
