Curiouser and curiouser
The bill already passed third reading in the Senate. That was seven months ago. It has also cleared committee in the House. It waits on just one more committee before a floor vote.
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The bill already passed third reading in the Senate. That was seven months ago. It has also cleared committee in the House. It waits on just one more committee before a floor vote.
Locking down the budget through technology and transparency is meeting determined pushback from administration decision-makers, raising questions about what is being planned for the 2027 pre-election national budget.
A bill pending in Congress would put the national budget on the blockchain, making every peso, every contract, and even the price of a single nail used in a project publicly traceable.
The information would be stored in an electronic ledger accessible on the Internet and updated in real time. No official could quietly alter the records afterward.
The bill already passed third reading in the Senate. That was seven months ago. It has also cleared committee in the House. It waits on just one more committee before a floor vote.
By the ordinary flow of lawmaking, this bill should already be law.
This week, in a budget hearing, Senator Bam Aquino, author of the Cadena Bill, asked Department of Economy, Planning and Development Secretary Arsenio Balisacan why.
The answer he got had the same shape as the old excuses for flood control money. Vague, procedural, sounding like an explanation while explaining nothing.
The Legislative-Executive Development Advisory Council decides which bills get pushed hardest, Balisacan said, calling this a matter of focus.
He said the council picks only the measures “so critical” they need the full weight of government behind them. The blockchain bill did not make that cut. It sits now in the pile of bills nobody promises to fight for.
Aquino did not accept that answer, pointing out that Balisacan had once been consulted on this very bill.
Back then, everyone agreed it mattered. Aquino also pointed out something sharper. Other bills on the short list have not even cleared a single committee report.
His bill has and is closer to becoming law than almost anything else on the government’s own agenda. And still, it was quietly dropped.
The bill would make racket operations such as the flood control scandal harder to pull off. In the anomaly, hundreds of billions of pesos vanished into ghost projects and padded contracts.
Nobody outside a small circle could see where the money went. A blockchain ledger does not fix corruption by itself. But it makes hiding corruption much harder. It puts the receipt where everyone can check it.
Public anger over flood control money had reached the kind of pitch that made everyone in government promise the same thing, at least in public: never again, full transparency and we will fix this.
That was the moment to fast-track the one bill that speaks directly to the problem. Instead, it got moved to the back of the line.
The People’s Budget Coalition and BetterGov.PH are behind a joint signature campaign that included a bloc of civil society and online civic groups, reflecting broad support for the measure.
Together, they are urging the House to pass the bill before the budget season closes.
The Senate passed it 17-0, but the Palace has now deprioritized the opportunity to blockchain the budget to take discretion away from those who currently hold it and remove the cover that allows contracts to be padded.
It would lift the fog that lets budget insertions slip through unseen. Every layer of government that benefits from that fog has a quiet reason to keep it.
Nobody has to lift a finger to kill the bill. They only have to stop pushing it. Then let it sit.
The government has spent the past year promising transparency after a trillion-peso scandal. Yet sitting in Congress is perhaps the clearest transparency measure available.
The bill is being allowed to fade from view, perhaps precisely because those who understand what it would expose also understand what they stand to lose.
