Perpetual Palace carousel

Perpetual Palace carousel | Daily Tribune

The allocation comes as fiscal space for development spending has shrunk for four consecutive years, from 25 percent in 2023 to just 19 percent now — even as the government continues to borrow more than it invests.

Financial resources, the little that can be generated amid tepid growth, are being used to pay down debt faster rather than to grow the economy. A third of the fiscal space that remains is devoted to hard and soft pork, which is unproductive at most.

For two years, the flood control scandal has taught the public a hard lesson in how public money disappears — through insertions, through “soft” projects or cash doles, through barangay allocations that the Commission on Audit has all but conceded it cannot track.

Cited in the House debate was P8 billion distributed to barangays for scholarships, at roughly P100,000 apiece, with no mechanism to verify its proper use.

Then there is the confidential and intelligence fund question, consisting of P4.56 billion for the Office of the President, broken down into P2.25 billion for confidential and P2.31 billion for intelligence operations.

Compare that to the P612.5 million in similar funds that the Office of the Vice President has been asked to specify, year after year, line by line, in a scrutiny so exacting it became a central plank of the impeachment trial of Sara Duterte.

The Senate impeachment court has spent months asking VP Duterte to account for funds a tenth the size of what the Palace now spends without a comparable challenge. Confidential funds, which are dangerous enough to warrant a constitutional proceeding when a Vice President holds them, do not become safe simply because a President holds more of them.

Congress must resolve this double standard. The Constitution does not grade accountability on a curve.

Article VI, Section 29 requires that no money be paid out of the treasury except by appropriation made by law, and the Supreme Court’s own jurisprudence addressing presidential discretion over public funds in the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) and Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) decisions has been unambiguous that the pork barrel system, in whatever form, corrodes the doctrine of separation of powers.

In the decision outlawing the DAP, the High Tribunal barred the Executive from dictating how appropriated funds are spent after Congress approves them.

The conspiracy involving the Executive in the corruption mess has long been established.

The Palace’s own former officials, dismissed after fugitive House member Zaldy Co and former Public Works and Highways Undersecretary Roberto Bernardo named them in connection with alleged 2025 budget insertions and kickbacks, were let go without explanation or investigation.

Some were even rewarded with safer government posts, raising questions about whether silence was the price for staying in the fold.

If the Senate can devote an entire impeachment proceeding, draining the chamber of legislative time and public funds, the House owes the public no less rigor in examining the unexplained confidential and intelligence spending running into tens of billions of pesos by the Office of the President.

Anything less is selective accountability and an abuse of power no less troubling than the flood control racket itself.