Government borrowings hit a record P19.39 trillion by the end of July, mostly going to pay for the government’s various cash subsidy programs — and the men and women lining up for the cash aid are paying for it with their health, and sometimes their lives.

In April, a motorcycle rider died waiting in line for a P5,000 relief check from the Department of Social Welfare and Development.

More than 2,500 transport workers had gathered that day at the Quezon Memorial Circle payout site, standing for hours in the heat.

The death exposed a widening gap between the government’s mounting debt and the shrinking share of the budget meant to cushion the poor.

The 2027 National Expenditure Program (NEP) allocates 4.5 percent of spending to Social Protection and Welfare Employment, the lowest share since 2010 and down 0.7 percentage points from 2025.

The DSWD received P241.6 billion this year, nearly P30 billion short of its request.

According to think tank Ibon Foundation, the debt keeps climbing. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has added P6.6 trillion to the national debt in just over four years, 96 percent of the P6.85 trillion his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, added over six years in office.

Marcos is on pace to leave behind the largest debt buildup of any Philippine president since the 1986 EDSA revolt, with the bulk of the borrowed funds used to bankroll the unproductive cash subsidies.

The government’s main relief programs cannot keep up.

The Department of Labor and Employment’s (DoLE) Tulong Pang-hanapbuhay sa Ating Disadvantaged/Displaced Workers emergency jobs program covers 13,000 beneficiaries, roughly 0.5 percent of the 2.59 million Filipinos who were unemployed as of June.

Ibon Foundation said the Marcos administration’s Unified Package for Livelihoods, Industry, Food and Transport (UPLIFT) program, launched to soften the blow of the global oil crisis, has reached only 2.7 million beneficiaries since March, about 13 percent of the 21 million households considered vulnerable amid the cost-of-living crisis.

Ex-DSWD chief up in arms

Active households fell from 4.4 million in 2023 to about three million by 2025-2026, yet the DSWD is proposing a P100-billion budget for the program next year.

Former acting DSWD secretary Judy Taguiwalo said Congress inserted its own allocations into the total, a practice she said contributed to the Commission on Appointments rejecting her confirmation as secretary.

Delays and favoritism persist at the local level, Taguiwalo said. She recalled a governor in Northern Luzon who withheld family food packs from a mayor’s town because of their political rivalry, and a mayor who planned to hand out relief goods in December as Christmas gifts instead of following an October disaster.

In one Bicol barangay, she said, an official kept food packs for himself to pay those who cleaned his house.

Far below living wage

The government’s official poverty rate, 6.4 percent of families in 2025, is calculated using a poverty line of just P481 a day, far below the P1,302 daily living wage Ibon estimates a family of five needs.

A Social Weather Stations survey in June put self-rated poverty at 49 percent, and DSWD social workers, most still without permanent positions, now carry caseloads of up to 400 families each, roughly twice what they had a decade ago.