SC slams 'unchecked vault'
Associate Justice Amy Lazaro-Javier in her strongly-worded concurring opinion called out Congress for subverting the economic and constitutional stability of the country.
She emphasized that while lawmakers have the absolute right to refine the allocation of public funds under their "power of the purse," they are explicitly barred from breaching the global spending ceiling set by the President's National Expenditure Program (NEP).
"It transforms a contingent safety valve into an unchecked vault," Lazaro-Javier wrote, describing how Congress weaponized what was legally intended to be an emergency financial buffer.
Unprogrammed funds are statutorily designed as standby lines.
They are only meant to be unlocked by the Executive if the country registers unexpected revenue windfalls, excess non-tax collections, or new foreign loans.
By artificially bloating these lines with billions of pesos, the Supreme Court ruled that lawmakers fundamentally dismantled the spending guardrails meant to safeguard the national treasury.
Echoing this severe warning, Associate Justice Ramon Paul Hernando openly categorized these unprogrammed insertions as “definite sources of graft and corruption in government,” cautioning that they systematically weaken fiscal accountability.
In a historic rebuke of legislative overreach, the Supreme Court En Banc has declared key portions of the 2024 and 2025 national budgets unconstitutional.
The landmark ruling strikes at the heart of congressional padding, firmly penalizing lawmakers for illegally inflating standby accounts beyond the limits proposed by the executive branch.
The decision, penned by Senior Associate Justice Marvic Leonen, forcefully reasserts the constitutional separation of powers.
It addresses long-standing practices where legislators utilized unprogrammed appropriations as a parallel, less transparent budget mechanism to fund pet localized infrastructure projects.
The ruling of the high bench specifically dismantled key legislative expansions across multiple fiscal years 2024 and 2025.
The Court invalidated Republic Act No. 11975 for a massive ₱449.5-billion increase into unprogrammed appropriations, violating Article VI, Section 25(1) of the Constitution, and voided the 2025 budget over an illegal ₱17.99 billion addition to the DPWH Special Road Fund.
The SC acted on a petition by lawmakers including Edcel Lagman, Aquilino "Koko" Pimentel III, Edgar Erice, and Leila de Lima, the Court also nullified specific 2026 budget provisions and struck down the "Support to Foreign-Assisted Projects or Invalidation of the SAGIP" lump-sum mechanism used for hidden infrastructure insertions.
The court, to prevent state disruption, invoked the doctrine of operative fact to protect past project implementations. However, this legal immunity was explicitly withheld from the authors, proponents, and implementors of the unconstitutional padding, leaving them open to civil, criminal, and administrative liabilities.
A review may be sought by the Solicitor General, but the ruling establishes the executive budget ceiling as an unbendable constitutional maximum.