HE said — SHE said

“The budget cut is coming in a year when the Universal Health Care is expected to go full blast. Sen. Christopher Lawrence “Bong” Go’s Malasakit Centers are also expected to be hurt by this cut.

Now matter how, our congressmen are really terrible at lying. Especially when it involves money. And lots of it.

Lawmakers — yes, the ones we chose to represent us in the House — could not seem to live without pork.

That’s pork barrel for the uninitiated, the fund that greases their lips and oils their palms.

Speaker Alan Peter Cayetano once boldly claimed that pork barrel would be inexistent in the proposed 2020 national budget. He knelt, bowed his head down and prayed there won’t be, yet at the end he was still guided towards the awaited distribution of the moolah. Or he may have guided his peers to it, himself.

No amount of denial would and could cover pork. It will smell, worse than the African swine flu that has afflicted our swine industry.

And there is nothing sweet about it. Pork is the reason why most of these congressmen are dying and killing and are willing to murder for each of the 200 or so House seats. They come with rewards.

The great prizes will come, but only after the quite stormy battle for the speakership was won by Cayetano’s “term sharing” formula.

The happy days are back. But these are just not in terms of the P100 million per each congressman that Albay Rep. Joey Salceda has happily announced.

Sen. Panfilo Lacson says each deputy speaker — and there are more of them now as Cayetano had wanted — will be receiving an additional allocation of P1.5 billion.

Lacson sees P33 million more in pork for them, on top of P700 million for each congressman that is P600 million more than Salceda had claimed.

That’s P54 billion in pork. Now, who would want Cayetano’s term to end?

Cayetano vowed to served just 15 months before he transfers the House leadership to Marinduque Rep. Lord Allan Velasco. That is if Cayetano would pursue his presidential ambition.

Velasco would need to watch Cayetano closely, though. He should learn the tricks he does to make his fellow congressmen happy, or he would not stand a chance of taking the top House seat for long. If he does.

To make these happen, Cayetano needed the House to juggle the funds meant for the government agencies. They call this realignment, but it sounds ugly in whatever name it’s christened with.

Reeling from the cuts is government’s health service.

The Department of Health, one of the government’s most important agencies, will just receive P88 billion for next year. It is deprived of P10 billion that helped fund its programs this year.

The budget cut is coming in a year when the Universal Health Care is expected to go full blast. Sen. Christopher Lawrence “Bong” Go’s Malasakit Centers are also expected to be hurt by this cut.

The lawmaker also noted that the House wants to increase the Department of Energy’s funding for electrification and the Philippine’s Sports Commission for the 2020 Para Games and the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

But first come their pockets, and Lacson said he expects his fellow senators to question them when they get their chance.

A friend of mine sent me an article recently that carried this sentence: “A person’s vocation is born from a simple discovery that brings with it many consequences: the conviction that the meaning, the truth of our life is not found in living for ourselves, for our own concerns, but for the others.”

It was an article on the vocation of marriage, but it struck me as something that holds true for any aspect of our lives.

And since I was thinking about the perennial pork barrel problems we have in this country for this column today, I then thought about how so many of our leaders seem to have lost sight of the vocation to which their position holds them.

In the past, nobody paid much attention to the P60-million per congressman and P200-million per senator discretionary funds our lawmakers were getting. These funds were for their constituents, geared toward hard and soft projects their communities needed.

Over the years, however, when these seemingly pork-rich communities began to show the vestiges of rot and neglect, people started wondering what in the world their leaders were doing.

As always, when the topic is money, the cold facts showed how much — just absolutely how much — had been done, though not in any way toward the people’s true welfare.

Pork became a bad word when the beans were spilled about the many ways it could be misused.

It sizzled into a controversy that has gone on for years, following the detention of a number of personalities that figured in the biggest pork barrel scandal of all.

Janet Napoles remains in detention, but one of the senators who figured in the case is now back in the Senate, while another two who ran for position in the last elections lost their bid.

It’s funny though that Napoles’ name was wrongly included in a list of supposed convicts released under the controversial Good Conduct Time Allowance law.

Why? Because that was another sign of extreme carelessness — which should scare us all if we are to think of how our government agencies are being run!

A “blunder,” her lawyer may have dismissed the wrongful inclusion, but such blunders are unacceptable in cases like crime and plunder.

Everyone in government, from top to bottom, should exercise care in fulfilling their duties because little mistakes and small transgressions build up rapidly into major problems.

Such is how multimillions are lost each year — gone into nonexistent of haphazardly done projects, or awarded to questionable entities.

Such is how Filipinos are robbed, and robbed thoroughly, even as we smile and strive and struggle to keep sane in our daily lives, always hoping for the best and praying things don’t worsen.

We cannot afford, as citizens, to be as careless or indifferent either.

If we stop asking questions, like why all the congressmen are allotted P100 million each in the 2020 budget, then we may never know how these funds were disbursed and utilized.

If we stop to wonder if each and every congressman actually receive this budget, then we won’t listen to those who say they and a few others do not get such funds ever.

With pigs dying of a viral disease, it’s high time we did away with something that had caused our system to rot.

The pork barrel had come with different names, and now there is that question anew of whether it had found its way back to the national budget with the said allotment that naysayers believe is a way to keep Congress under Palace strings.

That doubt — that propensity of the public to disbelieve whatever they say — shows without question that the disease remains in the air.

It has fouled up our faith in our leaders, leading us to ask if they are still true to their chosen vocation.