The 20th Congress’ priority will be the crafting of the national budget for next year, a contentious process considering the branding of the General Appropriations Act (GAA) this year as the worst ever due to pork insertions.
The Department of Budget and Management (DBM) has vowed to block the insertions in the 2026 National Expenditure Program (NEP), or the President’s budget, of P6.793 trillion.
Senator Ping Lacson, who has made it his crusade to scrutinize the yearly budget, said the 2025 GAA was essentially mangled through impoundment.
The practice has been disallowed since it was extensively used to realign funds to build up the notorious Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) during the term of the late President Noynoy Aquino. It was a method the SC declared unconstitutional in 2014.
Taking the place of impounded funds were items marked “Fisaro,” or for issuance of Special Allotment Release Order (Saro), which took the place of “FLR,” or for later release.
The 2025 budget was abused, and even President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., before vetoing some items, commented that he couldn’t recognize the National Expenditure Fund, which the Executive proposed in the General Appropriations Bill, according to Lacson.
The 2025 budget teemed with insertions, which were lump sum funds reminiscent of the Priority Development Assistance Fund that the Supreme Court had declared unconstitutional.
“It’s just that they managed to go around the Supreme Court ruling declaring the pork barrel system unconstitutional,” Lacson lamented.
It got worse. Lacson said that when it was still considered constitutional, the pork barrel was limited to around P200 million for each senator and P70 million for a House member, “although some were still able to sneak in extra funds.”
The insertions were then in the millions of pesos; now they are in the billions, he said.
He expects the deliberations on the 2026 budget to center on the insertions that have been growing through the years, primarily the allocations for flood control that have become a favored conduit for lump sums.
“We reviewed data from 2011, that’s 15 years. What we observed in the pattern is that in 2011, the flood control programs under the DPWH (Department of Public Works and Highways) began at P11 billion,” Lacson said.
He said that over 15 years, the total expenditure for flood control amounted to P1,907,880,000,000 — that’s P1.9 trillion.
It meant that the projects averaged P127 billion per year, or millions of pesos spent daily to fight flooding.
A mid-size cutter suction dredger — equipment that dredges and clears waterways of silt and debris — costs $1.5 million to $8 million, or about P285 million.
“If we bought one dredging machine per day, there would be one machine every day for 11 years. If the budget is this large, then by this time we shouldn’t have flooding anymore,” Lacson stressed.
Instead, the piecemeal approach to controlling floods is ineffective.
“Even if one mayor is doing a good job, if the neighboring town is flooded, the water will still flow into his area,” the senator explained, emphasizing the need for an integrated plan.
DPWH Secretary Manuel Bonoan admitted there were 5,000 flood control projects in 2024, but he didn’t know where most of them were located.
The many creative methods that legislators come up with to satisfy their craving for pork will manifest in the 2026 budget and the amounts will be bigger than before.
Most of the watchmen are themselves beneficiaries of the pork barrel system. The insertions are an inside job.