The 2025 national budget was sold for debauchery to the crocodiles of Congress and it seems the administration did nothing to stop it. It was branded the most corrupt budget ever, which is regrettable given the backdrop of majority of Filipinos considering themselves as living a hand-to-mouth existence.
While the budget is failing to contribute meaningfully to eradicating poverty, the sharks in Congress had more than their fill of pork after they sliced up and apportioned the public money that came from the hard-earned incomes of Filipinos.
Statements of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth (SALN), which have become difficult to extract from Congress, revealed multiple leaps in the wealth of legislators in the past three years.
Pork is now being produced wholesale, and in the 2025 budget former House Appropriations Committee head Davao City Rep. Sid Ungab revealed that automatic appropriations in the Special Accounts in the General Fund (SAGF) and the Use of Income in the General Fund (UIGF) were manipulated for the first time in his memory.
These funds are covered by laws specifying their yearly income, which is earmarked for specific expenditures.
“In my 15 years in Congress, starting in 2007 (except for 2016 to 2019 when I was not a congressman), I had never seen automatic appropriations altered,” he said.
The infraction may result in the Supreme Court, which is reviewing a petition against the 2025 General Appropriations Act (GAA), declaring the budget null and void for being unconstitutional, Ungab worried.
Ungab, a banker who knows what he is talking about, said the bicameral conference committee altered 12 items in the SAGF that resulted in 13 special laws being violated.
The allocations for these portions of the budget were increased, which Ungab said was illegal since they were automatically appropriated and sourced from specific collections.
“They altered P12.7 billion in the SAGF, and to the UIGF, particularly the Special Road Fund, they added P17.9 billion,” he noted.
Additions to an automatically appropriated fund also increase the total national appropriations, but under the Constitution Congress cannot pass a budget higher than what the President submitted.
“If the President submitted P6.352 trillion — or P4.2 trillion in new appropriations and P2.1 trillion in automatic appropriations — you cannot go over that. But by adding P12.7 billion to the SAGF, the bicam exceeded the constitutional limit,” he pointed out.
Aside from violating the laws on automatic budget appropriations, Ungab revealed that all agencies, except one, had their allocations under the National Expenditure Program (NEP) added or removed, “so the budget was essentially mangled.”
The 2012 Sin Tax Law, which imposes taxes on cigarettes and alcohol, clearly states that 80 percent of incremental revenue must fund universal healthcare through the Philippine Health Insurance Corp., especially for indigents, senior citizens, and persons with disability (PWD).
The defunding of P74 billion earmarked for PhilHealth’s subsidy effectively killed universal healthcare, according to Ungab.
Senate President Chiz Escudero and, at the time, Senate finance panel head Grace Poe vigorously defended the removal of the subsidy with the excuse that PhilHealth was being penalized for its failures, among them its having P600 billion in reserve funds.
Ungab explained that a zero subsidy means Congress cannot augment it later in the budget year. This also violated both the Constitution and the Sin Tax Law’s earmarking provision.
Both the pimps and the clients of the perverted budget should be made to answer for the violations, and only then can the public — whose money funds the yearly GAA — be assured that it will never happen again.