In expert testimony during oral arguments on the manipulation of the annual national budgets under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., a damning pattern emerged, which is that the congressional Bicameral Conference Committee (Bicam) weaponized the Unprogrammed Appropriations (UA) to create a pork barrel.

The Supreme Court (SC) held consultations on 7 and 21 April on consolidated petitions regarding the 2024, 2025, and 2026 General Appropriations Acts (GAAs). The petitioners and amici curiae identified a recurring, and increasingly brazen, pattern that began in the 2022–2023 budget cycle.

Before Marcos, UAs were strictly understood to be standby funds, to be released only upon certification by the Bureau of the Treasury that excess revenues or new loans were available.

The President’s National Expenditure Program (NEP) for 2024 proposed a UA of P281.98 billion. Both the House and Senate versions of the budget kept it at that — but then behind closed doors, the bicam increased the UA to P731.45 billion, effectively rewriting the national budget, which is the crux of the pending SC petition.

The SC is being asked to declare the P448.5-billion bicam insertion in the 2024 GAA unconstitutional.

The sinister mechanism worked under a two-part structure where the bicam moved programmed or priority appropriations to the UA.

The projects were considered development priorities since they had passed scrutiny by the National Economic and Development Authority, the regional development councils, and the Development Budget Coordination Committee.

Congress moved roughly P303 billion in programmed items — including the Armed Forces of the Philippines modernization, universal tertiary education, personal benefits, pensions, Marawi compensation, fire trucks, and even local government support — to the UA column.

Congressmen’s pet projects were then inserted into the freed “fiscal space.”

The result was that programmed spending shrank on paper, Congress stuffed in new insertions, and the UA column became a parking lot for patronage projects that would be released at the Executive’s convenience via Special Allotment Release Orders (SARO) once the Bureau of the Treasury certified the “excess” funds.

The insertions were the legislative end of the racket, and the allocables/SARO releases were the executive end.

A special provision in the 2024 GAA allowed the Department of Finance to sweep up what then Finance Secretary, now Executive Secretary, Ralph Recto termed as “idle funds.”

The insertions were described by the majority of the invited friends of the court as the new pork barrel, which was a more sophisticated and far larger version of the outlawed Priority Development Assistance Fund.

UP Economics professor Solita Collas-Monsod said that since 2022, Congress has used the UA “to hide lump sum appropriations,” particularly those approved by the bicam.

The SC’s resource persons indicated that the UA had ballooned into a mechanism that weakened congressional oversight, blurred accountability, and perverted prioritization.

Slush funds were thus created, triggered by selective interpretations of “excess funds” that no longer even required meeting the total revenue target.

The SC discussions uncovered a systemic scheme where the Bicam used the UA as a laundering mechanism by strip mining the programmed budget of legitimate priorities and parking them for uncertain funding.

The devious syndicated operation required the complicity of virtually the entire government apparatus.

Congress opened fiscal space in the programmed side for discretionary congressional insertions. At the same time, the Executive controlled the actual release of the funds, deciding through SAROs or allocables when and to whom the UAs should go.

This was nothing less than an annual shakedown by the GAA mafia.