The clock is ticking for the Supreme Court (SC) to rule on petitions challenging the distortion of annual national budgets to generate illegal pork barrel funds.
Thirty days after the State of the Nation Address, which falls on the fourth Monday of July, the Marcos administration must submit its proposed budget for next year to Congress.
That means watchdogs seeking to prevent another perverted budget will comb through the National Expenditure Program to identify insertions — projects designed for kickbacks.
The Supreme Court thus needs to settle — prior to the submission of the new budget — the complaints regarding the manipulation of previous budgets in order to establish parameters that would reduce corrupt practices embedded in government projects.
Among the issues the SC is asked to resolve is the nature of Unprogrammed Appropriations (UA) and how far Congress and the executive can stretch it.
Through the ingenuity of some corrupt minds in Congress, the part of the budget reserved for contingent projects funded through excess revenues mutated into a receptacle for pork barrel insertions.
The resourcefulness of the den of thieves was meant to circumvent a 2013 SC decision declaring the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) and similar pork barrel schemes unconstitutional.
No prior ruling defines the UA, unlike the SC decisions on the PDAF and the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP), both of which were pork barrel mechanisms.
In the DAP ruling, the SC specified that revenue collections must exceed original revenue targets before unprogrammed funds may be released, which, during the Supreme Court’s series of oral arguments on the budget’s misuse, was twisted to make room for pet projects of members of Congress.
Despite the government operating under huge budget shortfalls, the Department of Budget and Management declared UA releases due to excess funds.
The Bicameral Conference Committee (Bicam), a body with no independent constitutional mandate to legislate, has effectively become the gatekeeper of the UA. Without the resolution of the pending cases, the pattern of abuse will repeat itself in the 2027 budget deliberations.
The instability doesn’t end there. The 2024 budget listed 51 purposes under the UA, but this was reduced to three after the President vetoed the 2026 budget.
That exposes the absence of principled budgeting and proves that the line between programmed and unprogrammed funds moves depending on who draws it and when — with little legal anchor to hold it in place.
The danger of further delays in the SC ruling may result in misallocated funds that can’t be undone since these would have been disbursed, which was how the operative fact doctrine was applied to projects in the DAP where funds were spent first and declared unconstitutional later.
This left the burden of undoing the damage to the taxpayers. A ruling issued before the GAA goes through the legislative mill will put a clamp on the DBM, the Bicam and Congress in their habit of maintaining a cash factory to fill the luggage of the crooks in government.