Pork express rolls out

The fear of budget watchdogs that the House would backslide into opacity became a reality last Monday during floor deliberations when lawmakers appeared to move the goalposts to bury the debate over the chamber’s own spending plan.

A motion by Navotas Rep. Toby Tiangco to reopen the deliberations on Congress’ own P27.89-billion budget for 2027 was ruled out of order on what appeared to be a thin procedural justification.

The slapdown was troubling not simply because of the amount involved but because it suggested something about the budget process as a whole.

If Congress is unwilling to open its own spending plan to scrutiny, what confidence can the public have that the rest of the P7.2-trillion national budget is being subjected to the examination, transparency and accountability it deserves?

The House terminated interpellations on 17 September, a date moved forward without warning from the original 24 September. Back from an official trip abroad, Tiangco found the debate closed and the budget passed.

Every year, the same maneuver repeats: a schedule shifts, a vote is rushed, and by the time anyone notices, the money has been allocated.

The maneuver finds urgency with the 2027 General Appropriations Act (GAA), which is not an ordinary budget but is the last full appropriation Congress will pass before the 2028 presidential and national elections.

With the strong inclination to craft a pork barrel-packed proposal, the House’s own budget should have faced the most scrutiny.

Congress is the only government body that both approves and disburses its own funds. If any budget in the GAA warranted line-by-line interpellation, it was this one.

Instead, it was wrapped up in under 10 minutes, with no questions and no objections, after the schedule was moved to a date when those most likely to ask them were not around.

House Deputy Speaker Janette Garin insisted the shift was purely administrative, a consequence of deferred deliberations for other agencies.

Filipinos have been victims of this modus operandi by their elected officials before. The Supreme Court struck down the Priority Development Assistance Fund in 2013 to halt unchecked, undisclosed lump-sum discretion in the hands of legislators.

It barred the creation of any pork barrel, which invites abuse of the public purse.

The lesson was relearned with the flood control scandal, where hundreds of billions of pesos in Department of Public Works and Highways allocations were moved from one ghost project to another through budget insertions.

The mechanism was the same one on display on Monday. Change the timetable, shrink the window, and close the debate before anybody in the room objects.

Tiangco, to his credit, did not let the ruling go unchallenged. “More than the rules,” he said, “transparency is important.”

The 2027 national budget will fund the government through the next election. If pork barrel insertions got through in this GAA, the House again succeeded in making sure that the questions came too late to matter.