Stranger things play out in House

Some supernatural forces are at work again in the House of Representatives, where budget watchers who took Congress up on its vow to be transparent have been locked out of the deliberations as the 2027 General Appropriations Bill enters its crucial amendment stage.

The ritual of the Budget Amendments Review Subcommittee (BARSc) was familiar to the civil society organizations and the media who were kept out on the pretext that the proceedings were livestreamed anyway.

The BARSc, under the House Committee on Appropriations, reviews proposed budget amendments and realignments, the stage where legislators’ pet projects are inserted.

A small appropriations panel was previously suspected of being the portal for the huge pork insertions in previous budgets, functions the BARSc has taken over.

The Executive first draws up the budget bill, then the House takes it up, and the amendments are where the real decisions are made because that is where money is moved from one item to another.

The amendments in the BARSc look small on paper, but it decides which district gets a road, which agency gets a boost, and which gets trimmed.

That is why watchdogs don’t just want to hear the figures read out. They want to see who proposes a change, who objects, and who stays silent.

The way the National Expenditure Program (NEP), or the Executive’s spending proposal, is being amended raises serious questions.

Watchdog groups were told of the schedule around 6 p.m. on 30 September, barely a day before the BARSc meeting, leaving little time to prepare even if they had been allowed in. They asked repeatedly to observe in person, but the request was ignored.

On 1 October, the media were also kept out of the room, with no reason given, and told to follow the livestream.

The meeting was announced to start at 1 p.m. but it began at 5 p.m., after a four-hour “executive session” that kept the public waiting.

The House leadership earlier described the closed-door four-hour interregnum as “organizational,” meant only to settle the schedule and flow. A closed session that long, held on the day itself, is hard to reconcile with that description, since scheduling rarely takes four hours.

Before the cameras, no BARSc member objected, disagreed, or debated any proposal, although the amendments involved billions of pesos.

Members seemed to have copies of the tables of figures and amendments in hand, which suggested the reallocations were settled earlier, during the executive session, and the livestream showed a reading of decisions already made.

Civil society groups do not yet have the official subcommittee report. They encoded the amounts by hand from the broadcast.

The House must release the amendments in a document, not only as a video, which cannot be searched, checked line by line, and compared with last year’s numbers.

Five line items were added under the Department of National Defense, totaling P553,765,000, but the details of the programs, activities, and projects were withheld on grounds of national security.

The subcommittee did not say which items would be cut or reduced to pay for the amendments.

Last year the money came from P255 billion taken out of flood control. This year there is no equivalent source, which is one reason the total is smaller; but it also leaves open the question of where the roughly P116 billion came from.

Nor does the subcommittee provide a geographical breakdown that could reveal movements within infrastructure line items, where political reallocations tend to show up. Without a list of locations, it is impossible to tell which districts benefited — and by how much.

The House promised transparency but shut out the very people it promised to be transparent to. It kept the details to itself and offered a livestream when the public needed a document.

What more do we need to know about this pre-election budget that has been put under a cloud of doubt?