House pork purge starts

The purge of the pork insertions in the 2027 House General Appropriations Bill (HGAB) starts today, as the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) determines which of the 6,271 projects legislators introduced have documents backing them.

Senator JV Ejercito, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, had set a 3 November deadline for the DPWH to submit all the project listings.

“The list covers projects submitted in the HGAB, as well as those submitted directly by the DPWH,” the senator said.

“We will begin the purge as soon as the submissions reach us. In fact, we have hired additional staff to review the projects line by line,” Ejercito revealed.

“We can no longer delay this because we are working on a very tight timeline. We still have the impeachment proceedings, which will resume on 9 November. Then there is the ASEAN (Summit), during which there will be no work,” he explained.

The Palace declared 16 to 18 November special non-working days in the National Capital Region to ease traffic and ensure the safety of summit participants.

US President Donald Trump is confirmed to attend, and the White House said he will arrive in Manila on 16 November.

Floodgate lessons must be learned

“Given what happened with the flood control controversy, we have become stricter. We will require a certificate of implementability, a program of works, development council approval, geotagging, and other supporting documents to clear the proposed projects,” Ejercito said.

“All these must be submitted. If any of these requirements are missing, whether the project came from the DPWH, the House, or even the Senate through subsequent amendments, we will not accept it,” the senator firmly stated.

Ejercito counted eight staff members assigned to review the DPWH projects.

“Senate President [Vicente] Sotto has a similar team. So two groups are now reviewing the DPWH projects submitted to the Senate. This was not done before,” he added.

One of the projects flagged by watchdog groups is the budget for the First District of Ilocos Norte, represented by House Majority Leader Sandro Marcos, which supposedly received a P369-million allocation under the National Expenditure Program (NEP) but which was increased to around P4 billion in the HGAB.

“We do not want to prejudge the matter. We will apply the same standards to all projects, regardless of who proposed them. Each project must have proper documentation and justification,” Ejercito said of the Marcos allocation.

He said the Senate panel is expected to continue receiving help from civil society organizations (CSOs), whose participation he will seek in the Bicameral Conference Committee (Bicam) proceedings.

“Since this involves the Bicam, I will have to consult the leadership of the House of Representatives because, of course, this requires an agreement between the two chambers,” the veteran senator indicated.

“Perhaps we can start by allowing them to attend as observers. If they are given an active role in the Bicam, the proceedings might never end. They know that we already take up their red flags and observations, ask questions about them, and bring them to light,” he added.

Ejercito was firm about no longer tolerating last-minute pork barrel insertions during the Bicam, which had become notorious since the start of the Marcos administration for changes that allowed huge pork barrel allocations.

Watchdog People’s Budget Coalition’s parallel review found nearly P1 trillion in red flags or potential pork barrel allocations: P210 billion in “soft pork” in the form of patronage-driven ayuda, P695 billion in “hard pork” or politicized infrastructure, and P112 billion in “shadow pork” or unprogrammed appropriations.

A Senate review, meanwhile, found that the number of DPWH projects grew from 11,420 in the NEP to 16,244 in the House version of the 2027 budget.

Of the 16,244, Ejercito said 1,418, or 8.73 percent, have physical and digital documentation, while the rest have no supporting documents.

House leaders have defended their version of the budget, describing the contested items as “amendments” rather than insertions and blaming “typographical errors” in the voluminous documents.

The P190 billion in budget realignments by the House is not confined to multi-purpose buildings. It includes farm-to-market roads (FMR) under the Department of Agriculture, with coordinates allegedly located at sea.

For FMR alone, the coalition said the House inserted 355 entirely new projects worth nearly P6 billion that were “completely absent” from the NEP and the DA’s budget proposal.

The flagged programs include a P23-million FMR supposedly located in Nueva Ecija, but whose coordinates are in the ocean near Benham Rise.

Another FMR worth P30 million was allegedly found in the Celebes Sea near Indonesia, even though the line item showed the project was intended for Cebu.

A P55 million FMR purportedly pointed to an area near Brunei, rather than the intended project location in Quezon.

Multipurpose gyms abound

The allocation for proposed multi-purpose buildings scattered across the country ballooned to P83.7 billion after the House of Representatives augmented the HGAB, with most of these projects lacking publicly available data.

The figure purportedly surpasses allocations for critical sectors like health facilities and classroom construction and is more than double the P41 billion the executive proposed in the NEP.

Zy-za Nadine Suzara, PBC co-convenor, said the multi-purpose buildings were part of the 7,000 infrastructure projects worth P190 billion that House lawmakers inserted in the 2027 budget, but which lacked published supporting documents.

She alleged that of the 6,000 multipurpose hall projects added to the DPWH budget, only 2,000 could be verified using currently available public data.

The coalition has raised an alarm over the need and prioritization of these multipurpose buildings, claiming that while these projects could serve as evacuation centers during typhoons, the lack of public documents makes it impossible for taxpayers to verify whether they are indeed situated in disaster-prone areas.

“We called this out because there were no published supporting documents for the 7,000 insertions that are worth P190 billion. This is how the flood control scandal started,” Suzara said in a radio interview.