Some senators and congressmen have expressed willingness to open to the public the budget deliberations during the bicameral conference.
The bicam in the 19th Congress gained notoriety for acting as the top-secret third chamber. The members of that bicam should face criminal charges and be permanently barred from holding public office. But instead some of the thieves or their relatives even won election last May.
So far, only a handful of lawmakers have expressed readiness to open the bicam deliberations to the public. But maybe this is because it’s early days yet and the 20th Congress has just started.
Also, there could be enough support for it in the House of Representatives because the first congressman to back the proposal was Martin Romualdez, who seems assured of keeping his post as Speaker (as of yesterday anyway; loyalties in the HOR can shift overnight).
Chiz Escudero, perhaps because the contest for the Senate leadership is tighter, and also because of the impeachment case, has been more cautious in his recent public pronouncements.
He and his colleagues, after all, happily ratified (like the HOR) all those controversial provisions in the “most corrupt budget ever,” the 2025 General Appropriations Act. The GAA was enacted, it must also be stressed, by President Marcos, with token vetoes.
This budgeting atrocity is sure to be repeated in the 20th Congress if the public looks away from the process even for a minute. Even those statements of support for opening the bicam to the public may need nuancing. The bicam has been opened to the media in the past – but only at the start. And then all the budgeting sleight of hand went on as usual behind closed doors.
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Former finance undersecretary Cielo Magno, who is back as an economics professor in her alma mater the University of the Philippines, has become a vocal advocate for transparency in the budget process, and in promoting understanding of taxation among the masses.
She says that bicameral conferences on all laws, and not just the proposed GAA, must be opened to the public, since anomalous last-minute insertions favoring private companies, sectors and influence-peddling groups also happen in such bicams.
Magno also proposes that minutes of congressional deliberations be recorded and kept for public access. She is proposing this record keeping, which is done in the judiciary, for all pieces of legislation.
Senators will reportedly be moving in 2027 to that monument to misplaced spending priorities and profligacy with public funds, the new Senate building, with its enormous size reflecting the mansions where most lawmakers live. There’s enough room in that behemoth for 10 stenographers per senator to keep a record of the minutes of deliberations.
Sen. Panfilo Lacson, for his part, is proposing that representatives of civil society be allowed to sit as observers in the budget bicam.
To help promote public understanding of taxation and where all the consumption taxes collected from even the poorest of the poor go, Magno has recorded a Filipino song on the issue.
While crunching numbers in college, Magno was a member of the UP Concert Chorus. She plays the piano and saxophone.
Facing “Storycon” on One News last Monday, she played portions of a recording of her rap song, co-written with musician Jake Regala. The title: “Tax ng Ina Mo.” She dropped the music video, which she produced herself, hours later on YouTube and FB; you can also check it out on Spotify.
The song title has been a rallying cry in mass protests staged against the shameless mangling by the 19th Congress of the national expenditure program (NEP) that was painstakingly prepared by the Development Budget Coordination Committee.
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Apart from waiting for the bicam to be opened to the public, people must closely watch the 20th Congress for attempts to repeat these provisions in the 2025 GAA:
• Giving the Department of Public Works and Highways a bigger budget than the entire education sector. (What is the punishment for this unconstitutional act?)
• Including in the “education sector” the budgets for learning institutions that used to be under other departments or sectors, such as the Philippine Military Academy and Philippine National Police Academy.
• Giving the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. zero subsidy, and impounding supposed savings of PhilHealth and all other government-owned and controlled corporations for funneling from the National Treasury to unprogrammed appropriations in the GAA.
• Inserting in the GAA an unconditional dole-out scheme, the Ayuda para sa Kapos ang Kita Program, that wasn’t even in the NEP for 2025, and allotting P26 billion for AKAP, for post-budget earmarking by lawmakers (P21 billion for congressmen, P5 billion for senators).
• Defunding the conditional cash transfer or 4Ps, in which politicians have no say, of a whopping P50 billion.
• Slashing P12 billion from the education sector and P10 billion from defense, among others, while unprogrammed appropriations – the latest incarnation of the congressional pork barrel – grew exponentially from the allocation in 2024.
Why did the 19th Congress commit this institutionalized thievery of people’s money?
For the same reason that the Ampatuan clan thought nothing of executing 58 people simply because someone dared to challenge their political stranglehold on Maguindanao: because they could.
The Maguindanao massacre proceeded as planned, and so did the massacre of the 2025 national budget.
Two things need to be done. One is to penalize the manglers of the 2025 budget, but how to do this is uncertain.
The second is to prevent a repeat of the budgeting sleight of hand. This one can and must be done.