Red carpets were literally taken off from the floors when President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. (PBBM) delivered his fourth State of the Nation Address (SONA) at the Batasan Pambansa in Quezon City last Monday. Lawmakers and guests all walked on the shiny marbled floors of the Batasan, fully waxed and well-polished on SONA day. Except for the wall-to-wall carpet of the Batasan session hall, PBBM walked the entire length of the naked floors of the connecting halls going to the podium for his SONA.
Fashionably dressed men and women usually go through the ramp-like walk on the red carpet at the traditional joint opening session of the Senate and the House of Representatives each SONA year. But as previously announced, the respective leadership of the 20th Congress banned the roll out of the red carpets. This was supposedly in deference to the situation of many Filipinos still reeling from the severe disaster incidents the past two weeks prior to the SONA.
Three successive typhoons, Crising, Dante and Emong, combined with the habagat or monsoon rains, caused 34 reported deaths due to severe flooding and landslides in Metro Manila and other parts of the country. Many people wallowing in poverty suffered more economic dislocations with the typhoon damage to their poor houses and livelihoods. Daily wage earners lost much needed revenues with suspension of work and offices for several days.
It did not stop though PBBM from reciting in his SONA statistics and his administration’s accomplishment report.
Many of the intervention measures that PBBM announced at the SONA included more freebies for the remaining three years of his term. From “zero” hospital billing to “free” internet supposedly in all public schools nationwide, all the people in the audience heartily applauded every piece of feel-good announcement of PBBM.
But all these measures are in the form of “ayuda,” or state subsidies, the bulk of which come from taxpayers’ money. Yes, these ayuda can be drawn from existing non-tax revenues such as from state-run casinos, lotto games and internet online gaming, among other sources of public funds. And there are foreign debts and domestic loans, including official development assistance (ODAs), that can likewise be tapped.
So how can the Marcos administration bankroll all of these freebies or ayuda for us Filipinos?
Methinks PBBM counts on more ayuda funds coming largely from the hits, digs, tirades and warnings he fired against the corrupt and grafters in the government. These are the veritable sources of multibillion-peso revenues otherwise lost to graft and corruption. Presidential marching orders to all concerned officials in the national government were issued supposedly to plug these “leakages” in the government coffers.
First on the hit list, or should it be called the sh*t list, are the flood control projects that were “inserted” in the President’s 2025 National Expenditure Program (NEP). Offhand, PBBM tasked the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) to conduct an inventory and performance audit of all flood control projects that were included in the 2025 General Appropriations Act (GAA) that he signed into law last year.
And speaking of the budget, PBBM sternly warned those who might attempt anew to mangle his new NEP as contained in the coming 2026 GAA bill. The Chief Executive was obviously still smarting from his experience in the P6.326-trillion budget this year.
“So that this will not happen again. First, the DPWH will immediately submit to me a list of all flood control projects from every region that were started or completed in the last three years,” PBBM said. Also, he ordered the Regional Project Monitoring Committee to examine this list of projects. “And give a report on those that have been failures, those that were not finished and those that are alleged to be ghost projects,” he added. And third, he vowed to publish this list.
As mandated in our country’s 1987 Constitution, the President has one month after his SONA to submit the proposed GAA bill. Thus, it is precisely called the “President’s Budget.” For the 2026 GAA, PBBM approved the submission to Congress of a P6.793-trillion budget. In a veiled threat, PBBM expressed in his SONA the readiness of the government to operate on a re-enacted budget law should congressional “insertions” again get into the GAA.
PBBM underscored this while listeners, who included Senate President Francis Escudero and Speaker Martin Romualdez ,were seated behind him at the rostrum. Both were re-elected to their respective posts in the 20th Congress and were the same ones who headed the 19th Congress which approved the “badly mangled” 2025 GAA.
It was so mangled that several petitions were filed before the Supreme Court (SC). One of which questioned the “zero” budget for the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (PhilHealth) in violation of the Universal Health Care Law. But without adverting to this PhilHealth brouhaha, PBBM disclosed in his SONA having ordered the Department of Health (DOH) to strictly implement “zero billing” in all of its 87 government hospitals nationwide.
It took PBBM one hour and 15 minutes to deliver his SONA. Although most parts of the SONA was in English, PBBM especially used Tagalog to express in no uncertain terms his extreme displeasure before leaders and members of the previous 19th Congress. Many, in fact, have been his former colleagues in Congresses past. And many of them got re-elected to the 20th Congress.
Before this very audience of senators and House members, PBBM directed his most earnest appeals to shed their thick skins. Bato-bato sa langit, tamaan wag magalit, as one popular Filipino idiom goes. And all of them in the SONA audience of men and women seated inside the session hall stood up to applaud PBBM.
Alas, the state of the nation addressing the problems of the country depends on the President’s grip to ensure efficient use of available resources. Lest public funds get scarcer and scarcer due to the twin evils of graft and corruption.