Consequences

The Supreme Court ruled as unconstitutional the most controversial elements of the 2024, 2025 and 2026 national budgets.

The ruling was almost expected. Congress deviously toyed with the constitutional parameters. The legislators skirted around the constitutional bar on appropriating sums larger than what the executive branch proposed by bloating this anomaly called “unprogrammed allocations.” They tried to pull the wool over our eyes.

“Deviously” is well considered. Money was taken from education, health and foreign-assisted projects by simply moving it to the “unprogrammed” column. Then district-level projects were inserted into the “programmed” column.

These were not small amounts. In the 2024 GAA, the bicameral conference committee bloated unprogrammed allocations by P449.5 billion. In the 2025 GAA, Congress unconstitutionally increased appropriation for the Special Road Fund by P17.992 billion.

The Court struck down the cynically named “Strengthening Assistance for Government Infrastructure and Social Programs” (SAGIP) in both the 2024 and 2025 GAAs. The Court saw this as a prohibited lump sum appropriation. It gave legislative authority to the executive branch by giving it unchecked post-enactment discretion in identifying projects and allocating funds for them.

The President, who signs the budget into law, could not have missed the crime being perpetrated here. When the proposed 2025 budget became the subject of controversy because of blanks in the bicameral committee’s working documents, President Marcos Jr. claimed he had read the 4000-page budget document from cover-to-cover. Few people believe that, given Marcos Jr.’s unremarkable work ethic.

For three years running, the nation has been operating under seriously flawed budget allocations. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of billions were lost to corruption because of the built-in flaws in the GAA. The executive branch, because it received hundreds of billions by way of an opaque pork barrel, had a glaring conflict of interest in signing the flawed budgets into law.

What consequences will the Supreme Court ruling have on the money misspent and lost the past three years – and on the misallocations written into the House version of the 2027 budget? Who will be held accountable for the scandalously undocumented bicameral committee sessions that sealed the criminal insertions into place?

The Court ruling, with all its grave implications, comes in the nick of time. We have only a few weeks left to reconfigure the 2027 budget and take out the pork inserted by the congressmen.

For three years, we have allowed the budget process to become a racket. All the insertions inflated the deficit that forces us deeper into debt.

The national debt was about P12 trillion when Marcos Jr. became president. It could be double that by the time his term ends.

Embarrassment

No one seems to be minding the store in the wake of the scandalous 2027 budget document that emanated from the House of Representatives. Everyone seems engrossed with this silly controversy concerning the Chinese ambassador.

Consider the funny sequence here. The ambassador was thrown a question during a forum. He gave a safely qualified answer. Our politicians – at least those angling to build a “nationalist” constituency for themselves – cherry picked one sentence. The sentence is repeated out of context. A political circus ensues with every mediocrity in sight calling for the ambassador to be expelled.

The rest of the region is aghast at the depths of stupidity Filipino politics have descended into. Our political leaders are driving the nation to perdition for a moment of imagined glory at the rostrum of jingoism.

It was bad enough that the Philippines has been completely out of tune with the ASEAN, especially in this year when we chair the regional body. We have been stubbornly pursuing an infantile confrontational approach while everyone else is thinking a century ahead. The poorer our economy turns, the more hysterical our foreign policy becomes. We have become a living specimen of what the old Greek philosophers warned about those the gods wish to destroy.

This circus would not be happening if we had a President with a little more gravitas. Instead, we see a squad of half-literate senators trying to dictate the country’s foreign policy. We have some social media-crazed Coast Guard officers usurping the role of our DFA. We have the LP-Akbayan axis going to town with their all-consuming sinophobia.

Our politicians have morphed into the persona of huffing and puffing fraternity goons aching to rumble. Amidst all their unworthy noise, they have surrendered all tactical advantages to Beijing. China, with its cadre of “wolf warrior” diplomats, now have a pretext to lean on us harder.

Beijing dared us to expel her ambassador. We could not. We know the agitation was contrived by attention-seeking politicians. We know how heavy China’s hand could get when they decide to retaliate in kind.

Our tourism is dying because we lost our just share of the millions of Chinese tourists going abroad. The flow of Chinese investments is down to a trickle. No new infra projects supported by China have been offered. Our trade deficit is flashing red lights.

More immediately, we are trying to get the region’s leaders to grace the ASEAN summit in Manila next month. After that, the APEC summit will be held in China. We are trying to borrow $1 billion from the AIIB to save our economy.

Samuel Johnson, over two centuries ago, warned: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” He should see our senators now.