It ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings

For years now, we have written — perhaps too often — about the extraordinary plunder of public money involving politicians, public works engineers and officials, and their collaborating private contractors. What distinguishes the current moment is not the novelty of corruption but its scale, persistence and institutional embeddedness. The evidence has become both abundant and disturbingly familiar: ghost projects, substandard construction, unfinished infrastructure and flood-control works located in vastly different geographic and hydrological contexts yet priced almost identically — as if designed, costed and implemented by the same template, if not by the same favored contractors sourcing materials from a single supplier.

These are not isolated lapses. Over time, corruption and weak governance in the Philippines have evolved into systemic, durable features of the political economy. If the recent flood control scandals have accomplished anything, it is to strip away any remaining illusion that corruption is confined to the margins. Based on hearings conducted by the House of Representatives, the Senate and the Independent Commission for Infrastructure, corruption appears to have penetrated multiple layers of governance — political, bureaucratic and contractual. The problem is no longer about a few bad actors; it is about institutional failure.

Against this backdrop, one might reasonably expect that the government would respond by reforming the budget process itself, the primary instrument through which public priorities are translated into concrete programs and projects. One would expect a recalibration toward discipline, transparency and performance.

Yet the ongoing deliberations on the 2026 national budget suggest that such expectations remain, at best, premature.

The repeated involvement of even high-ranking elected officials in corruption cases underscores a deeper governance breakdown. The immediate determinants are well known and well documented: political corruption, weak legislative and administrative oversight, and entrenched collusion among politicians, public works officials and preferred contractors. Together, these conditions produce what amounts to syndicated crime against the Filipino people. This is not merely a failure of compliance or ethics; it is a structural pathology. And as with any systemic disease, superficial remedies — procedural transparency without enforcement, hearings without consequences — are unlikely to suffice.

It is therefore difficult to be optimistic about the prospects of a genuinely performance-based 2026 budget — one that is consistent with constitutional mandates and existing laws governing public health, education, climate resilience and other critical social infrastructure. The budget process, in theory, should be a forum for aligning public spending with national priorities, evidence of effectiveness, and fiscal constraints. In practice, civil society participation remains minimal, largely confined to brief interventions during public hearings of the two chambers. Such limited engagement does little to meaningfully influence outcomes or impose accountability. With weak external scrutiny, the government retains wide latitude to pursue discretionary priorities while invoking reformist language.

Some observers initially took heart from the political backlash generated by the flood-control scandals. Congress appeared, at least symbolically, to respond to public pressure by opening the bicameral conference committee deliberations to public observation as it moved to reconcile the House and Senate versions of the proposed P6.793-trillion national budget for 2026. This was a departure from long-standing practice, where bicameral negotiations, arguably the most consequential stage of the budget process, were conducted largely behind closed doors.

The expectation was straightforward: greater transparency would translate into better outcomes. With public scrutiny, the thinking went, legislators would be compelled to justify allocations more rigorously, align projects with strategic needs, and abandon questionable insertions. The flood-control scandal, after all, pointed unmistakably to the need for a result-oriented budget — one that links funding to measurable outcomes, institutional capacity, and demonstrable public value.

Yet transparency alone has proven insufficient. Old incentives remain firmly in place.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the budget of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH). Despite revised construction material pricing and the absence of more convincing cost justifications, there has been persistent resistance among some legislators to substantially reduce DPWH allocations. Recent media reports indicate that as many as 8,499 proposed projects worth approximately P144 billion remain classified as “risky and problematic.” According to assessments by the People’s Budget Coalition (PBC), there is credible evidence of overpricing and the recycling of projects that have already appeared in previous General Appropriations Acts.

The details are troubling. The PBC reports that 2,346 projects have appeared repeatedly in the budgets from 2020 to 2025; that 1,374 out of 3,677 highway segments are characterized by unusually high costs; and that a large proportion of farm-to-market roads and multipurpose halls are priced in conspicuously round numbers, often a red flag for weak or arbitrary costing. These patterns point not to technical oversight but to systematic manipulation of the project pipeline.

More broadly, the House and the Executive have continued to resist significant expenditure cuts proposed by the Senate. This inter-branch tug-of-war is not new. What is new is that the process now unfolds before a watching public whose interests should be central, not peripheral, to budgetary decision-making. Public observation, however, has not altered the fundamental bargaining dynamics that shape final allocations.

Transparency has likewise failed to meaningfully restrain the continued expansion of unprogrammed appropriations. Originally conceived as a contingency mechanism, a fiscal reserve to be tapped when revenues exceed targets or unforeseen emergencies arise, unprogrammed appropriations have increasingly functioned as a parallel budget. Over time, they have become a convenient vehicle for backdoor insertions of nonstrategic, politically expedient projects. In effect, they operate as a modernized form of pork barrel, one that is less visible but no less consequential.

For 2026, unprogrammed appropriations remain firmly embedded in the budget, carrying enormous allocations and retaining the same opacity that has long made them vulnerable to misuse. The Department of Budget and Management initially proposed almost P250 billion for unprogrammed appropriations — funds that have historically financed many of the anomalous flood-control and infrastructure projects now under scrutiny. If recent scandals have failed to prompt a fundamental rethinking of unprogrammed appropriations, it raises serious questions about the political will for reform.

The growth trajectory of unprogrammed appropriations is, by any measure, alarming. Under the current administration, they reached P807.2 billion in 2023 — more than three times the P251.6 billion recorded in 2022. Although allocations declined to P731.4 billion in 2024 and P531.7 billion this year, these figures remain extraordinarily high. Only those deeply embedded within Congress and the Executive know how much of these funds remain exposed to discretionary manipulation, despite efforts by some legislators to trim allocations for specific programs.

Budget officials acknowledge that unprogrammed appropriations were introduced four decades ago to address genuine contingencies. What has changed is not the formal justification but the function. They have effectively been institutionalized as standby pork, available for deployment in ways that undermine planning discipline, weaken fiscal credibility, and entrench patronage politics. This transformation reflects not a technical flaw but a political choice.

Equally concerning is the persistence of so-called “allocables” and targeted programs. Budget watchdogs estimate that hundreds of billions of pesos in discretionary or patronage-linked allocations remain embedded in the 2026 budget. These include medical assistance funds, livelihood programs and local government support funds that, while socially framed, often operate outside coherent sectoral strategies or performance frameworks. When allocations behave like pork, are distributed like pork, and are defended like pork, semantic distinctions offer little comfort. Confidential and intelligence funds, predictably, remain largely insulated from meaningful scrutiny.

It is in this context that some legislators — most notably Senator Panfilo Lacson — have argued that a reenacted budget may be preferable to rushing the passage of a potentially “graft-ridden” spending plan. His concerns, particularly regarding farm-to-market road projects involving billions of pesos without adequate justification, may involve smaller sums than major flood-control projects. But the underlying principle is the same: a budget process that tolerates weak justification in one sector weakens credibility across all sectors.

Civil society would therefore do well to temper any premature celebration of procedural openness. Opening the bicameral conference to public view is not, by itself, a guarantee of reform. Transparency is a necessary condition for accountability, but it is not a sufficient one. Without changes in incentives, enforcement and institutional design, transparency risks becoming performative — a ritual of openness that leaves underlying practices intact.

The flood-control scandals were explosive precisely because they revealed how deeply corruption is woven into the fabric of public investment management. Whether these revelations will translate into durable reform remains an open question. Congress has demonstrated, time and again, its capacity to operate in unorthodox — and often troubling — ways.

Indeed, when it comes to the national budget, it ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings.