CATOON BY: AARON PAUL C. CARIL
EDITORIAL
Follow the money
The impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte may command the cameras, but the larger and more enduring verdict on government is being written in the 2027 national budget. At ₱7.2 trillion, the proposed spending plan will decide which classrooms are built, which hospitals are supplied, which farms are protected, and how much debt the next generation must carry. Yet while the public follows every witness and courtroom clash, Congress is moving billions of pesos through a process that deserves equal—if not greater—attention.
The House has already approved the spending bill on second reading after adopting about ₱116 billion in amendments. Some additions carry defensible labels—education, agriculture, social protection, emergency employment—but labels are not safeguards. The public must know who proposed each amendment, where the money will go, what projects it will fund, and what measurable need it answers. A voice vote and a committee assurance are poor substitutes for a complete, searchable trail of every peso moved.
The warning signs are not new. Budgets under the Marcos administration have repeatedly been attacked over swollen unprogrammed appropriations, opaque bicameral changes, alleged blank entries, and funds that appear only after the public hearings are over. Challenges to the 2024, 2025, and 2026 appropriations reached the Supreme Court, including questions over a reported ₱449.5 billion bicameral insertion in the 2024 budget and the use of contingent or standby funds that critics call shadow pork. Even before the Court rules, the pattern has already damaged trust.
Confidential and intelligence funds deepen that distrust. The Office of the President is again seeking billions in expenses that are difficult for ordinary citizens to examine, even as the impeachment trial itself turns on allegations involving the misuse of confidential funds elsewhere in government. Accountability cannot be selective. If secrecy is intolerable when invoked by a political rival, it should not become respectable merely because the same shield is held by an ally or by Malacañang.
Congress must therefore resist using the impeachment spectacle as cover for haste. Senators and representatives should publish the sponsors and beneficiaries of amendments, justify every lump sum, impose strict release conditions on unprogrammed funds, and reject last-minute insertions that escape meaningful debate. The budget is not a ledger for political accommodation. It is the clearest statement of national priorities, and every unexplained transfer is a choice made against some school, clinic, farmer, commuter, or taxpayer.
The nation should watch the impeachment trial, but it must follow the money. Administrations survive scandals; bad appropriations survive administrations. If the 2027 budget is again padded in darkness, altered without authors, or released through loopholes, then the crime will not be mere procedural untidiness. It will be the deliberate conversion of public need into political currency—and every lawmaker who looks away will have signed the receipt.