Philippines’ project budget allocations spur accusations of pork barrel politics

On Tuesday, Undersecretary Claire Castro, chief of the Presidential Communications Office, called on the budget watchdogs to report to her office any “red flags” they had found in the proposed national budget.

“You are needed so that the president will hear [your concerns],” she said in a November 3 press briefing.

But Adolfo Jose “AJ” Montesa, a co-convenor of the People’s Budget Coalition, said in an interview on Wednesday that no one from the presidential palace had formally contacted his group about the government’s offer, with its members only finding out about it in the news.

This Week in Asia has reached out to Castro about her offer and has not received a reply by publication time.

Among the projects that the People’s Budget Coalition and its partner organisations, BetterGovPh, are questioning is a planned 30 million peso farm-to-market road in the southern Philippine province of Quezon. Its listed coordinates placed it in the Celebes Sea near Indonesia, said public policy expert Kenneth Abante.

The watchdogs had also previously flagged a 7-million-peso building project intended for the southern province of Misamis Oriental in the national budget. When they plotted its listed coordinates, they found the planned project appeared to be in the Sahara Desert.

The House of Representatives later corrected the error when it modified the president’s budget and passed it last month.

However, the critics noted that the House’s version retained another road project proposed by the president, this time on the central Philippine island of Negros, with GPS coordinates placing it in Nigeria.

While incorrect coordinates do not necessarily mean the projects themselves are fictitious, the watchdogs argue that such discrepancies highlight weaknesses in the scrutiny of proposed public spending.

Last month, the People’s Budget Coalition and BetterGovPh introduced what they described as the first-ever public tracker of lawmakers’ budget insertions, allowing users to examine changes made to the proposed national budget.

The groups, comprising mostly young volunteer professionals from the private sector, have grown increasingly alarmed by what they see as a lack of accountability and transparency in the budget preparation process.

Montesa accused House appropriations committee chair Mikaela Suansing of failing to deliver on promises of greater transparency, saying civil society groups had been given just three minutes each to present their concerns at a recent consultation that Suansing did not attend.

He also questioned the transparency of an October 1 budget subcommittee hearing, saying journalists were excluded from a four-hour closed-door session before the proceedings were live-streamed.

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“I noticed it felt very rehearsed, very scripted,” he said, adding that his “personal reading was that the real meeting happened during the executive session”, which he described as “horse-trading”.

According to the watchdogs’ calculations, a House-approved bill for general appropriations contained an additional 190 billion pesos worth of infrastructure spending that they characterised as “pork” – discretionary allocations that critics say could be used by politicians to cultivate support among voters.

This Week in Asia has reached out to Suansing’s office for comment and has yet to receive a reply.

Several sources said Suansing was on “maternity leave”. She also appeared to have deactivated her official Facebook account and did not list an email address on the House website.

Montesa said the lack of public explanation for the amendments was the watchdogs’ main concern.

“We would have liked to see the rationale for making those decisions. For example, right now, we are flagging the 190 billion pesos worth of insertions in infrastructure. So we would have liked to see how they could have come to those decisions, including the infrastructure projects, which don’t have project documents.”

Zy-Za Nadine Suzara, an independent public budget analyst who previously worked at the Department of Budget and Management, said in a separate interview that the president had also submitted what she considered pork barrel allocations to Congress.

Among them were proposed “allocations to local government units” of 109.1 billion pesos, “local government support fund” at 58.8 billion pesos and “financial assistance to local government units” totalling 37.5 billion pesos.

At a budget hearing on October 22, the president’s sister, Senator Imee Marcos, questioned the additional “no rhyme or reason” allocations, calling them “a lot of aid”. She added: “This is too much politicking.”

The controversy has also prompted an outcry from 36 prominent business groups in the country, including the Makati Business Club, the Federation of Filipino-Chinese Chambers of Commerce & Industry and the Financial Executives Institute of the Philippines.

In a joint statement issued on October 29, they urged Congress to “remove every insertion that lacks technical basis”.

The groups said they found it “deeply troubling” that the additional allocations were reportedly funded in part by cutting 130 billion pesos from foreign-assisted projects, 9.5 billion pesos from calamity funds, 1.76 billion pesos from the EDSA Busway and 4.9 billion pesos from health programmes.

“Cutting them delays the high-impact projects that lower logistics costs and attract investments. Raiding calamity funds in a country that is exposed to disasters is indefensible,” they said.

The groups urged lawmakers to restore the funds that had been removed unless Congress could justify each reduction. They reminded Congress that “a budget free of politically driven insertions” would boost investor confidence and ensure that “every peso builds the infrastructure, schools and health services the nation truly needs”.

Montesa expressed concern about poor budgetary decisions affecting the poor, saying that if they had to show up at the doors of senators and congressmen to get the help they needed, such as for hospitalisation, then “it’s bad. It’s pork.”