Ever since President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. wagged his finger at senators and congressmen and asked, “have you no shame?,” the question was what would both chambers of Congress do. Few things give greater pleasure to presidents than the feeling they are channeling the collective indignation of the nation. It is a feeling made even more delicious when doing so makes good political theater and even better partisan politics. 

Public disgust over inferior or nonexistent flood control projects, anger over the conspicuous consumption of crooked contractor’s kids, was what the President tried to channel, and his finger-pointing was meant to make good theater while punishing allies for failing to deliver a midterm victory to the administration.

The President might have thought his index finger was also a trigger finger but if so, all he did was order a circular firing squad to fire.

Within six weeks of the State of the Nation Address, both the House and Senate were on the defensive despite having mounted investigations to try to pin the blame on crooked contractors in cahoots with corrupt bureaucrats in the executive branch. 

The reason was twofold. 

First, the public knows a thing or two how effective or at least damning investigations are conducted. When they set their mind to it, senators or representatives know how to conduct effective investigations, particularly when it involves people who aren’t legislators. We saw it when the House zeroed in on Vice President Sara Duterte and didn’t see it when the Senate lamely tried the same thing. 

Second, guilty as contractors and bureaucrats in the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) might be, they’re lower in the pecking order than the ones who truly rule the roost during budget season: that is, representatives and senators themselves. 

Limits of hiding and grandstanding

So how do you go about it when legislators themselves need to be investigated? Some tried to disappear (where in the world is Representative Zaldy Co?), others tried to make noise while pointing fingers at others, and others tried to absolve each other. (Having asked if any senators were involved in fishy flood projects, only to be told by Curlee Discaya that there were none, Rodante Marcoleta turned to his fellow senator Jinggoy Estrada and said, “You’re safe.”)

The limits of hiding and grandstanding were revealed when party list Representative Jose Manuel Diokno got a contractor, Lawrence Lubiano, to confirm making a multimillion peso campaign donation to Francis Escudero. There’s the inconvenient fact that the law forbids people who have government contracts to make donations to legislators who enact the national budget. Another inconvenient fact is that the admission made Escudero damaged goods and a politically-damaged leader is a weak leader who is too weak to deliver on his promises.

What promises might those be? 

Who gets a say in who gets what, in the national budget, ultimately depends on the say-so of the three leaders: the Speaker, the Senate President, and the President. The first two decide how their members divide the pie; whether they actually get a piece depends on the President who issues the checks.

Let’s review the eyebrow-raising numbers involved.

The President proposes a budget, grandly called the National Expenditure Program or NEP. The sum total of this represents a ceiling Congress can’t exceeed. Once the President submits his NEP to the House, it becomes the General Appropriations Bill or GAB, which the House then the Senate picks apart and debates, with the version each chamber passes resolved in the Bicameral Conference Committee. Once Congress approves a final GAB, this is submitted to the President for signature or veto; when he signs it, it becomes law: The General Appropriations Act or GAA.

If you consult those familiar with the bloated budgets over the past three years, 65% of the P3T+ DPWH budget went to pork or what’s called “small infrastructure,” the here, there, and everywhere little schemes that have no strategic aim or plan behind them other than local political benefit. You can divide these into two broad types of projects: 22%, or P675B for flood control, and 43%, or P1.3T+ went to local roads, local bridges and multi-purpose halls. Some claiming to have done the math say with confidence they can identify the senate’s share: P142.7B for infrastructure in 2025 alone.

All this dicing and splicing, all the larding, was substantial: P219B in ‘23, P449B in ‘24 and P373B in ’25 based on the bicameral reports ratified by each chamber, representing the amounts cut from items of appropriation in the GAB during the Bicam. To give you an idea, P296B was slashed from the Department of Transportation over the same three year period to fund pork projects.

The House has decided to go down fighting on the principle that if they can’t have it, nobody can. Last week the House leadership said they wanted to return the proposed budget to the Palace and not have anything to do with budget deliberations. Deputy Speaker Ronaldo Puno said, “we do not know how to deal with it.” (They eventually withdrew that decision.)

The Palace sent two Cabinet members, Amenah Pangandaman of Budget and Management and Vince Dizon of Public Works and Highways, and an agreement was made: DPWH would return in ten days with a list of errata to correct the “irregularities” identified in Congress and anything that might come up in the meantime. This was formalized on September 5, when the House Committee on Appropriations approved a motion by party list Representative Leila de Lima for DBM and DPWH to submit an errata to the proposed 2026 budget.

The two secretaries have their work cut out for them. Either they will drop from exhaustion from all the digging, or things will get so bogged down, no new budget can be passed and thus, the bloated 2025 budget will end up reenacted. This means no one knows if the 2026 budget will ever get off the ground — which makes any promises made by either the Speaker or the Senate President to legislators to keep their jobs are worthless.

Fast forward to Monday morning, September 8, which began with a rumor: the Senate President was going to be ousted. The rumor soon had a companion: the Speaker was going to be ousted, too. By early afternoon rumor became fact when, shortly before session started, Vicente Sotto III confirmed he would be the new Senate president with 15 votes confirmed. Less than an hour into the session, Sotto was presiding and Panfilo Lacson was the new Senate President Pro Tempore, too — a symbolic appointment, considering his anti-pork advocacy.

In politics there are blunders worse than crimes, such as being both stupid and lazy in the fine art of budget-making. Francis Escudero’s the first casualty of this; the next could possibly be Ferdinand Martin Romualdez.