(Part 2)
WHETHER certain items in the national budget are called congressional insertions, pork barrel, or institutional amendments (as the Senators call them), having them there is not the real issue.
The real concern in the national budget is it becoming a tool for corruption. Nothing is wrong or improper with the so-called insertions or amendments unless they were made as means for legislators to personally enrich themselves.
Such is precisely the issue on what the Chairman of the House Committee on Appropriations, Representative Rolando Andaya, Jr., has about what he referred to as the pork barrel of the Department of Budget and Management (DBM).
It appears that DBM “inserted” at least R55 billion to the budget of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) without the latter knowing it. Is it wrong for DBM to do it?
In the government’s system of budgeting, all agency budgets are submitted to DBM for consolidation into the National Expenditure Program (NEP), which the President submits to Congress as part of the national budget.
The DBM Secretary maintains that making such insertion is part of the normal and regular process of DBM in preparing the national budget proposal. It is not difficult to accept such reasoning because indeed, budget proposals from agencies really need to go through some “processing” (amendments) to make sure that they are aligned with the development thrust of the administration and that their collective cost is within what the administration determined as sources of funds.
The issue raised by the House of Representatives is not really about the “power” of DBM to “insert” funds to the proposal of DPWH but the alleged personal interest of the DBM Secretary in the projects funded by the inserted funds.
The so-called DBM pork barrel or insertion is at the very least improper (if not outright illegal) when it becomes a means for corruption. If it is true that the DBM Secretary inserted such funds for projects that are to be awarded to a contractor who is related to him, the same becomes a real case of the bad pork barrel that should have no place in our national budget.
Will it be enough for the DBM Secretary to say that making such insertion cannot “enrich” him as he is not directly involved in the implementation of projects funded by the same, which in this case will be done by the DPWH?
We have to remind ourselves that in the case of the CDF (which was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court), even if the funds were “inserted” by the legislators and the projects were implemented by agencies in the Executive Branch, it still became as a tool for corruption.
Is there pork in our national budget? Let’s see who becomes richer because of it.
