THE annual budget debate that predictably gives rise again to animosity between the Senate and the House is sure to fire up when Congress returns after its break.
Still, like in the past, the hottest items that are expected to stir the hornet’s nest are the issues on realignment and insertions. For instance, the Department of Health, unless adjustments are made by the upper chamber, needs around P100 billion for its primary health care alone.
As proposed, the next year’s budget, the largest in history, would be around P4.1 trillion.
But the ‘arbitrary’ cuts affect also other agencies. If the Senate adopts the House version in a bid to please the Executive, the Department of Education proposed the hiring of 43,313 teachers to address the backlog. Instead of giving the full P10.45 billion appropriation for such item, the budget was cut by R1.27 billion.
Even DepEd’s appeal for P10.55 billion to create 56,558 non-teaching positions in schools was shredded, getting only P204 million, the equivalent of 525 posts. Even the Commission on Higher Education suffered a P11.6 billion cut, which is sure to impact the scholarship programs and free tuition of the agency. In fact, the list of agencies brutalized by budget cuts is a long one.
On the other side, the discretionary funds of the President, the intelligence budget and the social welfare fund, have ballooned. But the greatest hurdle that come with approving the 2020 budget is ensuring the lawmakers get their share of projects under various disguises. It’s the thing we call ‘pork barrel.’
Pork barrel is essentially a post-US Civil War legacy the Americans introduced in the Phlippine political system when the country’s legislature, a copycat of their democratic structure, was created. Accordingly, it started as a ‘plantation practice of distributing rations of salt pork to slaves from wooden barrels.’
In the Philippines, pork barrels scandals topped the list during the second Aquino admini-stration when the Supreme Court made a definitive ruling on it. The jurisprudence was an atom bomb that ferreted out opportunists who had to face charges in court, including plunder.
Why debates on annual budgets are contentious is chiefly due to a lawmaker’s intent to get a bigger share of the pie in form of development projects, which is turn means affording them the chance to choose which contractor to handle them, with the explicit arrangement that the legislator gets his share of commission.
Beyond pork barrel, the State should also adopt measures and mechanisms that allow agencies to have control over budget cuts, especially when there are already laws mandating them to pursue to their respective agenda.
