Imagine a renovation bill with thousands of new line items you never asked for, with no plans, quotes or photos. Would you pay?
That is roughly where you stand with the House version of the proposed P7.2 trillion budget for 2027. The People’s Budget Coalition and the civic tech group BetterGov compared the bill the House passed on October 12 with the National Expenditure Program the President sent to Congress. They found nearly 7,000 public works projects worth about P190 billion that appear in the House bill, have no match in the original proposal, and carry no public project documents.
The coalition puts its wider count of “red flags” at P1.017 trillion, about 14 percent of the budget. It sorts that into P695 billion of what it calls hard pork in infrastructure, P210 billion of soft pork in cash aid programs such as AICS, MAIFIP, TUPAD and the farmers’ assistance fund, and P112 billion of shadow pork parked in unprogrammed appropriations. You can dispute the labels, which are the coalition’s own.
What exactly is missing?
The coalition’s caveats are the strongest part of its case. An insertion is a red flag, it says, and proof of nothing. “Unsupported” means only that no documents are public. The data can show what changed between the two versions of the budget, but not who changed it. The P190 billion is a gross figure. District engineering offices often serve more than one district, so a project’s location does not tell you which lawmaker asked for it. The findings are partial and unofficial.
Those are the sentences of people asking for records, and every one of those gaps closes the moment the House publishes what it already has: the list of amendments, who proposed each one, the justification, and the project papers. If the projects are sound, the papers will show it in an afternoon.
Why are farm roads in the sea?
Some of the entries suggest nobody checked anything. Columnist Jarius Bondoc listed farm-to-market roads whose map coordinates land in odd places. A P23 million project in Nueva Ecija sits on Benham Rise. A P30 million one in Cebu falls in the Celebes Sea. A P100 million road in Negros Occidental plots to Nigeria, and a P7 million multi-purpose building in Misamis Oriental plots to Algeria.
Agriculture Secretary Francis Tiu Laurel has said such errors could come from mistakes in entering coordinates, perhaps a misplaced decimal. That may well be true. A typo that puts a road in Africa means no one in the chain looked at the map before writing a peso figure beside it. Catching that kind of slip is the whole job of a review.
Why does Sandro Marcos’s district keep coming up?
Because it tops BetterGov’s ranking. Across DPWH offices serving 220 districts, the portal counts P63.97 billion in House projects with no matching line in the President’s proposal, plus P97.66 billion more under the central and regional offices, tied to no district at all. On the same portal, the public works allocation for the DPWH office covering Ilocos Norte’s 1st District rose from about P369 million in the President’s proposal to about P4.74 billion in the House bill. ACT Teachers Rep. Antonio Tinio and the coalition ranked it first. They also flagged offices serving Appropriations Chair Mikaela Suansing’s district and those of other House leaders, though several of those offices are shared with neighboring districts.
Keep the caveats in view. The amounts belong to DPWH offices, a shared office’s total shows up in full under each district it serves, party-list members are not shown, and the entries are candidates from a document comparison. BetterGov’s disclaimer says its mapping “does not establish that a representative requested, sponsored, or controlled a project.” Rep. Marcos is presumed to have acted in good faith until shown otherwise. One report says he rejected the pork label and said the allocations are specific, itemized projects. House leaders say the amendments were based on agency proposals and valid grounds.
If those proposals exist, publishing them would settle the matter quickly, and specific, itemized projects should have specific, itemized papers behind them.
Classrooms or halls?
Look at what the House chose to grow. The House bill lists 5,763 multi-purpose building projects, and BetterGov counts 3,299 of them as inserted, 258 of those as unconfirmed matches. Money for these buildings reached about P83.7 billion, more than double the P41.0 billion in the President’s proposal. Education department school facilities went the other way, from P35.8 billion down to P31.8 billion, which is P27.5 billion for school buildings plus P4.3 billion in repairs, a World Bank project and school sites. The DOH hospital facilities program also sits below the original proposal. School facilities now get less than half of what multi-purpose buildings get.
These are proposed allocations, not money already spent. But a budget is a list of priorities, and this version ranks multi-purpose halls well above classrooms. The coalition’s Ken Abante told senators the House prioritized buildings that are “not at all an urgent need of our citizens.”
Didn’t the Supreme Court just settle this?
It drew some lines. Last week the Court, in a decision by Senior Associate Justice Marvic Leonen, struck down Congress’s increases to unprogrammed appropriations in the 2024 budget and other increases in the 2025 and 2026 budgets, and barred the release rules for 2026 standby funds. It also presumed good faith on the part of the officials involved. Solicitor General Darlene Berberabe says the government will seek partial reconsideration, arguing that some of the Court’s guardrails belong to Congress and the President.
Go back further to 2013, when the Court in Belgica struck down the PDAF. Bondoc reads that ruling as rejecting lump sums, projects left to individual lawmakers’ discretion, and lawmakers’ hand in implementation. Nobody outside the House can judge whether the 2027 insertions cross that line until the documents are out.
Palace Press Officer Claire Castro said an insertion “is not inherently bad” and only becomes wrong “when the funds are inserted into the politician’s own pocket.” Two days later she said the President wants every Filipino to help watch the budget. The public can only watch what it is allowed to see.
Who should do what?
The House Appropriations Committee should publish every amendment, itemized, with its proponent, its justification and its project documents, and a reconciled accounting of what was added and cut.
The Senate should do what Abante asked: remove insertions that cannot be supported by published papers. Sen. Panfilo Lacson says the job is to “scrutinize and cut all the fat.” Finance Chair JV Ejercito says some P266 billion needs review and is open to inviting civil society to the bicameral talks.
The bicameral committee should reconcile only what each chamber approved. Thirty-five business and advocacy groups asked that its report “contain no blank or lump-sum entries” and be deliberated in fully livestreamed sessions.
The President should veto whatever fails review, including in his son’s district. Economist Cielo Magno has already challenged him to do that.
And you?
Open budget.bettergov.ph, find your district, and see what was added, what was cut, and whether a document exists. Then ask your representative to explain the lines under the DPWH office that serves you. Ask your senators how they will vote.
Investigative reporters have noted that this budget arrives less than two years before the 2028 elections, and former budget secretary Butch Abad warned that local projects are “faster to announce, easier to control, politically more rewarding, and vulnerable to abuse.” What that timing means is your call to make, ideally with the papers in front of you.
As the coalition puts it: Buwis natin ’to. Boto natin ’to. Budget natin ’to.
