Philippine 2025 Budget Bloated by Pork
Marcos defies own pro-poor agenda by allowing lawmakers to loot 2025 spending plan
By: Tita C. Valderama
Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr has agreed to his congressional allies’ election-year insertions in the national government budget, reminiscent of the ₱10 billion (US$172.07 million) pork barrel scandal of 2013. The 2025 education allocation is artificially bloated, betraying Marcos’s declared ‘prudent spending policy’ and recalling the kind of corruption that characterized his father’s reign.
The annual spending plan, which Marcos signed on December 30, increases his own office’s ₱10.51-billion (US$181.63 million) budget request by ₱5.4 billion, supposedly for preparations for the country’s hosting of the ASEAN summit in 2026, while shaving ₱2.03 billion from the request of Vice President Sara Duterte’s office to ₱733 million following her refusal to answer questions on her spending of ₱612.5 million confidential funds for her office and the Department of Education in 2022 and 2023. The Duterte family has become Marcos’s most implacable political foes.
The annual budget program, in fact, has become a key congressional reelection tool touted as pro-poor but described by critics as one of the most corrupt in Philippine history. The House of Representatives itself has emerged as among the biggest gainers, with its allocation more than doubled from the originally proposed ₱16.3 billion to ₱33.7 billion.
Marcos, in signing the bill sent to him by his cousin and political ally, House Speaker Martin Romualdez, cut only ₱26 billion of the ₱289 billion to the ₱825 billion proposed budget for the Department of Public Works and Highways, leaving in more than 90 percent of the so-called insertions. But while padding the public works budget with the lawmakers’ pork-barrel additions, Congress slashed education spending by ₱12 billion, of which ₱10 billion was from the computerization program meant to "upgrade and strengthen the ICT competencies of learners, teachers, school leaders and non-teaching personnel.”
In the bicameral conference committee, the public works budget totaled ₱1.14 trillion while the Department of Education was left with ₱737 billion, down from the originally proposed ₱793 billion. Before the budget bill reached the committee, Congress had already reduced the education allocation by ₱44 billion.
The Philippine Constitution, however, stipulates that: “The State shall assign the highest budgetary priority to education and ensure that teaching will attract and retain its rightful share of the best available talents through adequate remuneration and other means of job satisfaction and fulfillment.” To avoid a constitutional question over the cuts, the final version of the spending program included the insertion of entities such as the Philippine Military Academy, National Police Academy, Public Safety College, National Defense College, and the Local Government Academy, leaving the education sector with supposedly ₱1.053 trillion of the ₱6.326 trillion outlay while public works is left with ₱1.007 trillion.
University of the Philippines professor Cielo Magno, a former undersecretary in the Department of Finance during the early months of the Marcos administration, said the inclusion of the training agencies under other line departments in the bureaucracy was an attempt to make it appear that education gets more than public works. She pointed out that these entities do not directly contribute to addressing the problems on literacy and numeracy in basic education and, therefore, should not be counted under the education sector’s budget program.
Magno described the spending plan as “pro-politician” as it prioritizes allocations that will benefit the legislators, most of whom are campaigning for the May mid-terms. Previously, the agencies under the education sector were the DepEd, state universities and colleges, the Commission on Higher Education, and the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority, excluding the training entities under the Department of National Defense, Department of Interior and Local Government, and the Philippine National Police.
Public finance analyst Zyza Nadine Suzara, executive director of the think tank Institute for Leadership, Empowerment and Democracy and a former director at the Department of Budget and Management, pointed out that out of the ₱194 billion in line items Marcos vetoed, ₱168 billion or 86.6 percent is from unprogrammed appropriations, which rendered the veto irrelevant. The ₱168 billion cut, she said, “does not significantly alter the structure of the 2025 national budget” because the “pork remains huge.” In the first place, she added, unprogrammed appropriations projects can’t be implemented unless the government has excess tax collection or new taxes are imposed.
Magno said most of the ₱26 billion cuts were intended for flood control projects identified by lawmakers. By keeping more than 90 percent of the legislators’ insertions and removing the appropriations for high-impact, big-ticket items listed under unprogrammed appropriations, Marcos chose to prioritize spending for small infrastructure projects endorsed by his political allies rather than those that could contribute more to national development.
Sonny Africa, executive director of the research group IBON Foundation, said Marcos’ spending program, titled “Agenda for Prosperity: Fulfilling the Needs and Aspirations of the Filipino People” was flawed from the start. “It was clear that the budget would make the poor poorer and the rich richer,” he posted on December 17.
The administration’s spending plan, he said, “doesn’t really respond to the nation’s social and economic needs while, unfortunately, favoring the pork of politicians and profits of the rich.”
Magno pointed out that while ₱50 billion was cut from the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps), a conditional cash Program, had a P50-billion cut, Congress allotted P26 billion for Ayuda sa Kapos ang Kita Program (AKAP), a program providing rice, food, medical, funeral or cash relief assistance to poor Filipinos.
Congress, she said, moved the ₱50 billion to the unprogrammed appropriations and provided ₱26 billion for AKAP and other items into which they could dip their hands. However, the transferred ₱50 billion was then deleted.
Both programs are lodged with the Department of Social Welfare and Development. Politicians are not allowed to distribute the 4Ps so they created the AKAP, under which beneficiaries are identified and the goods are distributed by the politicians, led by Romualdez, who is eyeing the presidency in 2028.
Already in its second year of implementation, Marcos said safeguards will be in place to “guard [AKAP] against misuse, and duplication, and fragmented benefits.” But while the assistance programs appear to benefit the poor, there has been no accounting of how much goes directly to the intended beneficiaries, making the payment occasions appear like a campaign sortie complete with tarpaulins bearing their huge names and photos.
The calamity fund was reduced by ₱500 million despite the increasing intensity of natural calamities. The Department of Science and Technology’s ₱49 billion budget request was reduced by a whopping ₱20 billion, while the ₱74 billion request for the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (PhilHealth) was deleted, supposedly because it has a P600 billion reserve fund that it could use. The spending program also included an increase in soldiers’ subsistence allowance from ₱150 to ₱350 a day, or ₱10,500 a month, an allocation that Romualdez said was made on Marcos’s instruction.
The legislators’ juggling of the funds from the agencies directly dispensing basic services to the lump-sum programs more beneficial to themselves shows an increasing influence of patronage politics in the budgeting system. And Marcos tolerated it, defying his own declaration that “every centavo must go to programs that truly uplift lives, strengthen communities, secure the future development of the Philippines.”
By keeping the bulk of the lawmakers’ pork barrel in the 2025 budget, it is not easy to swallow Marcos’ statement after signing the budget law. “We take our role as stewards of our taxpayers’ money seriously,” he said.
Tita C. Valderama is a Manila Times columnist and editor and trustee at VERA Files, a non-profit online news portal known for its institutionalized role in fact-checking false information