Everybody happy?

Editorial
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:49:00 01/24/2009

The Christmas season has long been over but Congress still seems unable to get over the spirit of giving. It is giving away billions of pesos to various government agencies, including those that didn’t even ask for the funds. And because charity begins at home, of course, the lawmakers have made sure they would partake of their own generosity, too.

Under the P1.415-trillion General Appropriations Act for 2009, whose final form was hammered out by the bicameral conference committee this week, the senators and congressmen voted for themselves a P9.665-billion pork barrel, euphemistically called the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF). This amount is P2 billion higher than what Malacañang proposed for the PDAF, further bloating past pork barrel allocations which used to average P200 million per senator and P20 million per member of the House of Representatives. These are funds set aside for the favorite projects of lawmakers to be undertaken by their favorite contractors, who are expected to show their gratitude to their patrons in millions of ways.

That is not all the pork that will grease the hands of greedy lawmakers. Tucked into the budgets of many executive departments are projects identified by lawmakers that are again to be awarded to their favorite contractors and suppliers. These “earmarks” (as the Americans call it) already built into the separate versions of the budget approved by the Senate and the House have been increased by P35 billion, sliced from the allocation for debt service. The Department of Public Works and Highways got the biggest share with P9.4 billion, boosting its overall budget to P129.9 billion. The Department of Transportation and Communications also saw its budget increased by P3.8 billion, while the Department of Education got P2.0 billion more. In addition, the 2009 budget sets aside a total of P10 billion for various education, skills training and financial assistance programs for the youth as well as displaced and jobless workers.

Lawmakers have justified this massive reallocation of funds by saying the government needs to put together a stimulus package that would breathe some life to a faltering economy. The P50-billion package, which is modest in comparison with the P300-billion package the administration of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo talked about, is meant to soften the impact of the worldwide recession whose effects are starting to make themselves felt through falling exports, the growing number of returning overseas workers and the closure of some big firms. But it is hard to see how far a package laden with pork would go in mitigating the effects of the crisis.

While this economic rescue package may have been intended to make everybody happy, it will clearly make the lawmakers themselves happiest of all. This economic rescue package will help shore up their personal fortunes and boost their chances of winning office anew in next year’s general elections — all at the expense of taxpayers already reeling from high prices and facing joblessness. Can anything be more heartless and callous than voting for oneself bigger slices of pork even as millions go broke and hungry?

But can anything be done to stop our lawmakers from rolling out a much bigger pork barrel and building a bigger war chest for the 2010 elections? Sen. Panfilo Lacson has pointed a way. If President Arroyo vetoes the reduction of the allocation for debt service but leaves the approved appropriations for all government agencies intact, then the appropriations act would become “constitutionally infirm,” Lacson said. That is because, its net effect would be to increase the budget proposed by Malacañang, and the Constitution bars Congress from increasing the budget proposed by the executive.

The same thing would happen if the President signs the bill as it now reads, and the debt service matches Malacañang’s original estimate of P287.87 billion. That is most likely because the estimate for debt service was based on an exchange rate of P40-P43 to a dollar (the dollar was worth P47.40 on Friday). And we have this strange law that gives first priority in the budget to the payment of debts.

It would seem that Malacañang has no choice but to remove one by one the funds realigned from debt service to the different agencies to keep its expenditures down to what it had proposed. But that is assuming we are still a government of laws, not of men who flout the law when it is convenient.