THE STAFF of Quirino Rep. Junie Cua, chair of the appropriations committee, must have done a good job of hiding the insertions in the national government budget for 2010 made by senators and congressmen. The Department of Budget and Management seems to be having a hard time finding them, and so the government has been forced to fall back on the 2009 budget in order to conduct business in the meantime. Or so we are told.

Don?t look at us, blame Congress instead, Malacañang spokesmen tell those who wonder why the budget has not been signed yet. They are right. Congress waited until Dec. 18, the last day of session for 2009, to ratify the General Appropriations Act of 2010. And it didn?t send the printed copy of the bill to Malacañang for President Macapagal-Arroyo?s signature until Jan. 13 this year.

There?s an interesting story about why the printing was delayed. It seems that as soon as the lawmakers went on their Christmas break, Cua?s staff was put to work, tacking in a few million pesos in the budgets of some agencies, a few hundred million pesos in other agencies, and even billions of pesos in the lawmakers? favorite departments. The Department of Public Works and Highways, which is already having great difficulty spending what it is being given by Malacañang and Congress (they call it ?law absorption capacity? in technical jargon), will be fattened farther with P14 billion in extra pork barrel funds under the budget approved by Congress. These ?insertions,? coupled with a P2.63-billion increase that will raise the Priority Development Assistance Fund to P9.67 billion, will bloat the pork barrel allocations to as much as P35 billion, according to Sen. Manuel Roxas II.

Where did our lawmakers find the money? They didn?t move money around from one agency to another, they simply slashed the appropriation for debt service by P64 billion. But since there is a law requiring the automatic appropriation of any amount for debt payment, the net effect of raising the pork barrel allocation is to increase the P1.54-trillion national budget proposed by the Executive, something that Congress is barred from doing by the Constitution.

It is not the unconstitutionality of the act that Malacañang seems to be most concerned about, however. Last month deputy presidential spokesperson Gary Olivar said President Arroyo directed the DBM to scrutinize the Congress-approved budget and recommend how ?the President should handle the pork barrel hike, considering higher deficit worries this year due to continued global [economic] weakness and the need to sustain stimulus spending.?

But will the DBM really recommend and will the President really veto the budget insertions and the increase in the PDAF, as Olivar hinted? If she does, it may be only for the first time. Still it will be a most welcome surprise, coming as it will in an election year.

It won?t be long before we know what her decision will be. If she wants to weed out the insertions from the budget, she only has a week to do it. If she doesn?t act, the pork-fattened budget becomes law before the Chinese New Year arrives, with or without her signature.

With or without the insertions, the potential is already there for the deficit to swell. With the government now operating on a reenacted budget, the Arroyo administration can carry on for the rest of its term as if it had not spent anything until the new budget takes effect, like it did in 2007. In that year, according to former Budget Secretary Emilia Boncodin, the government used the funds for one whole quarter under the 2006 General Appropriations Act and spent the entire budget for 2007 the rest of the year.

To repeat this year what happened in 2007 would be almost suicidal. When it submitted the budget proposal to Congress last year, the administration projected a deficit of P173.3 billion. That estimate has since been revised several times, and the latest puts it at P293 billion. If the administration adds what it has already spent this year to the whole-year spending program and if it doesn?t delete the P65-billion insertions made by the lawmakers, the deficit could shoot through the roof. Then the next president may not know what hit him.