Restore rationality and decency to the budget process

The yearly deliberations in Congress on the national budget are always met with calls for reprioritization and realignment of budget allocations (“Worthy call to recast 2022 budget,” 11/15/21) from some legislators and from media and civic and nongovernment organizations closely following the passage of the annual General Appropriations Act or GAA. Which is as it should be since the GAA is the most important piece of legislation that Congress approves. It sets the most strategic expenditures that the government undertakes in a given year, given its limited resources.

But this annual exercise is not as simple as it sounds, because there are many competing needs and interests that vie for a share of the budget pie (education, health, defense, etc.). And it can also degenerate into a highly politicized exercise where vested interests deeply embedded in both the executive and legislative branches of government predominate, as what has happened under the Duterte administration.

Consider some major expenditure items that have been given priority over more pressing public needs, to illustrate this misuse of government resources: the scandalous amounts of pork barrel funds inserted in the GAA, almost igniting a fistfight between two congressmen for bigger bounty; the never before seen massive increases in intelligence funds of the Office of the President, which are virtually outside the pale of the Commission on Audit; the huge budget for hundreds of contractual employees in the Presidential Communications Operations Office that cannot be justified and are suspected of being used to hire trolls of the administration; the hundreds of millions spent for the dolomite beach project, which was prioritized over the pandemic response, notably the ayuda for which the President always insisted the government lacked money; the disproportionate grant of hefty salary increases to military and police personnel, obviously to earn their loyalty, in contrast to the deadly silence and inaction on the demands of overworked health care workers for payment of their special risk allowance and other overdue benefits; the misplaced priority on “Build, build, build” projects even if plagued by severe underspending, at a time when social safety nets for the unemployed and impoverished sectors of society due to the pandemic are more urgent; billions for supposed development projects in insurgency areas allocated to the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict that have largely remained unused; and probably many others the public is not aware of.

The challenge for the next administration is how to restore rationality and moral decency to the budget-making process to genuinely address the most essential requirements of national development. Voters should choose which of the presidential candidates is most capable of meeting this challenge and who is not tainted with a history of incompetence, corruption, plunder, and power-tripping in public office. We should also beware of all the grandiose promises loosely made to entice voters without saying where the money will come from.

DONATO SOLIVEN
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