The Almighty has not endowed Senator Panfilo Lacson with any of the characteristics of a canine being, but there is one capability that the former Philippine National Police chief shares with dogs. He has become very good at sniffing. And Sen. Lacson’s nose is very busy these days.
The Senator is sniffing pork—pork of the kind that has come to be associated with the preparation of the annual national budget, more formally known as the GAA (General Appropriations Act). He has declared that the 2017 GAA is full of fiscal pork, which the Supreme Court declared as unconstitutional in a landmark 2013 ruling. Secretary Benjamin Diokno and his Department of Budget and Management are insisting strongly that this year’s national budget is pork-free but Senator Lacson is insisting with equal strength that that document is full of the flesh of pigs. And he has said that he will not stop trying to expose the porkiness of the 2017 national budget—and the pork-distributing proclivities of its authors—even if that means having to bring the entire sordid matter back to the Supreme Court.
Was Senator Lacson merely making a threat or is the High Court likely to have to rule on another petition relating the erstwhile PDAF (Priority Development Assistance Fund)? I think that the Court has another PDAF-related petition in its near-term future. I have two reasons for saying so. The first is that Mr. Lacson feels very strongly about Congressional pork—so strongly that he has not availed himself of his share of the pork during his entire stay in the Senate. The second reason is that he has a very strong suspicion that the P1.35-trillion 2017 GAA is heavily laden with the flesh of pigs.
Ping Lacson believes—and rightly so—that the No. 1 place to look for pork is the budget of the department that deals with physical infrastructure. The budget of the Department of Public Works and Highways contains the allocations for the construction of things that are highly visible to the legislators’ constituents—roads, bridges, airports, seaports and government buildings—and it is in the procurement operations of DPWH, more than those of other departments, that constructors (formerly contractors) are most prominent.
If Mr. Lacson is particularly vociferous about the pork barrel this year, it is because of the humongous increase in the budget of DPWH, which has catapulted that department to the position of No. 2 component of the 2017 GAA, after the Department of Education. DPWH’s 2017 pork, which translates into a tremendous amount of potential kickbacks for contractors (from DPWH) and members of Congress (from contractors).
During the budget hearings Senator Lacson was particularly suspicious about two 2017 GAA realignments involving DPWH. These were the transfer of budgetary allocations—billions of pesos—from the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Fund (NDRRMF) and the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) to DPWH. The amounts involved were P21.5 billion and P8.0 billion, respectively. His highly developed sniffing capability has convinced Ping Lacson that these billions are very probably pork funds. These sums are additions to a DPWH 2017 budget that, as indicated above, are humongously large. Pork barrel allocations are usually parked, Lacson says, within the DPWH budget.
Ping Lacson’s feeling of certainty about the highly porky character of 2017 GAA has been reinforced, the Senator says, by what he has heard from some Representatives of ARMM. These legislators have told him, he says, that some ARMM Representatives have been given project allocations totaling as much as P5.0 billion.
Mr. Lacson has every right to seek out and destroy the pork items in this year’s budget. As stated above, he has never availed himself of the usual P300 million pork allocation for Senators. In the past he was joined in this highly laudable attitude by the late Joker Arroyo. Two of his current colleagues—Senator Francis Pangilinan and Vicente Sotto III—have indicated disinterest in participation in the annual porkfest.
Predictably, the Secretary of Budget and Management has been denying to high heaven that this year’s national budget is laden with pork. But Ping Lacson is not about to accept Benjamin Diokno’s protestations of non-culpability. Like all Muslims, the Senator detests pork, and he looks all set to expose the pork that his keen sense of smell tells him abounds in the 2017 GAA.
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