In 2013, the Supreme Court declared PDAF (Priority Development Assistance Fund) and DAP (Disbursement Acceleration Program) violative of the Constitutional provision on the delineation of functions between the Executive branch of the government and the legislative branch. Four years later, PDAF appears to be making a comeback: a number of knowledgeable observers, including Senator Panfilo Lacson, believe that the 2017 national budget—more formally known as the General Appropriations Act—is full of PDAF-type appropriations.
What makes Senator Lacson et. al. believe that PDAF is again rearing its ugly head? An invitation or request – I’m not quite sure which is the more accurate word to use—has been extended to each member of Congress by the Secretary of Budget and Management to propose P80 million worth of projects for inclusion in the 2017 NEP (National Expenditure Program), which has a P3.3-trillion price tag.
The letter of the Constitutional provision is clear enough. In the separation-of-powers governmental system that prevails in this country, the making of laws is the exclusive domain of the legislative branch and the crafting of proposals relating to the administration of the nation’s day-to-day affairs, such as NEP, is the exclusive domain of the Executive branch. In deciding the petitions for the striking down of PDAF and DAP, the High Court was doubtless guided also by the said Constitutional principle. The principle is very clear. And it makes eminently good sense, for Congress should not be making expenditure proposals that it itself will be approving. In any sensibly run country, that is conflict-of-interest pure and simple.
Because of the clear Constitutional divide between the crafting of laws, which is the job of the Executive, and the approval of laws, which is the job of the legislature, a middle ground had to be found if the members of Congress were to have any participation in the preparation of NEP. Enter the PDAF system, under which members of Congress lobbied, with varying degrees of pressure, for the inclusion in NEP of specific local projects.
Harmful as the PDAF system was to the separation-of-powers principle, its deleterious effect would have been reduced if the projects that the senators and representatives proposed for NEP inclusion were projects that they themselves had adjudged to be truly beneficial to their districts or party-list constituencies. Unfortunately, this was, in the great majority of instances, not the case. The projects that the legislators proposed to the line departments—usually DPWH (Department of Public Works and Highways)—were projects suggested by contractors who offered the legislators upfront kickbacks ranging all the way up to 30 percent of the projects’ estimated costs.
In deciding the PDAF cases, the Supreme Court must have taken into account the abundant evidence—documentary as well as anecdotal – of widespread corruption associated with the SARO (special allotment release orders) issued by the DBM (Department of Budget and Management) to legislators in respect of the projects they sought to be included in NEP. This is the system that got a number of senators and a whole slew of representatives into trouble with the office of the Ombudsman. With its 2013 decision the Supreme Court sought to put an end to this obscene system. Now it appears to be making a comeback—ironically in an administration whose tagline is “Change is coming.”
PDAF-loving legislators assert that critics of the PDAF system are inflexible people who want them to have no say whatsoever in the use and disposition of government revenues allocated to their respective constituencies. This is untrue. Critics of the pre-2016 PDAF system accept that legislators have their own ideas about what’s best for their constituents and have a legitimate interest in obtaining approval of projects that in their judgment would be highly beneficial for their constituencies. But the critics firmly believe that the pre-2016 system—legislators having close ties with particular contractors, who suggested infrastructure projects to senators and representatives to whom they paid kickbacks – was the unholiest of unholy alliances and represented the worst kind of inefficient government-resource use.
Is there a middle ground in this situation, one that prevents unholy alliances and their favorite contractors and at the same time allows legislators to have a degree of involvement in the optimization of government-resource use?
There is such a middle ground, and it represents the ideal situation from the standpoint both of economics (efficiency in the use of public resources) and of politics (enhancement of the legislators’ standing with their constituents). That middle ground consists of legislators’ presenting their net proposals not to DBM or a line department such as DPWH but to Neda, whose board consists of the heads of the line departments, with the President of the Philippines as the chairman.
Let the Neda staff—economists, engineers, accountants, etc.—evaluate the legislators’ proposals and in due course make recommendations to the Neda board meeting, with the Chief Executive presiding, as to which projects are best for the development of both the local and the national economy. If the Neda board approves his project proposals, a legislator will get credit for it from his constituents (and his favorite contractors). And if the Neda board does not include them in NEP, the legislator can still say that he did his best.
Whatever anyone may say about it, the invitation to each legislator to propose P80 million worth of projects for NEP inclusion is a violation of the letter – and, perhaps more important, the spirit – of the 2013 Supreme Court decision. The decision pronounced PDAF dead. Let it stay dead.
E-mail: rudyromero777@yahoo.com