As things stand, this country’s national budget process is in shambles. This has to be corrected as quickly as possible.
The Great Flood Control Scandal has brought about a diminution in the prestige and public esteem of a number of important public and private institutions. Arguably the most important of the victims of this devaluation wave has been the proposed national budget, which upon approval by the President of the Philippines becomes the General Appropriations Act (GAA).
Prior to the outbreak of the scandal, news of the turnover of the Executive Department’s national budget proposal to Congress—an event that the Constitution mandates must be done within 30 days from the delivery of the President’s State of the Nation Address (SONA)—was received by the Filipino people with great expectations and high hopes. The prevailing feeling among the Filipino people was that their collective future during the ensuing 12 months depended on the proposed GAA’s proper evaluation and subsequent approval by Congress and the President.
Not anymore. The proposed national budget/GAA is no longer accorded by the Filipino people the same degree of respect and dignity that they previously accorded it. With the outbreak of the Great Flood Control Scandal following President Marco’s July 20, 2025 SONA, the national budget/GAA had, in the Filipino people’s eyes, been reduced to a document detailing the grand scheme of legislators and contractors to defraud the national government of billions of pesos’ worth of infrastructure projects. It has been an incredibly precipitous fall from grace.
It has been at the hands of this country’s economic profession that the national budget has sustained the greatest loss of value and esteem. Like their colleagues in non-communist countries around the world, Filipino economists are taught that the national budget prepared by the Executive Department and submitted to the legislature for evaluation and approval is the most important document guiding a country in its quest for economic development. In that quest, the national budget operates as the nation’s Bible.
Within its thousands of pages are encompassed all the nation’s aspirations—including, yes, all the infrastructure projects that fraudulent contractors have implemented either substandardly or not at all—and all the nation’s capabilities, represented chiefly by the trillions of tax revenues and foreign loans painstakingly marshalled by the government for the financing of those aspirations.
If a national economic development program is to move forward as planned, the aspirations—the highways, the schoolhouses, the power plants, and the hospitals—must be produced according to schedule. However, that is not going to happen if the capacities lined up to finance them are disbursed to persons other than those contractually liable for their completion and delivery. When that happens, the national economic development program suffers a double whammy: the Treasury is defrauded and national or regional economic projects are derailed. Thus, the damage caused to a country’s economic development program by national-budget-related corruption goes far beyond the misappropriated funds themselves; it extends as far as completion timetables, project linkages, delivery-delay costs, etc.
Filipino economists within and outside the government are highly cognizant of the damage that is done to the government of this country when the national budget process is subjected to corruption. Such corruption embarrasses them before their foreign colleagues, who are likely to develop the impression that the Philippine government is not really serious about the requirements of economic development, one of which is well-spent concessional foreign financing.
As things stand, this country’s national budget process is in shambles. This has to be corrected as quickly as possible so that the national budget/GAA is restored as the North Star of a country that has been striving for so long to achieve high middle-income country status.
The 2026 national budget must be free of corruption. As the nation’s chief financial officer, President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. can do so much to ensure that the possibility of a recurrence of the Great Flood Control Scandal is kept minimal. A Presidential order prohibiting the inclusion of unprogrammed projects in the proposed 2026 GAA will be a giant step in that direction.
(llagasjessa@yahoo.com).
