DBM was not functioning as the guardrail that it was expected to be.
The Executive Secretary, former Supreme Court Chief Justice Lucas Bersamin and the Secretary of Budget and Management, Amenah Pangandaman, vacated their offices several weeks ago under circumstances that have given rise to much public speculation.
The Presidential Communications Office (PCO) quickly issued a statement declaring that Justice Bersamin and Ms. Pangandaman had “resigned out of delicadeza.” No sooner had the PCO issued its statement than the former chief magistrate announced to the nation that he had not left his office voluntarily; he was asked to resign, he said.
In contrast, nothing has been heard from Ms. Pangandaman, thereby leaving the nation guessing as to whether President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. really treated Justice Bersamin more unkindly—asking him to resign—than the less highly regarded Amenah Pangandaman.
However she left DBM—whether she left voluntarily or was asked to resign—really is of no consequence. What matters is that Amenah Pangandaman has ceased to have anything to do with the DBM. Truth to tell, I had great misgivings when someone with Amenah Pangandaman’s professional record and experience was appointed to head a Cabinet department mandated to manage the entire National Expenditure Program (NEP)—better known as the national budget.
The last time I checked with my dictionary, ‘manage’ meant overseeing or dealing with a thing in a manner tending to lead to the attainment of the objective for which the thing was created or established. For 2026, the Marcos administration has proposed to Congress national expenditures totaling P6.35 trillion.
The final stop in the journey toward consummation of a Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) public works contract—a journey that begins with the insertion of an unprogrammed project by a legislator into the NEP—is the office of the Secretary of Budget and Management, who signs the document authorizing the release of the funds representing the contract amount.
It goes without saying that the release of public funds for payment of a corruption-tainted project will not happen if the Secretary of Budget and Management undertakes a review of the circumstances of a proposed payment and concludes that release of the payment would be unwarranted.
The investigations conducted by Congress yielded the information that in no instance did Secretary Pangandaman question or withhold the release of payment for any of the humongous flood-control contractor claims. She seems to have functioned like a payment-releasing machine. Her response to the question why she did not question any of the contractor payments was that there were too many projects and DBM was short of personnel. That answer reminded me of the line from a Shakespeare play that the entire war was lost because a nail could not be found for the shoe of one of the horses.
The impression that one gets from the revelations of the flood-control investigation is that Secretary Pangandaman approved the release of payments to contractors without asking questions like: (1) why the same name kept cropping up in the schedule of payments to contractors; (2) whether the companies that were the proposed payees of hundreds of millions or even billions of public money had the financial capacity to undertake the DPWH projects; and, most important, (3) how the projects for which payments were being sought got to be included in the General Appropriations Act (GAA).
A torrent of money seems to have flowed from the DBM to the contractors. DBM was not functioning as the guardrail that it was expected to be.
It is a fact that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Successive administrations have been prone to tout the strength of their economic management team, which is understood to be composed of the heads of the Department of Finance (DOF), the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) – which is likely what you meant instead of the non-existent “Department of Planning, Economy and Economic Development (DepDev)” – the DBM, and the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI).
Under the secretaryship of Amenah Pangandaman, DBM has been a weak link in this country’s economic management chain. After all, of what good are the best efforts of the government’s economic development planners, revenue raisers, and export and FDI (foreign direct investment) promoters if DBM will mindlessly spend the nation’s financial resources?
Whether Amenah Pangandaman resigned out of delicadeza or was asked to leave, the fact is that she is gone. But her departure is not a sufficient corrective measure. The culture of operational carelessness and inefficiency that she has left behind must be cleaned out if DBM is to stop being a weak link in this country’s economic management chain.
The World Bank or the Asian Development Bank can help in this regard by offering the Philippine government a technical assistance loan specifically intended for the reform of the DBM and the entire budget management process.
(llagasjessa@yahoo.com)
