“Digital transformation, if pursued with discipline and sincerity, does not merely speed up government”
The decision to open the bicameral conference committee deliberations on the 2026 national budget to the public is a welcome and cautiously hopeful step, one that suggests government may finally be listening to the peoples’ emphatic clamor for transparency and accountability.
For consumers and ordinary taxpayers, this touches a deeper concern shaped by decades of disappointment and plunder.
In a country still grappling with flood control and public works scandals, transparency has become less about ideals and more about the urgency for systemic transformation.
When roads crumble, flood barriers fail, and trillions vanish into ghost and sub-standard projects that failed to deliver, Filipinos end up paying twice: once through taxes, and again through lost livelihoods, damaged homes, and even lost lives.
The livestreaming of the bicam is not about political optics.
It is about repairing a broken relationship between the state and the people who finance it.
For too long, budget decisions existed as something exclusive and untouchable, felt only through their consequences.
Allowing citizens to watch lawmakers debate priorities in real time changes that dynamic.
People can now see who pushes questionable insertions, who asks uncomfortable questions, and who quietly allows things to pass.
This level of visibility reshapes expectations.
Once decisions are made in the open, it becomes far more difficult to justify sealing them off again behind closed meetings and rushed compromises that are explained only when everything is already done, or when someone courageous blows the whistle.
A similar shift is evident in how digitalization appears in the proposed 2026 budget.
The ₱87.33 million allocation for government digitalization may not yet solve decades of inefficiency, but it reflects an important reframing.
Digital tools are being discussed as services meant to ease daily burdens, not just internal checks and upgrades.
For consumers, this translates into no more time-wasting and expensive return trips just to complete basic transactions, no more lost workdays because a signature or form was unavailable, and fewer opportunities for discretion to slide into abuse.
When processes are automated, logged, and traceable, everyday frustrations that citizens have learned to tolerate become inexcusable.
The much larger allocation for the Department of Information and Communications Technology reinforces this shift by acknowledging that digital government requires more than apps and websites.
It demands sustained investment in infrastructure, people, and protection.
Systems fail when staff are untrained, when cybersecurity is treated as an afterthought, and when connectivity remains uneven across regions.
The proposed funding for agencies tasked with cybercrime prevention, data privacy, and telecommunications oversight reflects an understanding that going digital without safeguards creates new forms of harm. Fraud, data breaches, and identity theft are constant risks.
They are real and immediate threats that can wipe out savings, destroy reputations, and leave consumers with little recourse.
These budget discussions carry sharper urgency because of the public outrage triggered by the raging flood control controversies.
Those projects were supposed to shield communities from disaster. Instead, they exposed how opaque procurement and weak oversight can turn life-saving infrastructure into killers.
Against this backdrop, the passage of the Citizen Access and Disclosure of Expenditures for National Accountability Act takes on deeper meaning.
It responds to the painful reality that transparency has too often arrived only after damage was done. The law acknowledges that citizens should not have to wait for whistleblowers to surface or scandals to erupt before they can see where public money goes.
For consumers, this kind of access changes the rules of engagement.
Complaints no longer rest on suspicion alone.
Citizens can point to contracts, timelines, and discrepancies with evidence in hand.
The inclusion of penalties for non-compliance is critical because transparency without enforcement is hollow.
When disclosure is optional, opacity persists.
When failure to disclose carries consequences, openness becomes a discipline rather than a performance.
Taken together, the open bicam, digital investments, and permanent access to spending records suggest a transformative model of governance, one that treats citizens not as powerless victims to corruption, but as active participants with the right to know, question, and press charges.
This is as a chance to move from reactive anger to sustained oversight.
Digital transformation, if pursued with discipline and sincerity, does not merely speed up government.
It makes it understandable.
And a government that can be understood can be challenged, corrected, and, over time, trusted again.
The real test will be whether these reforms return power to the people who have long paid the price of decisions made without them.
