Seven years of enacted budgets

Pandemic budgets FY2020–2022

Nagsimula ang peryodong ito sa isang pandemya, at sa mga batas na isinabatas para sagutin ito.

Those laws were the Bayanihan to Heal as One Act of March 2020 (Republic Act No. 11469), which granted the President emergency powers to realign existing appropriations toward testing, treatment, and relief, and the Bayanihan to Recover as One Act that followed when the first lapsed. Together they suspended the procurement rules that would have slowed an emergency response down and let programs be inserted into appropriations already in force. The enacted budgets of these three years carried that posture in their shape: health and social-protection lines expanded faster than anything before them, and response spending arrived through realignment as often as through the annual law itself.

Why the totals moved the way they did is simpler than any chart makes it look. Collections fell while obligations grew, and the difference was financed by borrowing on a scale the country had not relied on in decades. These were not budgets of expansion so much as budgets of response — money directed wherever the emergency pointed, with debt standing in for the revenue that was not there.

• Lawphil: Bayanihan to Heal as One Act (RA 11469)
• Lawphil: Bayanihan to Recover as One Act (RA 11494)

The infrastructure push FY2023–2024

With the emergency powers lapsed, the enacted budgets of these two years turned from response to building. The administration of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. organized its spending plans under the banner of Build Better More, the successor to the previous government’s Build, Build, Build: airports, railways, tollways, and flood works, presented as the investments that would carry growth out of the capital and into the regions. In the enacted laws the signature shows plainly, with transport, irrigation, and public works taking back the prominence the pandemic years had squeezed out of them.

What the framing competed with was the bill for the pandemic. Debt service became one of the largest claims on every appropriations act in this period, its interest payments growing year after year as the borrowing of the emergency came due. Capital outlays held their ground all the same, and within them one programme grew faster than any other: flood management. River basins, drainage systems, seawalls, and dredging multiplied across these two enacted laws — a line whose growth, within a single season of floods, would become the biggest question in the entire budget.

For flood management the timing had a logic of its own: the storms of late 2022 had made drainage and flood works an urgent public ask, and the enacted laws answered it project by project, faster than any machinery existed to check. That gap — between how quickly the line grew and how slowly it could be verified — is where the next era begins.

The accountability turn FY2025–2026

The monsoon floods of 2025 broke the pattern. Flood-control works that had been completed and paid for failed in plain view — collapsed embankments, unfinished structures, rivers that rose anyway — and the programme that had grown fastest through the previous era became the subject of the country’s most consequential budget scandal.

What followed played out in public. The Department of Public Works and Highways flagged hundreds of ghost projects in its own nationwide audit, projects paid for in full that appear never to have been built. Investigators found works attributed to coordinates that pointed somewhere other than where the concrete was supposed to be. Senate and House hearings followed, audit findings mounted, and the Independent Commission for Infrastructure was created to investigate. It ceased operations in March 2026.

The enacted FY2026 law carries the turn in its own text: it writes satellite-based verification of flood-control projects into the appropriations act itself, with the Philippine Space Agency’s imagery serving as an instrument of budget oversight. Whether that machinery works is a question the next budgets will answer. What is already on the record is that the era of building without asking ended.

• BusinessWorld: DPWH flags 421 ghost projects