How to read the budget

Ang national budget ay, sa pinakasimple, shopping list ng gobyerno: doon nakalista ang lahat ng plano nitong gastusin sa loob ng isang taon — mga sahod ng guro, pagpapatayo ng tulay, gamot at bakuna, pambayad sa utang, at iba pa. Kung kaya mong basahin ang listahan ng bilihin sa palengke, kaya mong basahin ang budget. Ang pagbasa ng budget ay kasanayan, hindi pribilehiyo: walang course na kailangan, walang economics degree, walang eksam na dapat ipasa bago ka puwedeng tumingin. Ang kailangan mo lang ay isang hapon, at ang pahinang ito.

This page is the reading companion to Methodology. That page is about where this site’s numbers come from and what they refuse to claim; this one is about how to read a national budget at all — its shape, the comparisons that mean something, and the habits that keep a reader from being fooled, including by this site.

Everything below is deliberately generic. No department is named and no figure is quoted, because these are skills rather than answers: they work on any line in the budget. Read this once, then read it again with a department page from /departments open beside it. That second pass is the whole course.

Every year produces two documents that look alike and are not. The National Expenditure Program is the executive’s request: what it proposes to spend if everyone agrees. The House and the Senate deliberate it, amend it — heavily, some years — and the General Appropriations Act is the version the President signs. Only the signed act is law. Until that signature exists, the proposal is a request, however grand its totals. The vocabulary is short, but the distinction decides whether a comparison means anything.

This site measures the FY2027 proposal against the enacted General Appropriations Act for FY2026, not against last year’s proposal. The choice is the useful one: a new shopping list only says something next to the list you already bought. A request measured against a request tells you what the executive wants; measured against the law, it tells you what changed against what the country is actually funding. Methodology documents where that baseline comes from; this page is about how to use it.

The distinction also sets a clock. A proposal stays a proposal only while Congress is deliberating it, and that window is when a citizen’s finding can still change a line. The Take action page at /act exists for exactly that moment, which is why it puts the proposal and the enacted volumes side by side.

It helps to know the four classes every expense in the budget falls into, because the class tells you what kind of money it is before any figure does. Personnel services pays people: the salaries, allowances, and benefits of government workers. Maintenance and other operating expenses is the day-to-day: supplies, utilities, travel, repairs, and the unglamorous machinery of an office that functions. Capital outlays is things that get built: roads, buildings, equipment, anything meant to outlast the year it was bought in. Automatic appropriations is the odd one out — items the law itself spends, debt service and the local governments’ share of national taxes among them, settled by standing statutes rather than a fresh vote every year.

The classes are also the fastest way to read a department’s character. A department whose personnel share keeps rising is often absorbing retirements and salary standardization rather than new hiring: the class moved, the headcount did not. A capital-outlay-heavy department is a construction-heavy department, and it should be judged on projects rather than offices. When a line shifts sharply between classes, the interesting question is not why it grew but what kind of spending it became — the first is arithmetic, the second is governance.

A percentage inherits all of its meaning from the base underneath it. Off a very small base, almost any change looks enormous: a program that doubles from almost nothing has still, in absolute terms, almost nothing doubled. Off a very large base, even a serious shift can look unremarkable. A percentage quoted without its base is a headline waiting to mislead someone, and the person it misleads most reliably is a reader who never sees the amounts beside it.

That is why the site’s delta column always shows both. Every comparison against FY2026 on this site appears as an amount and as a percentage, side by side, so neither can quietly stand in for the other. The comparison that matters is the same line against its own last-year figure — same department, same program, same measurement — and that is exactly what the column holds. When the percentage looks dramatic, the amount next to it says how much drama was actually purchased; when the amount looks dramatic, the percentage says whether that is ordinary for a base that size.

Here is the skill performed once, in prose. Open a department page on this site — the biggest public-works department is a good choice — and read its proposed total from the first tile, where the FY2026 enacted figure it is measured against sits written beside it. Then open the DBM’s index of the FY2026 General Appropriations Act, linked below, find that department’s volume, and look for the same program family the site’s tables show. The figure in the law and the figure on this site are the same, because both are readings of the same document. What the site adds is not a different number; it is the same number with better company: beside the new proposal, beside its change, in a table you can filter instead of a PDF you must page through.

One honesty note belongs in the same breath. The GAA volumes are the authoritative document; this site is the convenient one. Convenience is not authority, and if a figure here and the signed law ever disagree, the law wins — the link below is how that argument gets settled.

The rest of the site is where these skills go to work. Methodology explains where the data comes from and what it does not claim. /departments is the practice ground, and any department is a fine place to start. And /act is what to do when a reading hardens into a finding worth sending. One afternoon is genuinely enough: the budget is long, but it is not mysterious, and it was published precisely so that it could be read.