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Congress had the opportunity to rebuild the public trust that had eroded amid all the corruption scandals. They needed to be bold, and Akbayan Representative Chel Diokno and Senator Sherwin Gatchalian both echoed the call to zero out the unprogrammed appropriations (UA) in the 2026 budget.
This would have been a strong signal that Congress is not simply doing business as usual. Unfortunately, the House of Representatives chose to forfeit that chance.
The House’s approval of the budget now forces us to reckon with the fact that we have accepted something dangerous as the new normal.
The unprogrammed appropriations, or UA, is a portion of the national budget that was intended to act as a standby fund. It isn’t automatically available to spend, but it can be tapped when any of the following conditions exist:
- Excess revenue collections in any one of the identified non-tax revenue sources from its corresponding collection target, as reflected in the BESF;
- New revenue collections or those arising from new tax or non-tax sources which are not part of, nor included in, the original revenue sources reflected in the BESF; or
- Approved loans for foreign-assisted projects.
The UA essentially allows the government to fund additional programs and projects only if there is extra cash beyond what was originally planned in the budget. We can imagine the national budget as similar to a household’s planned budget. There is money set aside for rent, groceries, tuition, and other things: this is the programmed budget. Meanwhile, the UA is like a separate bank account that can only be used if the family earns more than expected or if a relative sends money.
But what happens when one of the family members alone decides whether this money can be used and where it goes?
Size of departments
Before 2022, the UA had never breached P250 billion in any annual budget. Between 2011 and 2021, the amounts were moderate, reflecting its role as a standby fund, rather than a parallel budget. But from 2022 onward, the UA takes a dramatic turn.
The UA had ballooned into the hundreds of billions, the same size as major departments such as the DA or DSWD. Furthermore, the gap between the National Expenditure Program (NEP) and the General Appropriations Act (GAA) widened sharply beginning in 2022, with congressional insertions to the UA totaling over P1.1 trillion over the last four budgets. When controversy broke over the 2025 budget in December last year, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was compelled to veto P168 billion worth of line items in the UA. (He should have done more).
This has become the new normal: Unprogrammed appropriations are bloated by insertions, and normalized under the banner of “fiscal flexibility.”
The timeline fits quite conveniently. Starting in 2021, the DBM began reporting annual revenue collections above target in the Budget of Expenditures and Sources of Financing (BESF). This was unprecedented and happened despite the country still reeling from COVID-19. This took place just before when the UA began to balloon.
The Bureau of Treasury’s revenue certifications are not publicly accessible. As a result, these data may not correspond to the official figures. The only way the public can try to verify whether revenues have exceeded their targets is by comparing the projected and actual revenue figures published in the BESF.
The sudden annual excess revenue coinciding with a ballooning UA begs so many questions:
- Are these “excess revenues” genuine signs of good revenue performance, or carefully calibrated adjustments by the DBCC to justify triggering the UA?
- Why are the Bureau of Treasury’s certifications not made publicly available? If the release of hundreds of billions worth of funds is conditioned on these certifications, shouldn’t these have been released to the public and subject to Congressional oversight?
- What is the timing of the releases of the UA? Can quarterly or midyear adjustments of the revenue performance be used to prematurely trigger UA releases even before the actual annual “excess” is observed?
The lack of transparency only fuels suspicion that the UA has become a shadow budget, guided not by fiscal discipline but by political convenience.
There is also a moral hazard involved in this new normal of the UA. Because the release of funds can be triggered by revenues exceeding targets, the DBCC could theoretically understate its revenue projections to create “excess” later in the year. We’ve already noticed that the DBCC has been revising its projections downward vs the Medium Term Fiscal Framework.
In other words, the Executive through the DBCC now effectively holds an additional power of the purse to unlock hundreds of billions in the UA. Without any clear mechanisms for transparency and accountability, this is essentially the Pork Barrel of the DBM. The new normal has distorted the previous rules-based fiscal framework into a discretionary, executive-controlled parallel budget, something the the Constitution and laws explicitly prevent.
The Supreme Court has already warned against this kind of budgetary manipulation. In Araullo v. Aquino III (G.R. No. 209287, 2014), the Court stated that treating partial surpluses as grounds for spending violates sound fiscal management. The ruling states (emphasis mine):
“As such, the revenue targets should be considered as a whole, not individually; otherwise, we would be dealing with artificial revenue surpluses. The requirement that revenue collections must exceed revenue target should be understood to mean that the revenue collections must exceed the total of the revenue targets stated in the BESF. Moreover, to release the unprogrammed funds simply because there was an excess revenue as to one source of revenue would be an unsound fiscal management measure because it would disregard the budget plan and foster budget deficits, in contravention of the Government’s surplus budget policy.”
This passage directly contradicts the availment provision of the UA in the budget, which allows release upon “excess revenue collections in any one of the identified non-tax revenue sources.” My reading of the current UA clause is that it enables piecemeal certifications, exactly the “artificial surpluses” that the Supreme Court ruled against. The UA’s very legal framework is now at odds with the principles articulated by the Supreme Court.
It is also important to recognize that this is not solely a problem with the Executive. Congress shares responsibility with how the UA has been misused. While the Executive may exercise control over when and how the UA funds are released, it is Congress that decides how large the UA will be in the first place. It is Congress that has repeatedly authorized the ballooning of the UA.
New normal
This new normal for the UA opens the door for selective revenue certifications, opaque releases, and discretionary spending. As the House Appropriations Chair Mika Suansing herself revealed during the plenary deliberations last September 23, about P141 billion worth of flood control projects in 2023 and 2024 were disbursed through the UA. These are projects not included in the programmed budget and have evaded public scrutiny and accountability. The UA has become a parallel budget system that circumvents the “power of the purse” of Congress through the General Appropriations Act.
For most people, the discussion on the Unprogrammed Appropriations is best left to the technical budget experts. But we must confront the fact that the UA is no longer a harmless budget tool as it has become the major pipeline through which pork flows. The bottomline is that UA has allowed public money to be moved around covertly while squeezing programs for healthcare, education, and social protection to make room for patronage and corruption.
Consider what happened in the 2024 budget. The UA ballooned to an unprecedented P731 billion, and nearly P450 billion of that came from Congressional insertions made between the NEP and final GAA. How did this happen? Budget insertions are a zero-sum game: if a legislator wants to add funds for a pet project, they must slash funds for a line item elsewhere in the budget. So the quick fix would be to park those slashed line items in the UA. Congress or DBM might justify this by saying that these items can be implemented once the excess revenue arrives.
The casualties of this trickery were the programmed budgets for items like 4Ps and PhilHealth, which were cut from their NEP amounts by P6.5 billion and P40 billion respectively in the 2024 GAA. In the 2025 budget, 4Ps and PhilHealth got cuts worth P50 billion and P74 billion respectively compared to the NEP amounts. Ironically, a number of supposed priority projects under the DOTr worth P242 billion were also slashed in the 2024 GAA and relegated to the UA in order to accommodate congressional insertions.
To mask this, Congress slipped an additional fourth availment clause into the 2024 budget, allowing the use of the “fund balance of the Government-Owned or -Controlled Corporations (GOCCs) from any remainder resulting from the review and reduction of their reserve funds for reasonable levels taking into account the disbursements from prior years.” This clause became the basis for the illegal cash sweeps of PhilHealth and PDIC. One more coincidence that shouldn’t be lost on observers is that Ralph Recto was a congressman who helped pass this provision, and later became the Finance Secretary who signed off on its implementation.
This is why the UA matters. Every peso hidden behind opacity and trickery is a peso taken away from classrooms, healthcare, and social programs. This abuse shows how easily the power of the purse can be distorted and abused without vigilant scrutiny.
The 2026 General Appropriations Bill that the House of Representatives has approved on 3rd Reading includes items which certainly belong in the regular programmed budget, such as Foreign-Assisted Projects, Government Counterpart for Loans, Strengthening Assistance for Social Programs, and others. These programs should not be relegated to contingency. Furthermore, the implementing agencies and specific expenditures are not clearly defined in the UA, hiding them from oversight.
The DBM has argued that the UA provides “flexibility” to respond to emergencies, but flexibility already exists in the programmed budget through the Contingent Fund and the Calamity Fund. If these are not sufficient and there is a genuine need for additional appropriations, Congress can enact a Supplemental Budget. In fact Congress was able to enact such a Supplemental Budget just two weeks after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic in March 2020.
The real problem is not rigidity in the budget, but the Executive’s seeming aversion to transparency. UA allows the authorization of spending with no public report, no public deliberation, and no accountability.
This issue of the unprogrammed appropriations is more than a technical budget concern. It represents a battle for the integrity of our fiscal and budgetary institutions. If the administration is truly serious about restoring public trust in the budget process, we must begin by dismantling this “new normal.” — Rappler.com
AJ Montesa is a technical advisor of the People’s Budget Coalition.
