By Robert B. Roque, Jr.
Public outrage is obviously still boiling over the flood-control scams and the eyebrow-raising insertions uncovered in the 2025 spending plan. The result: Congress now seeks to rise above public demand for an unusually high level of scrutiny as it finalizes next year’s P6.79-trillion 2026 budget.
And while livestreaming lends a measure of transparency to the bicam — which some say is the root of all the crooked insertions — it risks becoming exactly what analysts warn against: a token gesture for public inclusion and a venue for grandstanding.
What Pinoys need to understand is that transparency is not the ultimate solution to corruption, because the problem with corruption is corruption itself. If you view it that way, transparency can be abused to undermine effective budgeting.
The real integrity test lies in how lawmakers plan, how they prioritize, and how they resist the impulse to bloat the spending bill with projects that cannot be implemented for lack of land, permits, feasibility, or even basic absorptive capacity.
Take the DPWH budget, for instance, which became a playground for kickbacks and theft. That’s because so much money was put into a year’s Build, Build More budget, even if there were not enough credible contractors to actually implement these big-ticket infra projects.
Another point is that if our elected lawmakers are truly to strive for a credible budget, most of them must be schooled! Yes, they and their staff need to study their constituency, do research, and align them with national policies and programs to push in one direction for an effective spending schedule for the next year.
Publishing all amendments before the bicam, naming who inserted what, and letting civil society into the room are essential. With that, there is no argument. But even these fall short if Congress remains trapped in a budgeting culture that prioritizes political patronage over national purpose — where unprogrammed funds serve as political slush instead of responsible standby financing.
They must work towards a budget bill that is tailor-fitted to the country’s dire macro and micro needs, grounded in a sober understanding of what can be funded and actually spent — not padded to please the strong, the powerful, and the influential who still hold the real power of the purse.
In the end, reform isn’t just about visibility. It’s about intentionality — the political will to craft a budget that works for the nation, not one engineered to work for those who engineered it.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth: the success of budget reform will never depend on livestreams, matrices, or public dashboards. What needs reform is not just the process, but the people — the moral fiber of those elected to represent us. Until the Legislature itself is willing to clean its own house, no amount of transparency will save the budget. Only character will.
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