For decades, the national budget has been the country’s most efficient instrument of legalized plunder. This week, the Supreme Court finally said it out loud. (Read the BusinessMirror story: SC tags ’24, ’25 budgets as unconstitutional, October 20, 2026).
In a sweeping decision penned by Associate Justice Marvic Leonen, the SC struck down the 2024 and 2025 General Appropriations Acts as unconstitutional and gutted key provisions of the 2026 GAA. The reasoning is as simple as it is damning: Congress has been padding the President’s budget, and the padding has a price-P449.5 billion in 2024 alone, plus P17.99 billion more for the DPWH’s Special Road Fund in 2025.
The Court’s core holding is clean. Article VI, Section 25(1) forbids Congress from increasing the total appropriations the President recommends in the Budget of Expenditures and Sources of Financing. That ceiling covers programmed and unprogrammed appropriations combined. Congress blew straight through it.
But the ruling’s real contribution is not arithmetic. It is diagnosis.
Unprogrammed appropriations were meant to be a modest contingency- six to 12 purposes between 1989 and 2018. By 2024, the Bicameral Conference Committee had stuffed them with 43 new programs and projects worth P303.11 billion, ballooning UAs from P282 billion in the President’s proposal to P732 billion. That is not budgeting. That is a slush fund in legal costume. The Court’s phrase-that Congress ‘severely distorted the budget’ to create ‘artificial fiscal space’-belongs in every future hearing.
Worse, the Court found that ‘Strengthening Assistance for Government Infrastructure and Social Programs’ (SAGIP) was a prohibited lump-sum appropriation, a ‘covert repository’ for DPWH flood control projects, because it handed the Executive post-enactment power to decide where money goes-a power the Constitution vests in Congress.
This is a familiar disease. Each time one pork barrel falls, another rises wearing a new acronym. The Priority Development Assistance Fund was struck down. The Disbursement Acceleration Program was struck down. Now SAGIP. The mechanism mutates; the appetite never does.
The Court also indicted the process itself. The Bicameral Conference Committee kept no records, explained no increases or decreases, and submitted no supporting documents-in violation of its own rules. A body that rewrites a multi-trillion-peso law behind closed doors, then explains nothing, is not legislating. It is dividing the spoils.
So what now? The Court applied the doctrine of operative fact to the 2024 and 2025 budgets, meaning money already spent stays spent. Convenient for the spenders. P449.5 billion flowed through channels now declared unconstitutional, and beneficiaries keep their windfall if they acted in good faith. That is the ruling’s soft spot-and its largest one.
But here is the opening. The doctrine, the SC stressed, ‘does not shield authors, proponents, or implementors from criminal, civil, or administrative liability.’ Read carefully, that is an invitation. The justices have handed the Ombudsman and the Commission on Audit a map. The question is whether they will follow it, or whether the political departments will do what they always do-shrug, rename the fund, and move on.
The permanent injunction against the 2026 GAA’s Special Provisions 1(a) and (b) is a start. But injunctions fade from public memory long before the next election. The petitioners-the late Edcel Lagman, Koko Pimentel, Edgar Erice, Leila de Lima-spent years being dismissed as noisy. They were right.
The Court’s closing words deserve to be carved above every budget deliberation: the GAA ‘has never been a catalogue of licenses to abuse or to steal.’ For too long, it has been exactly that. The justices have now drawn a line. The rest of us-voters, auditors, prosecutors-must hold it, or watch Congress redraw it with a new acronym.