Category: Philippines Daily Inquirer

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. will make sure the P6.793-trillion national budget for 2026 will be free of any anomalies, Palace press officer Claire Castro said on Monday.

Castro stressed in a briefing that the president would veto any questionable allocations in next year’s budget.

‘As we have said, the President truly wants the budget to be correct and allocated to the right programs for the future and the benefit of the people,’ she said.

‘We can be assured, with all these things happening, that the people can expect the 2026 budget to be in order and that the President will not allow anomalous projects,’ Castro added.

‘The president,’ she said, ‘already said before that if there are any mistakes or anomalies again in the 2026 budget, he will veto them.’

‘Humongous’ insertions

Senate President Pro Tempore Panfilo Lacson revealed on Sunday that ‘almost all’ of the 24 senators in the 19th Congress had inserted at least P100 billion worth of items in the 2025 General Appropriations Act (GAA).

Lacson noted that the roster of congressmen who made similar insertions was equally lengthy.

The chair of the Senate blue ribbon committee described the individual insertions by his colleagues as ‘humongous.’

‘I have never seen such amounts. Before the Priority Development Assistance Fund was declared unconstitutional in 2013, pork amounted to hundreds of millions. Now it’s at least P100 billion total for senators alone,’ said Lacson.

The insertions were made when the spending bill reached either the ‘small committee’ after it hurdled the second reading or during the bicameral conference committee when members of the House of Representatives and Senate reconciled the provisions of the third reading version of their respective bills.

These amendments, discussed not in open plenary but made in closed-door meetings by only a handful of lawmakers, were then parked under big-ticket projects of agencies, including the flood mitigation program of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH).

‘No detailed knowledge’

But according to Castro, Mr. Marcos is opposed to such practices and did not know the extent of the amendments made.

‘When the 2025 budget was being crafted, the president definitely did not have detailed knowledge of what insertions certain senators had made,’ Castro said.

‘But now, because the president has truly seen and taken notice of what happened to the funds for flood control projects, he would make sure that these insertions would not happen again,’ she added.

Directing her remarks to legislators, Castro said, ‘As shown by the public’s anger – something that the president also feels – we can see that they should have already learned to fulfill their mandate of being true public servants.’

Zero allocation

The Department of Budget and Management submitted to Congress in August the 2026 National Expenditure Program amounting to P6.793 trillion. It was 7.4 percent higher than the enacted 2025 budget of P6.326 trillion and equivalent to 22 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

For the 2025 GAA, Marcos vetoed P26.065 billion worth of DPWH projects related to flood mitigation and control for being ‘inconsistent’ with the government’s infrastructure program.

He has ordered zero budget to be allocated to locally funded flood control projects under the 2026 proposed budget of the DPWH.

The move created a fiscal space of P255.5 billion, which will be realigned to other agencies to fund the government’s social programs.

‘Here comes the rain again,’ to quote The Eurythmics. Falling on my head like a memory, the memory-still very fresh-is of staggering amounts of money stolen by contractors and congressmen, even senators, in the form of kickbacks, suitcases full of kickbacks, for flood control projects that never once saw the light of day.

Along with rising water levels, school closures, and lost working days, sudden downpours summon with alarming frequency the ghosts that we have so desperately and ineffectively failed to banish from our cursed existence: the ghosts of corruptions past, present, and future.

Sudden downpours summon with alarming frequency the ghosts that we have so desperately and ineffectively failed to banish from our cursed existence: the ghosts of corruptions past, present, and future.

These ghosts live not just in luxury penthouse apartments and sprawling mansions in gated villlages, basement garages lined with top-of-the-line European cars, or row upon row of Birkin bags. They cling to every substandard bridge that’s collapsed, every potholed road that leads to nowhere, and every floodgate whose construction was approved and funded but never built.

And they taunt us from their social media accounts, thanks to their clueless nepo babies who fancy themselves influencers as they flaunt their ostentatious (and often tasteless) lifestyles-filched from our taxes.

Money, money, money

A recent report issued by the United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese named the companies are aiding and abetting an ‘economy of genocide,’ fully complicit in Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people of Gaza. The list includes tech giants such as Alphabet, Microsoft, and Palantir, as well as industry titans like Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, and even Hyundai, to name a few.

When asked why Israel’s genocide continues, she replied, ‘because it is lucrative for many.’

When asked why Israel’s genocide continues, she replied, ‘because it is lucrative for many.’

By the same token, one could say that an economy of corruption persists in the Philippines because it is lucrative for many. So lucrative for contractors in particular that many of them were emboldened to run for office and today sit as elected members of Congress. One could thus conclude that being an elected representative of the people and holding office is extremely lucrative for many, despite official monthly salaries not exceeding P334,059 for a senator, congressman or department secretary, while a department undersecretary earns P226,319, max.

These are decent salaries in a country where the median monthly salary is P44,979.62, according to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). However, they won’t necessarily cover the mortgage payments on that unit in Aurelia, much less an afternoon’s shopping spree at Chanel in Paris. Ditto a business class ticket to New York.

Yet corruption apparently pays, if the ongoing Senate investigative hearings are anything to go by. And funds these lavish lifestyles. It’s an ecosystem entrenched in hierarchy, too, it seems, where everybody has their price for looking the other way and getting things done. Or in the case of ghost projects, not done.

Ten percent for the departmental employee who issues the necessary permits, fifteen percent for the next higher-up and so on, each one taking their cut of the project, with an astonishing thirty percent (if not more) for the congressman or senator, bundled into suitcases and hand-delivered to their homes by trusted bagmen.

No Lalamove for this sort of delivery. For a project that’s worth billions, that’s easily a van-load of suitcases. Or, to use the clever little code name given to these money drops: basura. As in, ‘Take the trash to Congressman So-and-So’ (who’s another piece of trash, by the way).

Selling your soul

The levels of meta here are just beyond. They’ve rubbished our own hard-earned contributions to the country’s coffers; they’ve rubbished the trust given to them by virtue of being elected into public office; they’ve certainly rubbished all those so-called Filipino and Christian values of honesty, hard work, and integrity. They’ve rubbished themselves. And they’ve rubbished the country’s reputation.

This is what really irks me. That deep down, they have such little regard for the country they profess to love, and zero respect for the people they are supposed to serve, that they can’t even do a proper job of building what they were contracted to do.

Take your ten percent. Yes, you-engineer, contractor, undersecretary, congressman, senator. Hell, take your twenty, even your thirty percent. I don’t really care. But build the goddamn flood control barriers to the requisite standards of quality, safety, and durability. Present something decent to show for the billions you stole apart from the fourteen houses in Forbes Park.

Build the goddamn flood control barriers to the requisite standards of quality, safety, and durability. Present something decent to show for the billions you stole apart from the fourteen houses in Forbes Park.

Have a modicum of shame, if not for your countrymen who are literally drowning in fetid flood waters every time it rains, then for the foreign direct investments you keep trying to woo to our shores. Is it any surprise that investors choose Vietnam, Thailand, or Indonesia over the Philippines when corruption is so rampant, the infrastructure so inferior, and the cost of doing business so high? In an economy of corruption, basura begets basura.

We now know the price for your willingness to compromise your own morals in pursuit of wealth, power, and, it would seem, immunity from prosecution. Apparently, it runs to billions. But what is the price for you to grow a conscience?

The great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, writing with acute eloquence over fifty years ago about his own people’s exile and occupation, penned these lines:

‘I don’t know who sold our homeland

But I saw who paid the price.’

How profoundly tragic it is that we Filipinos know exactly who sold our homeland. And that we will still be paying the price for generations to come.

Rabin Angeles and Angela Muji have been confirmed as the lead stars of the Philippine adaptation of ‘The Werewolf Boy,’ based on the 2012 Korean film of the same name starring Song Joong-ki.

Angeles and Muji were announced as the lead stars of the upcoming film during the finale media con of their recently concluded show ‘Seducing Drake Palma’ on Monday, Sept. 29.

‘The news is out! Rabin Angeles and Angela Muji in ‘A WEREWOLF BOY!’ Now in production. Coming Soon Exclusively In Cinemas,’ the post read. A teaser of the upcoming film also showed Muji peering closer at Angeles, who somehow followed the stature of a dog.

Further details on possible changes to the storyline and premiere date are yet to be revealed.

In its original storyline, ‘A Werewolf Boy’ centers on Kim Sun-yi (Park Bo-young) who moved to the countryside with her mother and sister when she was a young adult. She then meets the handsome but feral Chul-soo (Song Joong-ki), whom she eventually tames and develops feelings for.

The onscreen partnership between Angeles and Muji gained traction after they worked together in ‘Seducing Drake Palma,’ a series adaptation of the hit Wattpad novel of the same name. It tells the story of Alys (Muji) attempting to catch the attention of her good looking but unapproachable classmate Drake Palma (Angeles). /edv