President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was ‘alarmed’ upon learning that Congress transferred the 85.5% it had slashed from the proposed P52.7-billion budget of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) for foreign-assisted projects (FAPs) in 2023 to its own 8,075 ‘inserted projects,’ according to its former chief, Manuel Bonoan.
Bonoan made this revelation in his written judicial affidavit (JA) submitted to the Sandiganbayan Third Division, where he testified Wednesday against former Sen. Bong Revilla, who faces a case for malversation of public funds.
However, the part of his testimony pertaining to this new detail was not tackled by the court during the trial, and the JA was not immediately available to the media at that time.
A source confirmed this new information only on Friday.
In 2022, Bonoan said the DPWH proposed P52.770 billion for FAPs under the National Expenditure Program (NEP) for 2023.
However, under the General Appropriations Act (GAA) for 2023 national budget, the DPWH’s budget for FAPs was slashed to only P7.449 billion, accounting for an 85.59 percent reduction.
‘The budgetary cuts were made through the act of Congress when they passed the [general] appropriations bill (GAB),’ Bonoan said.
The executive branch prepares NEP, then the House and Senate review and authorize it to become the GAB and the president signs it into law, transforming it into the GAA.
Prosecutors asked Bonoan as to how did he know that the 85.5 percent cut turned into inserted projects, and he answered that he defended the 2023 DPWH budget under NEP before House and Senate, which he compared to the enacted GAA for 2023.
Reported to Marcos
‘[T]here were changes in the programs and projects of the originally proposed budget,’ Bonoan said. ‘As I stated, there were 8,075 new inserted projects as incorporated and reflected in the 2023 GAA.’
‘The insertion of new projects in the GAA was entirely and exclusively from the act of Congress also when they passed the appropriations law,’ he also said.
Upon learning of the budget cuts and Congressional insertions, Bonoan said he reported it to the president.
‘The president was alarmed in the reduction of budgets for major items and the inclusion of new items at the detriment of the original programs proposed for the department and he said that this cannot go on because it will derail the implementation of the socio-economic agenda, particularly the infrastructure program of the administration,’ he said.
‘Leadership funds’ comes in
In response to such cuts, Bonoan said the DPWH came up with an ‘innovative way.’
This is where the DPWH’s leadership fund comes in.
‘While we understand that Congress has the ‘power of the purse’, we nevertheless thought of an innovative way to address the likely situation of ‘budgetary cuts’ in the succeeding years of the Marcos administration to already accommodate and incorporate the priority projects of members of the Senate in the succeeding proposed budgets of the DPWH through what we internally coined as ‘Senate Leadership Fund’,’ Bonoan said.
The leadership fund started to appear in the preparation of proposed 2024 DPWH budget with an allocated limit of P24 billion.
Under this leadership fund, each senator was entitled to a ‘minimum’ of P500 million allocation for their priority projects, while chairpersons of major committees, including the Senate panel on public works, could have at least P1 billion, according to Bonoan.
Worse than ‘pork’
In his Wednesday testimony, Bonoan testified that all senators in the 19th Congress in 2024 availed of the leadership fund, including Revilla, who was the public works committee chair at that time.
Sen. Panfilo Lacson, who was only reelected in the 20th Congress, sought for the abolishment of the leadership fund, deeming it as a ‘worse’ version of the pork barrel.
On Thursday, Lacson noted that the ‘leadership fund’ is no longer in the 2026 national budget