Insertions

BECAUSE the two houses of Congress cannot agree on what to do with their pork barrel insertions, there is a real possibility that the national government will be operating on a reenacted budget. There’s a small window left for our legislators to hammer out an agreement as they will go on recess on Thursday to allow them to campaign for themselves and their allies and proteges for the May 13 elections.

Many of them must be gnashing their teeth over the intransigence of Sen. Panfilo Lacson about the pork barrel. It was Lacson, who once served as police chief of Cebu, who exposed the billions of pesos worth of projects identified by the congressmen and funded in the general appropriations budget. They’re called insertions apparently because they were not included in the original budget proposal forwarded by the executive to the legislative department.

For example, a congressman may have been planning on the construction of a new road in a municipality in his district but found to his dismay that there is no provision for the same in the proposed budget of the Department of Public Works and Highways. So what he does is insert his road construction in the list of projects of the DPWH.

At first glance, there does not seem to be anything wrong with what he did. After all, budgeting is essentially a legislative process so why can’t a lawmaker introduce amendments to the appropriations law provided that the totality of the insertions/amendments does not result in bloating the size of the budget submitted by the President?

Besides, the performance of a congressman or, for that matter, the senator is judged by his constituents not only on the basis of the number and quality of the laws that he authored but on the number of projects he brings to his province or district. If you have not been able to have a single bridge built in your district, they will judge you as a failure regardless of your having authored a number of landmark legislations.

The problem, however, is that the solon’s projects more often than not allegedly become a source of corruption. This is supposedly how it works: the DPWH informs the legislator that his project is ready for implementation. He identifies his favored contractor, who eventually wins the rigged bidding. Money changes hands along the way, it is claimed.

The Supreme Court has declared the pork barrel, then known as the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF), as unconstitutional but Lacson claims that the practice has not really stopped; the legislators have only become more inventive. The lump sum appropriations (P70 million for each congressman and P200 million for each senator) are gone but the congressional insertions have taken their place and this time, in the hundreds of millions for favored districts.

The House leadership has admitted the existence of congressional insertion but denied that it is irregular. And they’re not the only ones doing it, they hastily added. The senators have their own, too and in much bigger amounts yet.

Lacson has been steadfast in his sharp criticism of the insertions both by the House and by the Senate and has threatened to go to the Supreme Court to stop the practice. With the threat of a litigation complicating the impasse between the House and the Senate and the very limited time left for everyone to work out a compromise, the possibility looms large that we will have a reenacted budget, at least for some time.

But wait. How sure are we that the 2018 budget does not suffer from pork barrel insertions?