By Ade S. Fajardo
According to the Department of Budget and Management (DBM), unprogrammed appropriations provide standby authority to incur additional agency obligations for priority programs or projects when revenue collection exceeds targets.
Money may also come in when additional grants or foreign funds are generated. These cannot be programmed in the same manner as appropriations with definite or identified funding as of the time the budget is prepared.
In simple terms, says the DBM, unprogrammed appropriations are like planned household purchases that may only proceed if extra money is available from additional income like bonuses, or from loans.
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Is the Philippines getting additional grants or incurring more indebtedness?
In his separate opinion in the PhilHealth cases, Senior Associate Justice Marvic Leonen noted the increasing trend in the amounts of unprogrammed appropriations in the budget: P10 billion in 2022, P219 billion in 2023, and P449.5 billion in 2024.
Where is this “extra money” coming from?
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Justice Leonen notes the growing suspicion that allocations for programmed appropriations are transferred to unprogrammed appropriations to create fiscal space in the programmed appropriations for projects identified by legislators during the budget process.
Legislators may be directly or indirectly involved in the implementation of these “transfers.”
This “bloating” of the unprogrammed appropriations supposedly translates to “massively funding pork barrel” because it required additional sources of financing by siphoning funds of government owned or controlled corporations like PhilHealth and the Philippine Deposit Insurance Corporation.
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If that is the case, then that is not new extra money for the government to expend.
By juggling the funds to free up fiscal space in the programmed appropriations, legislators may purportedly place them where the hard and soft projects are usually lodged.
These are local infrastructure projects of the Department of Public Works and Highways and the Department of Agriculture. This is a new scheme of massively funding pork barrel, which purportedly defeats a previous Supreme Court decision declaring pork barrel illegal.
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This led Justice Leonen to declare that the transfer of PhilHealth funds to finance certain programs and projects under unprogrammed appropriations, despite the failure to advance the objectives of the Universal Health Care Act, is “immoral, illegal and unconstitutional.”
This reduced available resources by diverting a portion of the fund pool for health services, and violates the principle of progressive realization of the right to health.
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It was former Senator Koko Pimentel, who argued that the 2024 national budget was unconstitutional due to the P450-billion increase in unprogrammed funds introduced by Congress.
This allegedly pushed the total amount of the budget over the P5.768 trillion national budget as originally proposed by the executive department.
The scheme even violated the Sin Tax Laws which have earmarked portions of the revenues from excise taxes on sweetened beverages, alcohol, tobacco products, and heated tobacco and vapor products.
These were meant to be used exclusively for the implementation of the Universal Health Care Act./WDJ