Pork wars and dubious P532 billion would derail budget passage

The term “double funding” does not exist in our budget lexicon precisely because the practice is illegal. Projects funded, for example, by the current 2020 budget, cover the funding for the projects’ entire life so as not to complicate the sourcing and releasing of funds for those projects. It is patently illegal, and maybe immoral, to allocate substantial amounts of money in the 2021 National Expenditure Program (NEP) for projects funded by the current round, except for a few exceptions. These few exceptions are the projects categorized as items with a “multiyear contractual authority,” but these are the exceptions from the norms of the budget process.

Whoever wrote the P4.5-trillion proposed budget for 2021, which is now being deliberated upon by the two chambers of Congress, has forgotten this bedrock doctrine of budget crafting, according to Sen. Panfilo Lacson. Proof?  A P532-billion fund under the jumbo budget of the Department of Public Works and Highways, Lacson alleged, has been realigned for projects already funded in the 2020 national budget.