The Great Cabinet Revamp has just started but it’s already turning out to be a dud.
In the first episode of his BBM Podcast, the president said that the revamp is in response to public disappointment with government services. But it seems designed to change perceptions rather than policies. At best, it’s a publicity stunt to cover up continued inaction on the fundamental economic directions that actually affect people’s lives.
Reappointed, recycled
The first wave of announcements on Friday included retaining the main members of the current economic team and a few reassignments. The core members of the economic team who will continue are Finance Secretary Ralph Recto, Budget Secretary Amenah Pangandaman, Department of Economy, Planning, and Development Secretary Arsenio Balisacan, Trade Secretary Ma. Cristina Roque, and Special Assistant to the President for Investment and Economic Affairs Frederick Go.
The announcement was swiftly hailed by the country’s big business groups such as the Makati Business Club (MBC) and Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry (PCCI). Capital is getting the continuity it wants and pays for. Notably absent, however, was any support from groups more representative of the country’s majority – the supposed primary beneficiaries of economic policy.
This divide is completely understandable. On one hand, the economic team upholds an economic framework and implements policies that deliver soaring corporate profits and ever-rising billionaire wealth. On the other hand, that same framework produces persistent economic problems for the majority: high prices and joblessness, low incomes and wages, and chronically underfunded public health, education and housing services.
These are two sides of the same coin – in the first three years of the Marcos Jr administration, billionaire wealth and corporate profits bloated astride growing poverty and hunger. The government tried to use imperfect inflation, employment and growth statistics to cover up the worsening distress of ordinary Filipinos. But fortunately, the truth will out.
It’s also worth highlighting that the economic team is not just a passive observer of the grossly wasteful pork barrel system – they actively design and enable it. The hundreds of billions of pesos flowing through the government bureaucracy into the pockets of political allies and contractors cannot happen without the involvement of the economic team, and indeed the president himself. Pork barrel is embedded in the budget process and dispensed to entrench the patronage politics so deeply favored by the country’s political elite.
Problem at the top
But the problem really lies with the presidency itself. It has apparently not undergone any self-reflection on how it has failed the majority in the last three years. Nor does it seem aware of the huge shifts in the global economy which will have repercussions for decades to come. Otherwise, there would be a realignment of vision, not a recycling of positions.
Simply put, there is no evidence of a coherent direction for the economy that pivots away from the business-as-usual approach that has kept the Philippines a laggard for so long. We can’t be dazzled by the administration’s “upper middle-income status” hype – with or without this, the Philippines is still in the bottom third of over 200 countries in the world with gross national income (GNI) per capita that is barely one-third (32%) of the global average.
Coherence starts at the top. A Cabinet is only as strong as the leadership behind it. If the president cannot define the country’s strategic goals – economic transformation, social justice, national development – then there’s no basis for choosing alter egos in the Cabinet to execute that vision. Competence is always good, but without vision then it should really be asked just whom that competence is for.
That’s why the retention of the core economic team is so telling. Their departments set the overall economic framework that shapes the policies of the rest of government. All the other departments are downstream, following the lead set by the core. Their budgets, mandates, and priorities are squeezed into the narrow space left by macroeconomic and fiscal policy dictated by the economic managers.
This inner circle insists on keeping the economy wide open to foreign goods and investors, slashing public spending to keep deficits low, and letting private profit-seeking and the market sort out social needs.
They are the ones blocking more ambitious support for local farmers, fisherfolk and Filipino industry. They underfund public hospitals, schools and housing in favor of infrastructure for big business.
They push tax measures favoring the rich and disproportionately burdening the poor and middle class, in the process also undermining government revenues and progressive social spending.
So how can we expect food to become more affordable, wages to rise, jobs to become plentiful, or health, education and housing services to improve, if the same obsolete neoliberal globalization policy mold remains untouched?
Smashing old ideas
There’s no doubt that a revamp of government, governance and the Cabinet is overdue. But the Cabinet revamp, for instance, can’t just be recycling combined with superficially new names or faces.
Most of all, it should mean new ideas for solving old problems and the political will to act on them. But that would demand vision, knowledge and courage to deliver these solutions from the very top and then being surrounded by people able to give substance to such direction. Without these, the Cabinet reshuffle will stay what it is now: a dud. It will just be more drift and politicking. The public awaits the next round of announcements on Wednesday.
All of this is just another public relations stunt. There could also be political impulses, such as punishing underperformance in delivering votes in the midterms, giving positions to cobble together an anti-Duterte coalition or to ease internecine conflict, giving a platform to possible successors or a poison pill to rivals, or any of myriad self-serving motivations that politicians are inclined to.
The apparent indecisiveness of the president in his own political strategy makes it hard to speculate, although the final Cabinet will give among the clearest clues to date. In any case, there is no reason emerging to believe that the last three years of the Marcos Jr presidency will be defined by anything more than empty slogans, missed opportunities and a further descent into trapo politics. ###
