Pres. Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr is no anti-corruption hero. If anything, there is much reason to believe that the president is the King of Pork.

The president feigns surprise at the extent of corruption in his administration. Since taking office, he has overseen the rotten budget process that doles out trillions of pesos in pork to presidential allies to keep their support as well as to not-so-allies to moderate their opposition. He can do this because of his overwhelming control of the annual national budget.

The President’s Budget

It doesn’t take much squinting to look beyond the theatrics and inter-parliamentary finger-pointing to see who ultimately decides about pork barrel. The president is the political boss of the budget and the budget secretary his chief technical operator. The president draws up the National Expenditure Program (NEP), his allies in Congress produce the General Appropriations Bill (GAB) after backroom bicameral dealing, and the president signs (or vetoes) to pass the General Appropriations Act (GAA) into law.

It would be impolite to accuse the president of being incompetent and not being in the know – he has always been complicit in making the pork flow. The massive pork the president has doled out includes at least Php987 billion for flood control projects (2023-2025). This is on top of hundreds of billions in pesos more for roads, buildings and other pork barrel-friendly projects from his Php6 trillion in infrastructure budgets from 2023 to 2025.

To do this, the Marcos administration rolled with a budget scheme of the Duterte administration and blew it up way beyond its original scope. In 2019, the Duterte administration nearly tripled unprogrammed appropriations (UA) to Php197 billion in the NEP to create more budget space for pork barrel projects. In 2022, Congress was used to add another Php100 billion to carve out even more space for pork, with the final UA in the GAA hitting a then-record Php252 billion.

The Marcos administration pushed this idea forward and drastically increased the UA in the NEP to Php588 billion in the first budget it prepared, for 2023. Congress added another Php219 billion and the eventual UA reached a record Php807 billion in the 2023 GAA that the president signed. Subsequent years saw smaller UAs in the NEP but these all bloated while going through Congress – which for instance added Php449 billion in 2024. Not coincidentally, this was also when flood control projects boomed in number and in value – rising to Php283 billion in 2023 and to Php353 billion in 2024 – giving record pork and payoffs to corrupt legislators and contractors. In any case, the president approved and signed all these into law.

But the president also gives to himself. The previous Duterte administration started bloating the confidential and intelligence funds (CIF) budget of the Office of the President (OP), which the Marcos administration has been happy to continue. The president’s CIF has amounted to some Php16 billion since he took office in July 2022. This is estimated by assuming half of 2022’s CIF at around Php2.3 billion and adding this to the Php13.7 billion he gave himself for 2023-2025 and the Php4.6 billion to come in the 2026 budget.

The Marcos administration’s narrative arc since the president’s state of the nation address (SONA) is compelling – berating legislators in their own political home, launching the “Sumbong sa Pangulo” website to hear public complaints, declaring no flood control project budgets in 2026, forming an Independent Commission for Infrastructure (ICI), Congressional investigations bringing sensational aspects to light, and even shows of dramatic leadership changes in the Senate and House.

Calculated blindness

The public outcry is justifiably strong and the administration will seek to manage the momentum of protests. It is likely that at least some erstwhile allied mid-level legislators or maybe even some upper-rank ones in the House or Senate will be implicated. What is more certain is that anonymous bureaucrats and many contractors will be finished off with flourish.

The administration will seek to appease the public’s outrage with these gestures of accountability. However, its most compelling motivation is not to truly eradicate corruption but to gain legitimacy, discipline belligerent allies and opponents, and tighten its systems of patronage and control. This will make it difficult to avoid accusations of just being politically-motivated, performative and selective.

It is already conspicuous that the president’s so-called anti-corruption campaign ignores his closest allies and is not geared towards ridding government of all its corrupt officials. There are for instance no signs that the government’s main anti-corruption institutions will be beefed up for such a huge task – because intentionally weak capacity is the most potent enabler of corruption.

Potentially hundreds or thousands of government officials are complicit. Yet the lack of resources will stifle the Commission on Audit (COA) from auditing fraud, keep the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) willfully blind to tax evasion, and straitjacket the Ombudsman from investigating and prosecuting all the corrupt. The Commission on Elections (COMELEC) won’t be able to verify all the claimed contributions and spending of politicians, and the Civil Service Commission (CSC) will just passively accept the fictions of Statements of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth (SALNs).

The anti-corruption campaign also ignores so many other vectors of massive corruption and the abuse of public resources, authority and power for personal gain – other pork-ridden infrastructure projects like roads, bridges and buildings, billions of pesos in CIF, tax cheats among the wealthy and businesses, and billionaire regulatory capture of utilities and public services. And there is of course also the corruption in the very DNA of the presidential dynasty, its massive unexplained ill-gotten wealth, and compared to the magnitude of that crime even its relatively petty tax evasion.

The People’s Option

A simple test of any administration’s anti-corruption sincerity is the extent to which it will trust the public and media with information that helps expose corruption. For instance, a real anti-corruption crusade would give the public and media immediate and permanent online access to:

• Statements of Contributions and Expenditures (SOCE) of all national and local politicians
• SALN of all public officials
• All infrastructure project appraisal, approval and budget documents
• All Congressional insertions, changes and realignments in project funding
• All project bid evaluation reports and resolutions
• All joint venture agreements and Public-Private Partnership (PPP) contracts
• All project inspection and assessment reports
• All COA reports

Institutionalizing real, meaningful and sustained public access to complete and accurate information empowers citizens to expose wrongdoing, break the culture of impunity, and build a climate of accountability.

Experience shows that entrenched corruption is unlikely to be addressed by government actors who benefit from it. Corruption is systemic, deep-seated and widespread with bogus public servants and private firms enriching themselves at the people’s expense. Enduring reforms require pressure from outside government – and the most effective measure is a mass movement constantly demanding accountability and forcing a government that feeds off plunder to finally answer to the people.