The Php6.8 trillion national government budget for 2026 just signed into law by the president clearly shows that pork barrel politics remains the overriding fiscal motivation, rather than national development through real social and economic transformation.
Public and civil society scrutiny of the 2026 budget was indeed unprecedented but any feeling of progress must be tempered by how the seeming improvement is from the very low base of decades of entrenched fiscal opacity. Also, critically, the stubborn persistence of pork confirms that greater visibility of numbers clearly does not necessarily constitute meaningful reform.
Amid the Marcos Jr administration’s anti-corruption posture, public pressure influenced the 2026 budget with some reallocation of spending items. However, this was not according to any coherent strategy for national development or sustained social and economic transformation, and pork barrel logic prevailed.
An estimated half a trillion pesos remain tied to pork-risky road and other infrastructure projects. These are embedded in the ‘allocables’ and ‘non-allocables’ of the National Expenditure Program (NEP) submitted by the President to Congress but whose details are deliberately kept from the public.
The hyped cut in pork barrel projects was meanwhile not really reform but a redistribution of discretion. Pork barrel was merely shifted from “hard” infrastructure projects towards “soft” pork barrel projects now totaling some Php150 billion for emergency aid (Php63.9 billion), medical assistance (Php51.6 billion), informal workers (Php22.4 billion), and farmers and fisherfolk (Php10 billion). These address immediate needs but are largely consumption-oriented, fragmented, and vulnerable to patronage rather than embedded in a coherent social protection or productivity-enhancing framework.
The president also keeps Php4.6 billion in confidential and intelligence funds that remain largely exempt from meaningful oversight. The final budget even increases the local government pork dispensed to Php57.9 billion.
Given the depth of the economy’s problems, each annual budget should be a deliberate step toward structural transformation – instead, long-standing mispriorities are once again reproduced. There is still underinvestment in agriculture and no investment in Filipino manufacturing. The economy will not generate sufficient decent work without substantial investments in these sectors and informality and joblessness will persist.
There is continued neglect of universal public provision of education, health and housing as well as of transport, water, and electricity. The people will suffer expensive social services and utilities without these.
In this context, the partial Php92.5 billion veto of unprogrammed appropriations is not so much a substantive fiscal correction but a largely performative gesture aimed at projecting anti-corruption credentials without altering the underlying architecture of discretionary spending.
Contrary to official claims, the budget does not mark a shift toward a genuinely “people-centered development agenda”. It remains oriented toward short-term political survival rather than long-term development outcomes.
As with previous budgets, it reinforces a consumption-led and patronage-driven growth model that stifles domestic productivity and deepens poverty, inequality, and dependency. Strategic national development – anchored on strong domestic agriculture, Filipino industrialization, and universal public services – remains secondary, or even absent, within the overall fiscal framework.
