New name, same animal

Revelation of a “leadership fund” distributed to “all senators” under the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) budget raises troubling questions whether the country has quietly resurrected the pork barrel system that the Supreme Court already declared unconstitutional.

Former Public Works Secretary Manuel Bonoan told the Sandiganbayan that “all senators” in the previous Congress received at least P500 million each from a P24-billion leadership fund included in the agency’s 2025 budget. These allocations were reportedly intended to accommodate senators’ preferred or “pet” infrastructure projects, with the distribution subject to the discretion of then-Senate President Juan Miguel Zubiri.

Of course, the obligatory press statements of denial by several senators, including Zubiri, marked the beginning of obscuring issue. Allocating public funds for legislators’ favorite projects is now automatically deemed source of corruption.

Sen. Panfilo Lacson aptly described the arrangement as a “worse version of the outlawed pork barrel system,” particularly because lawmakers could influence allocations even while the national budget was still being prepared. And the possibility of additional insertions after the National Expenditure Program is submitted to Congress only compounds the problem.

Lacson made an important distinction: budget insertions are not automatically evidence of corruption. Legislators have a legitimate constitutional role in scrutinizing and amending the proposed national budget. But when billions of pesos can be steered toward projects identified or influenced by individual lawmakers, the system creates opportunities for favoritism, political patronage and misuse of public funds.

That danger becomes even more alarming in light of the controversy surrounding billions of pesos worth of anomalous and even non-existent flood-control projects. As torrential monsoon rains again submerged Metro Manila and major cities in Luzon, Filipinos were reminded that huge infrastructure allocations do not necessarily translate into effective public protection.

The lesson is straightforward: public infrastructure must be determined by transparent, objective and technically defensible priorities—not by political influence.

If the leadership fund exists primarily to give senators a pot of money for projects in their preferred areas, then it deserves far more scrutiny. Congress should not merely investigate where the money went. It should examine whether such a mechanism has any legitimate place in a democratic budgeting process.

Pork barrel was abolished for good reason. Rebranding it as a “leadership fund” should not make it acceptable.