Budget retains solons’ pet projects

THE BAGUIO chapter of Kabataan Partylist puts up a dart game at Baguio City’s Malcolm Square to protest pork barrel. The board features government officials and legislators who were implicated in the pork barrel scandal. A round of darts costs passersby P5. VINCENT CABREZA/INQUIRER NORTHERN LUZON

BAGUIO CITY – Lawmakers have submitted their list of choice projects for funding in the 2014 national budget, which, a partylist representative said, was proof that Congress has not abolished pork barrel as its leaders have advertised.

Bayan Muna Representative Carlos Isagani Zarate said all but the seven lawmakers who make up the Makabayan bloc in the House of Representatives had beaten the deadline to itemize their respective infrastructure projects that would be financed in next year’s budget.

The budget measure has passed the second reading after the House deleted lump sum appropriations meant for the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF), the congressional pork barrel. The money was allocated instead to six agencies, including the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), which received P9.65 billion.

But the lawmakers were allowed to tap the DPWH fund for five projects each, as long as they did not exceed P24.5 million, Zarate said on the sidelines of the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers (NULP) assembly here on Friday.

Zarate and NULP discussed new legal challenges that have surfaced because of the campaign against pork barrel, as well as the impact of climate change on the poor. Congress resumed its sessions on Oct. 14 and Zarate said the budget measure was expected to pass the third reading next week without a hitch.

“Who said the pork has been abolished? Congressmen still have some entitlement to funds in the new budget,” he said.

He said Makabayan’s crusade against pork barrel was intended to make Congress itemize every project being financed by the government in the annual spending plans.

He said the PDAF was a reform mechanism set in place to address a previous pork barrel scandal in 1996. But that mechanism was allegedly used by fake nongovernment organizations, most of them linked to detained businesswoman Janet Lim-Napoles, to steal funds. This has triggered a public outrage against the pork barrel system.

“What is clear [from the Napoles case] is that the PDAF can no longer be reformed. It is corruptible, so we have to end this cycle by going through the tedious process of identifying the projects where our taxes go,” Zarate said.

“It’s more work. Most lawmakers have reservations about the line budgeting process and prefer the lump sum process, so they do not paint themselves in a corner and are given free rein to choose projects after the budget is released. But putting out the projects in the budget will make politicians more dazzling. It shows the people where the money goes,” he said.

Instead of heeding the public outcry by rechanneling funds meant for the lawmakers’ PDAF, the House realigned the PDAF lump sum allocations so that the money would still finance projects picked by them, Zarate said.

“This means the 2014 budget will still have pork. I know it is not easy to change the system, so we will continue our arguments for a line-item budgeting system when Congress deliberates on the 2015 budget,” he said.

Some lawmakers were also studying how to improve the budgeting system used to divide the national wealth to ensure that no region or province is disadvantaged once pork barrel is abolished, he said. Vincent Cabreza, Inquirer Northern Luzon