DESPITE THE transparency theatrics, political capture of the budget remains intact. Hundreds of billions of pesos are still embedded in pork-like discretionary allocations, fragmented line items, and executive-legislative patronage channels.
IBON Foundation Executive Director Sonny Africa opined that “once the anti-corruption spectacle subsides, it will be clear that what remains is a fiscal structure oriented toward short-term political survival rather than long-term development.”
JUST FOR A SHOW
He said that as with previous budgets, the 2026 budget reinforces a consumption-led and patronage-driven growth model that stifles domestic productivity and deepens poverty, inequality, and dependency.
“Domestic agriculture, Filipino industrialization, and strong public provision of education, health, housing, transport, water, and electricity remain secondary concerns at best,” he stressed.
The P6.8 trillion 2026 national budget generated immense political drama and moral spectacle in the second half of the year, consuming a large share of the public’s attention.
“Yet, in this moment of pause — after Congress’ ratification and as the budget awaits the president’s signature – an unsettling thought rises to the surface. For all the noise, the budget remains strikingly hollow in terms of genuine developmental transformation.”
NO DEVELOPMENT TALK
Africa noted that discussion of the national budget for 2026 has been engulfed in corruption exposés, pork barrel controversies, and public moral drama — and much political posturing. The issues raised are certainly serious and deserve scrutiny.
Yet the fixation on scandal has also obscured the more fundamental question of whether the budget meaningfully addresses the country’s deep and persistent development problems, which remains largely unaddressed.
In quantitative terms, the 2026 budget is only marginally expansionary. Its 7.8 percent growth is smaller than the increase in the 2025 budget, below the 10.6 percent historical average over the past four decades, and far short of what is needed to stimulate robust growth or drive structural change.
“At a time of weak domestic production, fragile employment, and rising vulnerability, the budget’s scale and ambition fall short,” Africa said.
PRESERVING THE PORK
Qualitatively, some of the most blatant pork barrel allocations were trimmed or reworked, but the overall spending framework remains fundamentally unchanged.
The budget does not decisively pivot toward building agricultural and industrial capacity, generating decent jobs, reducing inequality, or expanding public provision of essential services and utilities.
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.
OBLIVIOUS TO POVERTY
As it is, the proposed budget is structurally oblivious to how poverty, hunger and joblessness have been growing since the start of the Marcos administration.
Since June 2022, the number of poor Filipino families has grown by two million and of hungry families by 3.3 million, according to Social Weather Station (SWS) surveys.
Adjusting for seasonality and including discouraged workers, IBON estimates at least a million more Filipinos have become jobless.
Joblessness, poverty and hunger stem from how agriculture and manufacturing have collapsed under the Marcos Jr administration. Agriculture’s share in gross domestic product (GDP) has gone down to just 7.7% of GDP and of manufacturing to just 17% in the first three quarters of 2025 — compared to 8.9% and 18.7%, respectively, in 2022.
ANTI-PORK HYPE
The much-publicized P1.35 trillion allocation for education, supposedly equivalent to 4.4% of GDP, is “historically symbolic but structurally incomplete.”
It is an important starting point, but remains to be seen whether such will be sustained long enough in subsequent budgets to reverse learning losses, address teacher shortages, upgrade facilities, and link education to industrial and technological policy.
Without continuity, the gains will be fleeting.
More budget increases should go beyond boosting salaries and administrative costs to also include more sustained transformative investments in classrooms, research, and technical capacity.
EDUCATION SPENDING
Education spending becomes far more transformative when it is explicitly linked to an employment strategy and a coherent Filipino industrialization strategy.
Absent this integration, higher allocations will deliver social benefits but remain economically underleveraged — producing graduates but without expanding productive opportunities at home.
The P255 billion realignment away from the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) is potentially positive, given the agency’s long-standing association with pork barrel politics and rent-seeking.
But, the shift appears narrowly focused on flood control projects, while other pork-risky allocations for roads and major infrastructure remain largely untouched.
FROM HARD TO SOFT
There is also strong reason to suspect that this is less a reform than a redistribution of discretion – pork barrel from hard infrastructure projects was just redirected towards soft pork barrel projects.
There are huge increases in budget items politicians will distribute as largesse.
The Assistance to Individuals in Crisis Situation (AICS) goes up to P63.9 billion, Medical Assistance to Indigent and Financially-Incapacitated Patients (MAIFIP) to P51.6 billion, Tulong Panghanapbuhay sa Ating Disadvantaged Workers Program (TUPAD) to P22.4 billion, and Presidential Assistance for Farmers and Fisherfolk Program to P10 billion.
REDIRECTED PORK
Some hard pork actually remains equally hard but were just shifted from the controversial DPWH — such as P33 billion in farm-to-market roads for the Department of Agriculture (DA), which woefully lacks the capacity to implement these.
Developmental impact hinges not on where funds are removed, but on where they ultimately land — especially when controversy is selectively tolerated. It is also suspicious that the President kept the P4.6 billion in confidential and intelligence funds for his office intact.
ANTICIPATING 2028
Politically, the President will be signing a budget that projects an image of restraint against traditional political meddling and patronage. Yet Congress deliberately framed these safeguards too weakly and too vaguely to be effective.
For one, they did nothing to address the hundreds of billions of pesos in pork barrel “allocables” and “non-allocables” already embedded in the National Expenditure Program (NEP) even before congressional insertions in the House and Senate.
It is more likely that the budget approved by Congress will be signed largely intact, perhaps accompanied by a few symbolic vetoes as another display of reform.
POLITICAL SURVIVAL
Substantively, the budget signals a clear strategy of elite consolidation rather than of succumbing to popular mobilization.
Executive discretion and congressional largesse are preserved to secure short-term political stability among allies, not to advance long-term national development.
As the administration enters 2026 with an eye on 2028, it does so with a budget that manages politics but not development. Designed for political survival, it paradoxically leaves the government more exposed to public anger as corruption persists and growth remains shallow, exclusionary, and immiserating.
FUTURE EXPECTATIONS
The President’s political calculation with his allies in the Senate and HOR have actually left little space to discuss chronic food insecurity and high prices, rural backwardness and industrial stagnation, or worsening joblessness and informality.
The budget that will soon be signed into law is rhetorically reformist but fundamentally politically functional, achieved at the expense of social and economic transformation.
It reinforces the very structural weaknesses it claims to confront — and in doing so, sets the stage for further political turbulence and economic drift in the year ahead.