BUDGETS are the disappearing acts of governance.
Journalists write a lot about them and commentators have a field day speculating when Congress and the local governments deliberate on them.
Yet once the national and local government budgets are signed, though, these practically vanish from the public’s radar.
I don’t mean that the funds these budgets represent all get lost or squandered, although the audit commission has given us many examples of how public budgets sometimes don’t make the leap from the page (or screens) to actual public goods and services.
What I mean is that hardly anyone, save for your most avid news consumers and policy wonks, will pay attention or ask how well government agencies are sticking to their budgets.
I bet more people can tell us the names of the celebrity couple who wed in a supposedly secret civil rite over the weekend, than the total amount of this year’s national budget. Or the total budget their city or municipality has to work with in 2020.
There’s a price to pay for this inattention.
When we skip over stories about public budgets, we miss the chance to push for more resources to meet our communities’ most urgent needs.
We could lose, for example, a flood control project because the lawmaker who’s supposed to represent us would rather ask for a pedestrian overpass. Which project do we need more? Which would serve the greater good? And when was the last time your district lawmaker took the time to tell your community what their projects and legislative priorities were?
When we choose to ignore important discussions like how public funds are divided, we miss intriguing little details like what the Philippine Star buried on page B6 last Saturday, under the obituaries.
In her story, journalist Mary Grace Padin reported that the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) had assured that all changes in the 2020 national budget “will be subject to proper documentation requirements to promote prudent fiscal management.”
Wait, what?
In case it has escaped your notice, as it did mine, Congress introduced as much as P83 billion into this year’s P4.1 trillion budget.
What sort of “documentation requirements” did our lawmakers present—before Congress decided to add that P83 billion to the national budget—that the DBM now finds itself having to promise that the necessary paperwork will get done?
If you’ve ever had to propose a budget in the private sector, you’ll know how much information you have to prepare: how you have to break down each project into its objectives, activities and resources. How you have to be ready to justify each cost estimate. The better your CFO is at their job, the more preparation you need to do.
You have to wonder how an P83 billion insertion made it into this year’s national budget, apparently without “documentation requirements,” and who stands to benefit most.
If Sen. Panfilo Lacson is correct, Cebu is among the top seven provinces with the biggest shares of this mysterious congressional insertion. In a press statement that GMA News Online published in December, the senator said that Cebu stood to gain as much as P410 million worth of projects.
May we ask our lawmakers from Cebu if that P410 million figure is correct and, if so, what projects it would pay for? Would they like to respond to Senator Lacson’s claim that the 2020 budget is riddled with “lump sums and vaguely described projects?”
Part of the challenge of getting more citizens to pay attention to public budgets is making stories about them sexier. With each budget season, journalists who watch and write about the government are reminded to “make the important interesting.”
We don’t often succeed.