According to a good friend in UP Diliman, almost a year before he was appointed Budget Secretary, Kim Robert de Leon wrote a paper titled “Programming for Uprogrammed: Unbundling the Unprogrammed Appropriations”, tracing the origins of unprogrammed appropriations (UA) in the Philippine budget. He was then an assistant professor at the UP National College of Public Administration and Governance. His conclusion was blunt: the national government does not need UA to function. He argued that any funding requirement that the General Appropriations Act (GAA) cannot cover should instead be addressed by Congress through a supplemental appropriation bill, a route that brings both the source of the money and the specific items of spending into the open for lawmakers and the public alike.
That argument is worth revisiting now that De Leon is the one signing the National Expenditure Program. The 2027 NEP, submitted to the House on August 11, 2026, still contains ₱111.984 billion in UA, less than in past years and, by the DBM’s own framing, the lowest share of total spending since 1991, though UA remains. The question his own scholarship raises is not whether UA has been trimmed but whether trimming a mechanism he once called unnecessary is a genuine reform or a managed retreat from a harder argument he was right to make.
UA was originally designed as a narrow, self-limiting instrument: standby authority that could be tapped only if specific triggers were met, such as revenue collections exceeding targets, new loan proceeds materializing, or similar contingencies. In principle, it’s a reasonable hedge against the unpredictability of forecasting a national budget year in advance.
In practice, it stopped functioning as a hedge and began functioning as a second, less-supervised budget. Congressional research has documented UA ballooning to account for a large share of new appropriations, accompanied by a rise in lump-sum, loosely itemized allocations. That expansion is not incidental to the flood-control corruption scandal that has dominated Philippine budget politics over the past year, as several flood-control and infrastructure projects that later became subjects of controversy and investigation were funded through unprogrammed appropriations, further intensifying scrutiny of the mechanism.
Moreover, a pending Supreme Court petition argues that the mechanism lets Congress sidestep a constitutional limit that bars it from increasing the President’s proposed budget, because items conditioned on uncertain future revenue can effectively expand appropriations well beyond what was originally submitted. Members of the Supreme Court have raised questions regarding the constitutional implications of the mechanism during proceedings. The department says it would have to comply with such a ruling immediately, mid-budget-cycle, if it lands while the 2027 budget is being deliberated.
The DBM’s defense of the 2027 UA figure rests on two claims: it’s the smallest amount in years, and it’s earmarked for “clearly defined and necessary purposes,” primarily restoring a fund balance previously remitted by the Philippine Deposit Insurance Corporation and covering foreign-assisted projects. Both claims are true as far as they go, and a smaller, better-labeled UA is unambiguously better than a larger, vaguer one. But smaller and better-labeled is not the same as transparent, as De Leon’s paper described it.
Two risks survive the downsizing. First, the funding sources themselves are thin. PDIC and PhilHealth surplus remittances are non-recurring windfalls, not a durable revenue base. Building any part of next year’s spending plan around restoring a one-off balance is a stopgap, not a structural fix. Also, it says the department is still leaning on the same kind of contingent, excess-revenue-dependent financing that got UA into trouble in the first place. Second, the more consequential exposure isn’t what DBM proposes in the NEP but what happens to that list during the bicameral conference committee, where past UA items have been inserted, expanded, or swapped with minimal public visibility between the version Congress debates and the version that gets signed. A restrained NEP submission constrains the Executive’s opening bid and does very little to constrain what legislators do with the line once negotiations start.
DBM’s leadership has pushed back against scrapping UA entirely, arguing that the tool itself isn’t the problem, but rather poor implementation controls. They also contend that removing it risks stalling foreign-assisted and loan-contingent projects that can’t be sized until financing is confirmed. That’s a fair operational point, and it’s the strongest version of the counter-argument: some genuine uncertainty in financing is unavoidable, and a total ban on contingent appropriations could simply push the same problem into messier workarounds.
But De Leon’s own 2025 paper already answered this. A supplemental appropriation bill accommodates exactly this kind of contingency, funding that becomes necessary only when a condition is met, without abandoning line-item, pre-disbursement scrutiny by Congress. The difference isn’t whether contingent financing exists but whether the public sees the specific project and the specific funding source debated in the open before money moves, versus after, via a Special Allotment Release Order (SARO) the DBM itself issues once it decides a trigger has been satisfied. That is precisely the accountability gap his paper identified, and it does not close just because the total UA envelope shrinks.
There is nothing inherently dubious about a smaller UA figure in isolation. What’s dubious is the gap between what the incoming DBM chief argued was structurally necessary (abolition in favor of supplemental bills) and what his department is actually proposing: a more disciplined version of the same instrument he said the government could do without. That gap may be entirely defensible as political pragmatism: eliminating UA outright would require legislative buy-in De Leon doesn’t unilaterally control, and a 1.5-percent NEP figure is a real improvement over recent years. But pragmatism is a different claim from the one his paper made, and it leaves open the risks that made UA controversial to begin with: thin, one-off funding sources, a pending constitutional challenge that could force an abrupt mid-year rewrite of the budget, and a bicameral process that has repeatedly shown it can turn a modest, well-labeled UA list into something much larger and much less traceable by the time it reaches the President’s desk.
If De Leon's academic argument was right, as the flood-control scandal suggests it largely was, then the honest test of this budget isn't how small the UA number starts. It's whether it survives Congress at the same size, for the same purposes, and with the same paper trail it left behind for the DBM.
That test hasn't been run yet.
