Unprogrammed

My spellchecker does not accept the word “unprogrammed.”

- ALEX MAGNO

This machine has a better grasp of semantics than many of our legislators.“Unprogrammed” makes no logical sense. It should be taken as an unaccredited synonym of “invalid.”

But here we are, condemned to living with a word that has no right to be there. This is because a significant portion of our national budget goes under the heading of “unprogrammed appropriations” (UA).

While the 2026 national budget was being deliberated, a number of legislators struck brave poses, saying they will never allow UA to be enacted. This was after we discovered UA was the method used to conceal hundreds of billions of pesos inserted into the budget document and destined for corruptible projects that lined the pockets of the corrupt.

All those brave poses meant nothing. UA remained in the budget document. Legislators mumbled about this category of appropriations being a convenient accounting device to include expenditure items for which no money was available just yet. Whatever happened to the constitutional guidance that government can only allocate money it already has?

UA has not always been the peril to transparency and accountability that it has become.

During the tenure of Rodrigo Duterte, the UA was a negligible item in the budget. In 2016, 2017 and 2018, UA was a uniform two percent of the total budget. In 2019, on the eve of the pandemic, the share of UA went up to 5.4 percent. In 2020, this stayed up at 5.3 percent. In 2021, with the pandemic still lingering, the share of UA went down to 3.9 percent.