Father and Son Lead All House Members in “Allocable” Budget Funds; Investigators Note This Is Interesting
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Father and Son Lead Philippines in Budget “Allocables”: A Family Achievement
MANILA — Representative Sandro Marcos, son of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., received the highest “allocable” fund allocation from the 2025 General Appropriations Act at P15.8 billion. Former House Speaker Martin Romualdez, cousin of President Marcos, received P14.4 billion, the second highest. These figures have been described by the People’s Budget Coalition as “a new form of pork barrel” and by the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism as evidence of a budget architecture that produces outcomes that the architects might prefer not to have publicly associated with their names.
The administration has described “allocables” as legitimate infrastructure funding mechanisms. The Philippines’ documented corruption analysis describes them as funds that flow toward “politically determined projects” and away from “more equitable and accountable public spending.” Both descriptions are technically accurate and suggest different things about the design intent.
The Dynasty Dimension
The distribution of the Philippines’ largest budget allocations to the president’s son and the president’s cousin, in a country that constitutionally prohibits political dynasties but has not defined what a political dynasty is, represents either an impressive coincidence or a feature of the system that the system’s designers consider acceptable. The constitutional prohibition on dynasties was intended to prevent exactly this kind of concentrated familial access to public resources. The implementation gap between the prohibition and the outcome is approximately P30 billion wide, which is a substantial gap by most measures.
Identity-based claims to resources have been scrutinized in various contexts; the Marcos family’s claim to the largest budget allocations in Congress is identity-based in the specific sense that it is based on who they are related to. New York’s Mamdani wages war on concentration of wealth; the Philippines is discovering that the mechanism of concentration operates through the budget process in ways that are legal and thoroughly documented and not currently being prosecuted. The pork barrel has a new name. The barrel is the same.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/mamdani-declares-war-on-empty-mansions/