House Speaker Faustino Dy III (left) receives the 2027 National Expenditure Program from Budget Secretary Kim Robert de Leon on Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2026. —Photo from the House Of Representatives
MANILA, Philippines — While the government did not heed the call of budget watchdogs to eliminate unprogrammed appropriations (UA) in the national budget, the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) said it kept the controversial appropriations at “historic low” in the 2027 National Expenditure Program (NEP).
Budget Secretary Kim Robert de Leon on Tuesday said that at P119.984 billion, the proposed UA for next year is “the lowest amount nominally of the UAs since 2019, and only accounts for 1.5 percent of the total expenditure program—the lowest ratio since 1991.”
The proposed UA by De Leon was even lower than the 3-percent of the total budget cap proposed by former Budget Secretary Rolando Toledo and the 5-percent ceiling by former DBM chief Amenah Pangandaman.
The proposed UA for 2027 was even smaller than the P150.9 billion allocation for UA under the 2026 General Appropriations Act (GAA), after President Marcos vetoed P92.5 billion, or more than one-third of the P243.4 billion of UA approved by Congress.
“Let me be clear: The unprogrammed appropriations are not blank checks. We will not allow the unprogrammed appropriations to be misused or treated as a backdoor for discretionary spending,” Marcos said in January after signing into law the 2026 GAA.
The DBM said the move to cut the UA for next year “marks a significant move toward more programmed, predictable, and transparent government spending.”
Budget watchdogs consider UA as “shadow” pork funds, as these sit outside the regular budget framework and can be released with minimal transparency. They have been calling UA unconstitutional and should be eliminated from the GAA.
According to the DBM, the proposed UA was “limited to clearly defined and necessary purposes.”
There are only four items under the proposed UAs for 2027:
- Restoration of the Fund Balances of the Philippine Deposit Insurance Corp. (PDIC): P57 billion
- Program on Risk Management: P3.6 billion
- Support to Foreign-Assisted Projects: P42.55 billion
- Conversion of National Government Advances into Subsidy for GOCCS: P8.831 billion
“This deliberate restraint reflects the administration’s push for stronger fiscal discipline, greater transparency, and increased predictability in public spending, with more government expenditures placed directly under programmed appropriations that undergo full budget scrutiny rather than relying heavily on standby funding,” the agency said.
Among these is to restore a portion of the P107.23 billion remitted by the PDIC to the national treasury in January 2025 under a special provision under the 2024 GAA that had already been struck down by the Supreme Court.
sion 1(d), Chapter XLIII of the 2024 GAA, and Department of Finance Circular No. 003-2024 for having been issued and implemented with grave abuse of discretion amounting to lack or excess of jurisdiction.
The special provision authorized the return of the fund balance or excess reserve funds of government-owned or -controlled corporations (GOCCs), particularly PDIC and the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (PhilHealth), to fund UA under the 2024 GAA.
PhilHealth, which transferred P60 billion of its unused subsidies to the national treasury, was able to retrieve its remittance in May, following the SC ruling and President Marcos’ order in September last year.
A petition challenging the constitutionality of UA is pending before the SC.
The petitioners argued that UAs allow Congress to circumvent the constitutional limit that bars lawmakers from increasing appropriations beyond the President’s proposed budget.
UA allocations surged in 2023, the first national budget approved under Marcos, reaching P807.16 billion, more than triple the P251.64 billion allocated in 2022.