Leadership Funds: another alias for scamming?

Thieves don’t sleep. The police may stop them on their tracks today. But trust them to have a new modus the next day.

The official nomenclature of congressional “pork barrel”—the main course on the menu of kleptocracy—has evolved over the years. The new kleptocrats in government (to distinguish them from the old looters who made their mark during the dictatorial rule of Ferdinand E. Marcos, Sr.), started with the Countrywide Development Fund (CDF), followed by the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF), then the “allocables” and “unprogrammed appropriations.” The latest, revealed by former Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) Secretary Manuel Bonoan under auth, is called “Leadership Funds.” While at this, we hear how the confidential funds of Vice President Sara Duterte have become a scam, in the words of Atty. Lorna Kapunan.

Both the CDF and PDF are post-enactment pork. This means members of Congress (the House of Representatives and the Senate) are given access to lump-sum allocations following the enactment of a budget law (officially called the General Appropriations Act, or GAA). This pork is also called a discretionary fund because congressmen and senators can freely identify, at their discretion, projects that the fund may support. Access is by no means perfunctory, which means it pays to be allied with those who wield power. Alliance building is best done in secret, but somehow the public learns how pork attracts flies when politicians shift en masse from the defeated partisan groups to the conquering coalitions or blocs. This has been a merry cycle for the well-entrenched political families: every budget year spins fresh opportunities for thieves.

Estimates show that up to 60 percent of project funds are lost to corruption. The taxpayer is worse off when the money is used to fund ghost projects, like what supposedly happened in many of the flood control projects. With ghost projects, the thieves walk away with everything.

The thieves are good at organizing. The public may justifiably point fingers at politicians for the scale of corruption in government. Yet, a pillage is better done with equally skillful accomplices. The Napoles scam—whose foul odor led to the filing of court cases—involved the combined work of bureaucrats, private groups and individuals, and politicians.

But the next day the Supreme Court outlawed the PDAF, the scammers were back with something new. The congressional insertions, differently labelled as “allocables,” “unprogrammed appropriations,” and now “leadership funds,” are different only because of their bigger and more obscene size. If the Napoles scam ripped the taxpayers off in billions, the congressional insertions occasioned the looting of public funds in trillions, reckoned from the time they became fashionable in 2016.

The "allocables" and “Leadership Funds” are also different from the CDF and PDAF because they can be classified as pre-enactment insertions. The scamming shifted upstream. Instead of inserting pet projects during or after congressional deliberations, the lawmakers negotiate "allocables" directly with executive departments (like the DPWH) during the budget preparation phase.

The thieves cook the allocations with the President's National Expenditure Program before the pot gets served as an executive budget, ready for congressional review. While the labels, terminologies, or nomenclatures have changed, and the mechanisms shifted from explicit lump sums to pre-budget insertions, the underlying goal remained the same: enabling individual legislators to control discretionary spending. From Napoles to the allocables, the players are also the same: politicians, bureaucrats, private contractors (although the beneficial owners of some contractor firms have been exposed as either bureaucrats or politicians).

The case of the leadership fund, recently shared by Mr. Bonoan before the Sandiganbayan hearing the malversation case against former Senator Ramon “Bong” Revilla, pertains to an operation where the DPWH parks an amount of Php24 billion for the senators to splurge. The DPWH tells the senators to just send the list (of works projects they wanted funded), and it does the rest. The speculation is that kickbacks from the operation also had to be agreed by the bandits.

The leadership fund, disowned by Malacañang, purportedly was inserted during the congressional deliberation of the 2025 GAA. The fund champions equality within the 24-member Senate, as each senator, Bonoan claims, had a hypothetical allocation of at least half a million. Some senators who took part in that deliberation promptly disputed the allegation, as if being a beneficiary of budgetary allocations summarily tags one a suspect of wrongdoing. But that’s the context of corruption being perceived by society as normal; better for them to offer an alternative accounting that assures diligence before a skeptical and scandal-weary public. The records show that only two senators—Risa Hontiveros and Koko Pimentel—rejected the bicameral report that carried the insertions.

Malacañang, for its part, reacted to the Bonoan tale by denying that President Bongbong Marcos was aware such a fund ever existed. Presidential Spokesperson Claire Castro also assured the public that she sees nothing irregular in it as long as the funded projects benefit the people.

At any rate, a president who is not on top of what happens under him is incompetent. Or an alter-ego who reports to know one is a fraudster. Or both Bonoan and Castro are less than candid and forthright in expressing their thoughts. It is always irregular when legislators perform executive tasks; it has only appeared regular because the post-dictatorship era has made it a normal practice.

Speaking of normal, manipulating the language of fraud has reached beyond comfortable levels. Leadership is in no way being promoted by the leadership fund, which makes one wonder if taking liberties with aliases has spilled over from the walls of the Senate impeachment court that hears the Duterte case.

Kapunan, in a side comment, called the aliases tell-tale signs of a scam. The court ruled that the damning word be deleted from its records. What the court does is immaterial. The public sees in government something worse: an inside job robbery, as Senator Ping Lacson lamented it is.