Legislate unprogrammed appropriations – SC justice

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December 15, 2025 | 12:00am

MANILA, Philippines — In order to prevent more budget insertions in future budget deliberations, it would be best if both houses of bicameral Congress “legislate” and pass a “special appropriations law” specifically for unprogrammed funds.

This was the proposal made by Justice Ramon Paul Hernando, who agreed with his 14 Supreme Court colleagues to declare unconstitutional the executive department’s impounding of P60 billion from Philippine Health Insurance Corp. funds, which the high court ordered returned to PhilHealth coffers.

In Hernando’s 33-page concurring and dissenting opinion – the dissent of which delved on the unconstitutionality of unprogrammed appropriations as a source of corruption – the senior magistrate noted that such funds “do not relate to any appropriation for expenditures” and are thus “prohibited” in the charter.

“Instead, unprogrammed appropriations should be legislated through a special appropriations law,” he wrote, specifically citing Article 6 Section 25(2) of the 1987 Constitution, that bars any provision from inclusion in the General Appropriations Bill, unless there is specific particularity.

“At the core of this controversy lies an undeniable truth: Unprogrammed funds in the GAA (General Appropriations Act) are unconstitutional. They create an unregulated space where discretion replaces discipline and where the temptations of greed and corruption inevitably find room to operate,” Hernando said.

In his review of congressional wisdom where he cited deliberations among lawmakers, which included constitutional commission hearings in the 1935 Constitution and the Administrative Code of 1987, Hernando also discovered “structural defects” in unprogrammed funds.

“As presently conceived, they have no place in a constitutional order that requires appropriations to rest on defined sources of financing and prohibits riders in the GAA. Fidelity to that trust requires that every peso collected for health be spent for health and for no other purpose,” he reiterated.

First-term Rep. Robert Nazal, of party-list Bagong Henerasyon, welcomed and commended Hernando’s dissenting opinion, saying it “strengthens” their “long-standing call to remove unprogrammed funds from the national budget starting 2026.”

“Justice Hernando’s opinion makes clear what we have been warning all along – this mechanism is prone to abuse and should no longer appear in the 2026 budget,” Nazal said.