SC: Filing raps over budget hikes next step to exact accountability

MANILA, Philippines — The Supreme Court on Wednesday said that any criminal or administrative liability in the illegal increase and transfer of funds by lawmakers in the 2024 and 2025 national budget should be filed in the appropriate tribunals.

Camille Ting, the high tribunal’s spokesperson, said that proper cases should be filed against certain government officials to exact accountability in the substantial increase in the proposed budget in the last two years that was declared unconstitutional.

The government also may also challenge the Supreme Court decision by way of a motion for reconsideration as it is not yet final and executory.

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The Supreme Court, in its Oct. 7 ruling made public on Tuesday, declared as illegal the transfer of budget items by the Congress to unprogrammed appropriations (UA) that led to a significant bloating of the General Appropriations Act (GAA) for the years 2024 and 2025.

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The high tribunal, whose main decision was written by Senior Associate Justice Marvic Leonen, stressed that the UA peaked at P449.5 billion in 2024, the highest since UAs were created in 1989.

READ: SC: Congress can’t bloat president’s budget

In the case of the 2024 GAA, the increase was brought by the addition of 43 new line items worth P303.1 billion alone. 

Some of the items with huge funding under this amount are “priority social programs for health, including health facilities enhancement program, social welfare and development, higher education, and technical vocational education (P59 billion); and a “government counterpart of foreign-assisted projects (P51.5 billion).

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The Supreme Court also struck down for being illegal the special road fund, which was augmented by P17.99 billion in the 2025 GAA. 

The parts of the national budget that were declared unconstitutional, however, could no longer be returned to public coffers because the high tribunal invoked the doctrine of operative fact, a legal principle that spares a law or an executive act from retroactive application of a court decision.

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Meanwhile, only a key provision of the current 2026 GAA was struck down by the Supreme Court for being a lumpsum appropriation that “lacked sufficient standards.” /mr