House spends P100M a year on utilities. Why ask for P1B?

• The House of Representatives has consistently requested inflated budgets for utilities and supplies, despite underspending significantly in these areas, raising concerns about the utilization of unspent funds.
• Critics, including Congressman Toby Tiangco, have highlighted the lack of transparency in the House's budget allocation and spending, suggesting that unused funds may be redirected to extraordinary expenses without proper oversight.

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In the last five years, the House’s utility expenses averaged only P108 million per year, but the chamber keeps on requesting — and approving — an inflated budget, never mind if it has already reached a billion pesos.

The underspending is a total head-scratcher, especially because it becomes uncertain how the eventual savings are being utilized.

The House enjoys fiscal autonomy, which means that unlike other government agencies, it is not required to return unspent funds to the Bureau of Treasury.

In the absence of transparency, critics warn that the funds may be prone to abuse and corruption.

Electricity, power spending

Take a look at the 2025 budget of the House of Representatives, the latest of which has been subject to complete state auditing.

The General Appropriations Act — signed by the President after it was approved separately by the House and the Senate — gave the House a total of P1.35 billion for the chamber’s water and electricity expenses.

The Commission on Audit’s report, however, learned that the chamber spent only over one-tenth of its actual utility allocation.

Did the House anticipate a major spike in utility needs for 2025 that it needed a gargantuan budget for power and water? They didn’t say so, but trends show that the House has had a habit of securing an inflated utility budget, even though it only needs a small fraction of the funds.

Supplies, too

The underspending goes beyond utilities.

The House’s budget for supplies has also tremendously increased in recent years, from P327.98 million in 2021, to a whopping P1.34 billion in 2025.

That’s even though spending for supplies averaged only P83 million annually in that half-decade.

Where did the savings go? Finding out was Congressman Toby Tiangco’s agenda when he interpellated the budget sponsor of the Commission on Audit (COA) during plenary debates in the House.

“COA’s job is to audit what was spent, what is being spent. COA doesn’t know where the savings went,” said COA budget sponsor in the House, Representative John Tracy Cagas.

For Tiangco, the practice of budget allocation does not make sense.

“Why is there high funding for supplies and utilities but are left unspent, and then the following year, you still increase the budget?” Tiangco told Rappler.

Tiangco’s suspicion is that savings from utilities and supplies are being realigned to extraordinary and miscellaneous expenses (EME).

EME cover unique demands not typically covered by standard budgets. The Department of Budget and Management says these refer to expenses incurred for meetings, seminars, public relations, and official entertainment, among other things. EME should not be used for salaries, wages, allowances, and confidential expenses.

Following those guidelines to the dot may be easier said than done. A 2011 concurrent resolution by Congress states that these funds — which fall under maintenance and other operating expenses (MOOE) — require liquidation only by way of certification.

In other words, no official receipts are needed to justify these expenses.

“Unused funds of the House don’t revert to the Treasury. However, the House Speaker can declare those unused funds as savings as provided under the Constitution and relevant General Provisions on use of savings in an annual GAAs,” budget expert Zyza Suzara told Rappler.

“These savings are typically used to provide hefty bonuses for congressional staff of the House of Representatives,” she added.

The disparity between the allocated extraordinary funds for the House and its actual expenditure is astonishing. In 2025, the overspending reached P3.74 billion. The question arises: where did the extra funds come from?

Budget transparency

Transparency on the MOOE allocated to every congressman has been among Tiangco’s recent crusades. COA, after all, has confirmed that the MOOE for districts are not the same.

Tiangco has been a thorn in the House majority during the budget process this year. He wrote to Speaker Bojie Dy in August, informing him of his decision to break ranks and become an independent, to allow him “greater latitude to raise questions…in the use of public funds.”

This is not the first time Tiangco parted ways with the majority. Close and longtime observers of the House budget process may not find it uncharacteristic of Tiangco to be a champion of budget accountability, but given his background — particularly his perceived kinship to his relative, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. — his vocal opposition to the budget proposal may come across as jarring.

Tiangco, alongside over a dozen lawmakers, voted against the 2027 spending bill approved by the House, citing the chamber’s supposed rejection of his proposed transparency reforms.

His demands are a tough ask anyway. For one, he wanted the budget of the House of Representatives to undergo actual scrutiny.

This meant a public committee hearing for the House’s 2027 appropriations, pegged at P17.6 billion. Tiangco later said the House revised the executive’s proposal and increased its own appropriations by P5 billion for the upcoming fiscal year.

The House in recent memory has not conducted committee deliberations on its own budget. The free pass is similar to what’s been given to the Office of the President, the Supreme Court, and the Office of the Vice President before Sara Duterte parted ways with the Marcos administration.

A proper committee hearing, or even plenary-level debates, could have provided clarity on various questions surrounding the House’s expenditures, including its underspent utilities and supplies funding.

Rappler has emailed Speaker Dy’s office for comment. We will update this story once we receive a reply.

Congressmen’s insertions

Since the House’s approval of the 2027 budget, the chamber has faced greater scrutiny after budget watchdogs crunched the numbers and found that the chamber included nearly P190 billion in public works funding despite the absence of published project attachments.

In simple words, the House appears to have modified the President’s budget proposal so much that it resulted in hundreds of millions to billions of pesos in insertions in congressmen’s respective districts.

Even Tiangco’s constituency isn’t spared. The tracker of People’s Budget Coalition and Better Gov says that P338 million in insertions were made to the district engineering office covering Malabon and Navotas, raising its total funding to P1.12 billion.

Tiangco has disclosed a P2.28-billion public works funding for Navotas, up from the P1.61 billion that he said was included in the executive’s original proposal. But Tiangco insists the increase is backed by project details, and is in line with what the Regional Development Council and civil society organizations originally approved for his city. 

But the seeming top offender for the 2027 budget is no less than the President’s son himself, Majority Leader Sandro Marcos. The DPWH engineering office in the Ilocos Norte district he represents has been allocated P4.74 billion in public works projects, up from the P369 million that was originally proposed by the executive.

In short, the House has increased his district’s budget by P4.38 billion. The younger Marcos has not provided an explanation for the budget adjustment.

The staggering figures underscore the alarming need for transparency. The watchdogs based their analysis on figures from engineering offices, but they sometimes cover numerous constituencies.

This means that the exact allocation per congressional district, and the insertions made by party-list lawmakers, cannot be fully determined, unless the House opens up its books to the public.

But does the House really have the guts — or decency — to truly pierce its longstanding veil of secrecy? – Rappler.com