THERE’S A BUDGET INSERTION IN YOUR DISTRICT, AND YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT IT?

Someone told me in the comments, “Your guess is as good as mine.”

That reminded me of Under Siege 2: Dark Territory, the 1995 Steven Seagal movie. Marcus Penn, played by Everett McGill, delivers a line I’ve never forgotten: “Assumption is the mother of all fuck ups.”

I see that habit too often in our political discussions. We Filipinos love to assume, jump to conclusions and guess. Look at our situation. It’s so fucked up that even figuring out where to start fixing it is difficult. Yet we keep passing off guesses as facts.

At Morning Coffee Thoughts, I try to check what the records actually say. Sometimes that means finding out that my first reaction was wrong. Sometimes it means discovering that the explanation an official gave doesn’t answer the question.

Congresswoman Gerville Luistro’s statement about reported budget insertions sent me looking.

Asked about ₱1.31 billion in additions for the DPWH engineering office serving her district, she said she wanted to see the list and check it. She had been told that the executive’s proposed amount and the House amount were nearly the same.

Check it? How come you don’t know?

I had heard versions of that answer before. A congressman gets named in a budget controversy, then says he didn’t request the projects or doesn’t know who added them.

I also had to admit something: I didn’t fully understand how that could happen. I knew Congress could amend the budget. I didn’t know enough about who handled those changes, what district representatives were shown, or when they were supposed to check.

Since I don’t like to guess, I study. So, with a hot Americano beside my laptop, I started looking through the reports and budget documents.

OTHER CONGRESSMEN HAD SAID IT TOO

Oriental Mindoro Representative Arnan Panaligan said in August 2025 that flood-control projects had entered the enacted budget without being requested by or coordinated with his office. He said he belonged to neither the small committee handling amendments nor the bicameral conference committee.

The increases reported for the province were large. Its proposed flood-control budget for 2023 went from ₱605.5 million to about ₱1.42 billion in the enacted budget. For 2024, roughly ₱1.72 billion became ₱4.19 billion.

Then there was Laguna Representative Benjamin Agarao Jr. At a December 2025 hearing of the Independent Commission for Infrastructure, he said he had requested around ₱120 million to ₱150 million in projects. Asked about roughly ₱800 million in additions, he said he didn’t know who put them there.

He said he learned about projects when they appeared in the General Appropriations Act, the budget already signed into law.

That was what bothered me. By the time the money appears in an enacted budget, the decisions have already been made. Someone proposed those projects. Someone accepted the changes. The amounts passed through a process handled by public officials.

How does the person representing the affected district end up finding out afterward?

TIANGCO DESCRIBED HOW IT COULD HAPPEN

I have to admit that writing this part made me uncomfortable. I’m quoting people I do not trust at all. But they said what they said, and it is relevant to what I’m trying to understand. My distrust doesn’t give me a reason to leave their statements out. I wish more people with direct knowledge would speak about how these changes happen.

Navotas Representative Toby Tiangco offered an explanation during the 2025 budget controversy.

He described “parking,” where money is placed in another district through an arrangement, and “sagasa,” where projects are placed in a district without the local representative’s agreement or knowledge. He linked his allegations to former appropriations chairman Zaldy Co.

That gave me something more concrete than a theory about forgetful congressmen. Tiangco was alleging that people handling amendments could put projects into another lawmaker’s district.

The budget process allows changes at several stages. The executive submits its proposal. The House and Senate amend it. A bicameral conference committee reconciles their versions before both chambers ratify the result and send it to the President. The district representative is not personally handling every change along the way.

But representatives need access to those changes before they vote. And access itself had become a fight.

In August 2025, Tiangco demanded the previous budget’s small-committee amendment report. Appropriations chair Mikaela Suansing disputed the need for the separate report he wanted.

By October 2026, the House was using a Budget Amendments Review Subcommittee, or BARSc. Minority lawmakers were still complaining. Antonio Tinio raised the absence of its report. Another complaint concerned roughly 4,000 pages received at around 2 a.m. House leaders pointed to livestreamed proceedings and the substitute bill.

Try checking thousands of pages delivered in the early morning. Then imagine explaining to your constituents why a project appeared in your district and you missed it.

That is a failure Congress can fix: show the changes, identify who requested them and give members time to read them.

LUISTRO SAID SHE WOULD CHECK. HERE’S WHAT I FOUND.

Luistro’s case offered a specific figure to test.

Using BetterGov.ph’s data, I reconstructed 77 project entries worth ₱1,307,771,000 that its comparison flagged as insertion candidates. That matches the count and rounded amount reported in the People’s Budget Coalition’s findings, although I did not obtain PBC’s original 77-row list to compare the entries individually. I checked the titles and amounts in our reconstructed set against the House’s second-reading and third-reading budget documents.

The first thing I found changed how I understood the accusation.

The Batangas 2nd District Engineering Office covers both the second and fifth legislative districts. Luistro represents the second. The entire engineering office’s figure cannot simply be put under her name.

Of the 77 entries, 47 explicitly named towns in her district. They amounted to ₱598 million. Another 14, worth ₱345 million, named Batangas City, which belongs to the fifth district. I left 16 road-section entries worth ₱364.771 million unassigned rather than guess their legislative coverage. The ₱598 million is therefore a subtotal of clearly named locations, not a complete district total.

Luistro herself acknowledged the shared engineering office, according to a later report. She also said her duties in the impeachment trial had affected her participation in the budget process and that she would coordinate with the appropriations committee about the reported insertions.

Her earlier statement was that she had already asked the engineering office about the ₱1.3 billion and wanted the list to understand its basis. That does not tell us which individual projects or changes she already knew about.

Among the entries I checked were a ₱50 million municipal hall project in San Luis, a ₱50 million road project in Sitio Malabnig in Lobo, a ₱23 million covered court at Lobo Senior High School and a ₱20 million Super Health Center in Mabini.

The 77 entries remain comparison candidates, not a final finding that every project was entirely new. Verifying their presence in the House documents does not rule out a renamed or reorganized counterpart in the executive proposal. The downloadable research lists them so readers can inspect the work.

I also found changes to existing projects:

Nearly unchanged totals would still leave these individual changes unexplained.

The Malimatoc II barangay hall’s proposed amount was halved. The Banoyo covered court’s amount doubled. The San Pascual road gained ₱5 million.

You could keep an overall budget almost unchanged while making very different decisions about what gets built and where. These three comparisons show changes to those projects; they do not settle whether the complete district total was nearly unchanged.

I could identify the changes in the documents. I could not identify who requested them. The project entries I checked did not supply that information.

Luistro and the House can pursue that missing record. They should explain the projects and amendments themselves.

WHAT BECAME OF THE EARLIER CASES?

I also wanted to know whether the earlier denials led anywhere.

Panaligan had written to then Public Works Secretary Manuel Bonoan on July 31, 2024, about a damaged flood-control project in Naujan. So there was a documented complaint about the work. The letter did not explain who had added its funding.

In Agarao’s case, the infrastructure commission identified ten flood-control projects worth about ₱700 million and gave him seven working days to report on their status. I did not find a published follow-up showing what he submitted or what the commission concluded.

His timeline also needed checking. He was out of the House from 2022 to 2025, when his daughter Jam held the seat. He returned in July 2025. He could not have personally voted for budgets passed while he was out of office.

Tiangco took his allegations to the Senate and the infrastructure commission. On September 23, 2025, he also filed a House ethics complaint against Co.

Co resigned on September 29. The House ethics complaint was dropped because he was no longer a member. That proceeding ended without deciding the substance of Tiangco’s accusations.

Zaldy Co is out of the House, yet another budget is drawing questions about additions that lawmakers say they cannot explain. Why does this keep happening after the person blamed for the earlier insertions has left? Removing one man does not answer who can propose these changes, who approves them and why district representatives are still asking for the details afterward.

Criminal cases did emerge from the wider flood-control investigations, including cases over the roughly ₱289 million Oriental Mindoro project and a ₱77.2 million project in Balagtas, Bulacan. Those cases do not account for every addition within the ₱13.8 billion Tiangco questioned.

So the answer to “Was it investigated?” is yes. The answer to “Did those proceedings explain all the disputed insertions?” is still incomplete.

A hearing happened. A deadline was given. A complaint was filed. Those are steps worth reporting, but the public also needs the result. Otherwise, officials can disappear from the story after saying they will check.

THANK YOU, BETTERGOV.PH AND THE ANGRY NERDS

I was able to do the project comparison because BetterGov.ph and the Angry Nerds made the records easier to search and check.

Their work helped me correct the district attribution and find changes hidden by the discussion of overall totals. The source documents were there for me to return to.

That deserves credit, especially after Ronaldo Puno’s reported remark that criticism of the insertions “betrays ignorance.”

BetterGov.ph and the Angry Nerds, thank you. I owe you for helping me work through something I did not understand. Being called ignorant does not make a budget question disappear. Making the documents usable helps people answer it.

SHOW US WHO REQUESTED THE MONEY

The House’s published BARSc mandate already includes an amendment report identifying the proponent and reports on changes affecting legislative districts.

Make those records public.

Put the original amount beside the revised amount. Name the person who requested the change, give the reason and show when it was approved. Let constituents trace a project without having to reconstruct the budget themselves.

That would answer the question that started this piece. A congressman says a project was added without his knowledge? The amendment record should identify who put it there. He says he objected? Show the objection. She says she will check? Publish what she found.

I started with Luistro’s statement and ended up with specific projects, changed amounts and a missing account of who requested them. That is where the follow-up belongs.

Congress should not be allowed to leave these stories at “I didn’t know.” Once you know, what are you going to do about it?

Photo: Congress of the Philippines, 2023, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain (PD-PhilippinesGov). Archival House plenary photograph, not current budget deliberations. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Batasang_Pambansa_Plenary_Hall.jpg . Cover adds the approved editorial title and official MCT logo; the homepage uses the photo-only crop.