FIRING LINE: Budget cuts and borrowed promises

FIRING LINE: Budget cuts and borrowed promises

By Robert B. Roque Jr | August 18, 2026

If you haven’t been paying attention to the Department of Budget and Management’s (DBM) proposed National Expenditure Program for 2027, let me break it down: ₱7.2 trillion.

Education, rightfully so, still gets the biggest slice of the cake. But state universities and colleges (SUCs) are bracing for big cuts — 49 of 113, to be exact.

The University of the Philippines (UP) is set to lose ₱2.95 billion, including ₱805 million ripped straight from the Philippine General Hospital (PGH), a hospital already short on beds and doctors.

PUP students are watching ₱9.2 billion in expansion funds remain unapproved. Even the Philippine Normal University (PNU), the country’s teacher-training center, faces the same Tier 2 rejection. Students, faculty, and parents are asking: What’s up with these targeted cuts?

It’s not just SUCs. Education is the single biggest casualty of DBM’s proposed cuts, down ₱39.3 billion. Health loses ₱33.6 billion. Social welfare loses ₱28.6 billion.

These are not final numbers, but neither are they abstract. They translate into hospital beds and medicines, teachers’ salaries, scholarships and stipends.

Acting Budget Secretary Kim Robert de Leon says the cuts followed careful assessments, pointing to a familiar problem: underspending. Hindi naman daw nagamit ang pondo! His argument is that agencies and institutions can survive on unspent 2026 balances carried into 2027.

Former Budget Secretary Butch Abad, however, raised an important question in a recent Bilyonario interview: Will carryover funds for DepEd and other agencies truly be added on top of the new NEP, or will government simply cut now and explain later?

The public deserves an answer now — not accounting sleight of hand.

And whose fault is underspending in the first place? Slow disbursement, bureaucratic bottlenecks and delayed procurement are not always agency failures. They are also government failures. Punishing schools and hospitals for the government’s own slow release of funds is not discipline. It is misplaced blame.

Meanwhile, despite the louder alarms over corruption, look who gets the biggest funding increases next year. Based on GMA News Research, they include the Departments of Transportation, Public Works and Highways, National Defense, and the Interior and Local Government.

On paper, the priorities sound good: railways, flood control, stronger defense and better local governance. Malacañang says the formula is pro-poor — more jobs, better roads and safer communities.

Working-class Filipinos, who largely fund this government and make up much of its constituency, would certainly like that music. Even I want to believe it.

I want to believe the ₱107-billion flood-control program will actually hold back floods, rather than wash away with the rains like so many projects — and billions — before it.

So this is on you, President Marcos.

The ₱3.3 trillion in this budget is borrowed money, pushing national debt to ₱21.479 trillion by 2027. Every Filipino family already carries that weight.

We look to you not for justifications, but fulfillment — for the genuine progress and growth this nation has long yearned for and richly deserves.

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