From the Inquirer: Sen. Panfilo “Ping” Lacson is serving notice to the public that he is back, digging into the budget for “pork.”

Lacson still on the hunt for ‘pork’

By: Maila Ager – Reporter / @MAgerINQ
INQUIRER.net / 05:14 AM July 11, 2025

Sen. Panfilo “Ping” Lacson is serving notice to the public that he is back, digging into the budget for “pork.”

Returning to the Senate after three years, Lacson was met with the shocking discovery that multi-billion pork allocations in the 2025 budget were given to a few lawmakers.

One congressman, for instance, got P15 billion in “pork barrel” allocations, while some senators got P5 billion to P10 billion.

Lacson noted that before the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) known as the “pork barrel” was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2013, senators had only P200 million in pork, while members of the House of Representatives had P70 million.

Longtime advocate

“Well, after it was declared unconstitutional, there are now senators with P5 billion, some even with P10 billion. And there’s a congressman with as much as P15 billion,” Lacson said in Filipino in an interview on One News late Wednesday.

He did not provide other details in the interview.

An anti-pork advocate, Lacson had long traced corruption to the government’s dredging and flood control projects.

“One backhoe was on ‘parade rest’ by the river, just waiting to be filmed while scooping soil. Once the inspectors left, it went back to ‘parade rest’ again. Then it gets moved to another location just to be filmed again. So much is being wasted in the dredging,” he said.

They won back then

But Lacson said he and then-Sen. Franklin Drilon succeeded in removing the budgets for these projects.

“We won in the bicam back then. But now, it has come back with a vengeance,” he lamented.

In the same interview, the senator disclosed his initial findings from his scrutiny of the P6.326 trillion national budget for 2025.

He said one item in the budget showed that “a very small barangay in a small town” received a P1.9 billion allocation, while another small town was allotted a P10 billion budget.

“Imagine a P10-billion appropriation for a small town with 10,000 residents. It is an inequitable distribution of the budget,” Lacson said.

“I will seek clarification on this. What happened to the P10 billion appropriated to the small town? We saw that it is near a riverbank, but is it the only town with a riverbank? These appropriations are for flood control,” he added.

Projected borrowings

To illustrate the current situation, Lacson said the country spends P16 billion but only earns P12 billion a day so it needs to borrow P4 billion a day.

“If we don’t fix how the national budget is being used, the outcome might be that in one or two years, we’ll be borrowing P6 billion a day. In five years, that could rise to P10 billion a day. Where will that leave us?” he asked.

As early as June, Lacson announced that he and his staff have started taking a “deep dive” into how the 2025 national budget was mangled, starting with how changes were made from Malacañang’s original proposal to the approved versions in the House of Representatives, the Senate, and bicameral conference committee, all the way to the enrolled bill.

P50B from 4PS

One example of mangling the 2025 budget was the removal of the P50 billion from the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) in the bicameral conference committee, which was supposedly diverted to other cash aid programs “that are prone to abuse since they are not data-driven,” the senator said in a statement last month.

Lacson also cited the insertion of P26 billion for the Ayuda sa Kapos ang Kita Program that was neither in the House nor Senate version of the budget measure.

All these questions surrounding the various “ayuda” programs prompted him to file a bill that will integrate them under 4Ps, so it will be data-driven and not whimsical.”