Proposed 2027 budget

The real score

Written out in full, the 2027 proposal is PHP 7,200,186,000,000.

In more familiar terms, that is PHP 7,200 billion, or PHP 7.2 trillion.

The grid draws each of those billions as one square. A million pesos would be a thousandth of one square, too small to print on any page.

To get a sense of the scale, a million seconds is 11.6 days, while a billion seconds is 31.7 years. At one peso per second, PHP 7.2 trillion would last about 228,000 years.

But divide the budget by the population and it comes to roughly PHP 63,000 per Filipino for the year, or a little over PHP 170 a day for schools, roads, hospitals, soldiers, and debt.

PHP 63,235

The budget per Filipino for the year, against a 2025 population of 113.9 million

228,165

Years it would take to count it out at one peso a second

About two-fifths of the proposed 2027 budget is already spoken for. Local governments' share of national taxes and interest on the national debt alone come to PHP 2,434 billion.

That is already 33.8% of the entire proposal.

Nobody sits down each year and decides those two amounts. One is a share of taxes collected three years earlier, fixed by law. The other is whatever we owe our lenders.

Add the BARMM block grant (the yearly transfer to the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao), pensions, and the retirement premiums of government workers. About 40% of the budget is spoken for before anyone chooses anything.

But the budget fight is over what remains. Education and public works alone take 22.5% of the total.

18.3%

Local governments' share of national taxes, the single largest item

15.5%

Interest on the debt, up 17.3% from the 2026 budget that was signed

85.2%

Share of the whole budget held by the 13 items shown

A budget of PHP 7.2 trillion sounds enormous. But set against the size of the economy, it is almost exactly what it was four years ago.

The budget-GDP ratio has sat between 21.7% and 22.6% of gross domestic product (GDP) in every year since 2023.

The peak is 2025, at 22.6%. That was not a spending surge. The budget grew 9.7% that year while the economy grew 5.9% in peso terms, so the same money became a larger slice of a smaller economy than anyone had planned for.

But the last two bars use forecast gross domestic product. Recall that the government has missed its growth targets before.

For 2025 the government projected nominal GDP of PHP 28,356 billion at the low end of its range. The outturn was PHP 28,014 billion, short by PHP 342 billion.

The advertised 21.7% for 2027 assumes the economy grows 8.8% in peso terms. Miss by as much as 2025 missed, and the ratio is 22.0% instead.

21.7%

The 2027 proposal as a share of projected GDP, the same share as 2023

PHP 342B

How far the 2025 economy fell short of the government's own low projection

Look only at department totals and Congress seems to move about 6% of the budget. But look at individual programs and the figure rises to 16–23%.

In short, roughly three quarters of the money Congress moves stays in the same department. It is taken from one program and given to another.

Judge the budget by department totals and all of that is invisible.

Going finer still, down to individual funds and expense types, barely changes the answer.

The real bargaining happens at the level of programs.

After Congress passes one budget, the President writes the next proposal. How much of Congress's changes does he keep?

The answer, every year, is between 30% and 50%. Raise a program by PHP 10 billion and the next proposal typically keeps only PHP 3 to PHP 5 billion of that increase. The rest is quietly pulled back toward what the President asked for in the first place.

I call that survival rate lambda (λ). It is a share rather than a peso amount, so we can compare it across four very different budgets.

Put differently, the President's previous request carries roughly twice the weight of the law that was actually signed.

Confidential funds at the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) show it plainly. They were proposed at exactly PHP 0.907 billion 4 years running, raised by Congress three times out of four, and proposed again unchanged each time.

Take the Department of Health's medical assistance program. Its budget goes from PHP 24.24 billion in the 2026 proposal to PHP 51.65 billion in the law, then back to PHP 24.24 billion in the 2027 proposal.

The same pattern repeats across the assistance programs. Of the PHP 500 billion Congress added across government, PHP 283 billion is taken out again in the next proposal. Of what it cut, PHP 306 billion is put back.

But the Local Government Support Fund (LGSF) is the exception. Congress raised it by PHP 41.8 billion and the President kept the higher figure. It is the only large fund on this list where what Congress enacted became the new starting point.

Note that a year earlier the same fund was raised and then pulled back down.

For now, this is a break in the pattern, not yet a new rule.

+PHP 10.0B

Presidential Assistance to Farmers and Fisherfolk. It appears in the 2026 law and in no other document, before or after

PHP 0

Tulong Dunong student grants in all three proposals, but funded in both budgets that were signed

In all four years we can compare, Congress enacted more ayuda than the President proposed.

And the gap is large. The enacted amount runs from 1.5 to 2.6 times the proposal.

Congress added PHP 31.8 billion in 2023, PHP 92.6 billion in 2024, PHP 53.5 billion in 2025, and PHP 75.0 billion in 2026.

But look at the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps). It is our largest cash transfer and the one with the tightest rules on who qualifies. In the 2025 law, Congress cut it from PHP 114.2 billion to PHP 64.2 billion.

Note where the missing PHP 50 billion went. It reappears in the 2025 list of unprogrammed appropriations, or spending released only if extra revenue comes in, at exactly PHP 50 billion.

So in one budget, Congress raised the assistance that officials hand out case by case, and made the rules-based transfer conditional on money that may never arrive.

2.6x

How much larger the enacted 2024 ayuda budget was than the proposal, the widest gap in the window

PHP 0

What Tulong Dunong student grants were proposed at in all five proposals. Congress funded them in all four enacted budgets

Four big streams carry national money to local governments. Three of them are set by formula, and Congress has never changed any of the three by a single peso.

The National Tax Allotment, the special shares of local governments in national taxes, and the BARMM block grant are identical in the proposal and in the law, in all four years.

Only the fourth stream has no formula. The Local Government Support Fund (LGSF) is a lump sum, and it is the one that moves.

In the 2026 budget it went from PHP 16.1 billion proposed to PHP 57.9 billion enacted. That is a rise of 260% in one passage through Congress.

But almost all of the increase is in one line. Financial Assistance to Local Government Units (FALGU), which has no allocation rule, went from PHP 5.0 billion to PHP 37.5 billion. The Growth Equity Fund (GEF) added another PHP 10.3 billion.

Note that the President kept the higher figure. The LGSF is proposed at PHP 58.5 billion for 2027, with Financial Assistance to LGUs held at exactly PHP 37.5 billion.

PHP 0

Change Congress made to the three formula-based transfers, in any of the four years

100%

Share of the 2026 change in these four streams that came from the one fund with no formula

After intense public scrutiny, Congress slashed flood control in the 2026 budget. The amount fell from PHP 250.8 billion in the proposal to just PHP 4.8 billion in the law.

That is a 98% cut. By comparison, the 2025 proposal and law were PHP 254.3 billion and PHP 249.8 billion, respectively. The 2027 proposal partly restores the amount to PHP 103.5 billion.

This was not a gradual change in priorities.

But the entire cut did not stay in the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH). The department's budget fell from PHP 881.3 billion to PHP 530.9 billion, while funding for local roads, bridges, and multipurpose halls rose by only PHP 73 billion.

Most of the missing PHP 246 billion left the department altogether, for health, social welfare, and the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth).

The North–South Commuter Railway and the Metro Manila Subway take PHP 191.3 billion. That is 97% of all rail money and 64% of the entire Department of Transportation (DOTr).

Everything else on rails, meaning the whole Light Rail Transit (LRT) and Metro Rail Transit (MRT) network plus the Philippine National Railways (PNR), comes to PHP 6.3 billion between them.

About two-thirds of the funding for the two mega-projects comes from loans: PHP 56.7 billion from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and PHP 67.7 billion from Japan.

But seventeen rail projects sit at zero, among them the Mindanao Railway, PNR South Long Haul, MRT-4, and the LRT-2 extensions.

Zero here means zero in the regular budget. Projects like these usually sit on the standby list instead, which is the next section.

−81% / −55%

How much Congress cut proposed rail spending in 2025 and 2026. The PHP 197 billion is a request, not a settled figure

For three straight years, Congress added PHP 219 billion, PHP 450 billion, and PHP 373 billion to the standby list. In 2026, it added nothing.

This is where Congress has a free hand. The regular budget has a ceiling it cannot raise. The standby list does not.

In fact, the PHP 450 billion added in 2024 is nearly as large as everything Congress shifted around inside the regular budget that whole year.

But 2026 breaks the pattern.

For the first time, the signed figure came in PHP 6.6 billion below what the President proposed. That is the same year Congress moved PHP 500 billion around inside the regular budget instead.

From 2023 to 2027, Congress did not cut the combined total of confidential and intelligence funds.

2024 is where the pattern shifts. It is the only budget where confidential funds end up below the proposal, from PHP 4.86 billion down to PHP 4.11 billion, as the Office of the Vice President, the Department of Education (DepEd), and the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) are all zeroed out.

But in the same document, intelligence funds rise from PHP 5.28 billion to PHP 8.27 billion, almost all of it in the security agencies. The money moved from civilian offices to security ones, and the total still went up.

Note that the Office of the President has sat at PHP 4.560 billion in eight documents in a row, untouched by either branch.

That is 42% of everything proposed for 2027.