The unholy trinity of the OVP budget

Lemuel Ortonio sat before the impeachment court and testified that the PHP 125,000,000 confidential fund request came directly from Vice President Sara Duterte. She signed the August 2022 letter and spent the money in eleven days that December.

But Duterte did not act alone.

The Office of the President released that money from the 2022 contingent fund before the Office of the Vice President even had a confidential line item to speak of. Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin confirmed the transaction. Rep. Erwin Tulfo laid out the routing on the House floor – the OVP asked the Department of Budget and Management, the DBM recommended, and President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. approved. Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel correctly pointed out that this contingent provision had no corresponding appropriation for the OVP to legally augment.

A petition pending before the Supreme Court now names Marcos, then-Senate President Juan Miguel Zubiri, and Speaker Martin Romualdez as respondents regarding that exact mechanism.

By 2023, the workaround became official policy. Congress wrote a PHP 500,000,000 confidential fund directly into the General Appropriations Act for the OVP, adding another PHP 150,000,000 for Duterte’s Department of Education. That required deliberate votes in a House led by Romualdez and a Senate managed by Zubiri.

This happened when Marcos and Duterte still operated as an intact political alliance. The money moved effortlessly because the ruling coalition was not yet at war. That is dynastic, transactional politics at its worst.

Contingent-fund augmentation is not a Duterte invention. Presidents have used the mechanism before and will use it again. The mere existence of the tool does not automatically prove collusion.

But Ortonio’s testimony only establishes how Duterte burned the cash. It does not establish what Marcos, Romualdez, or Zubiri understood when they opened the vault.

Romualdez publicly told Duterte to explain her spending. He has not explained why his own chamber gave her a half-billion-peso blank check the year after the contested contingent release. Zubiri chaired an oversight committee and later dismissed the issue by telling reporters the funds would not return simply because the Vice President no longer wanted them. He framed her refusal as the end of the story, entirely ignoring his chamber’s original judgment to approve the allocation.

This unholy trinity must admit their complicity in bankrolling this arrangement to keep their electoral alliance breathing. An affidavit, a privilege speech, or a sworn statement to the impeachment court will suffice.

The structural fix requires a hard, statutory ban on all confidential funds for civilian agencies.

The cost of this transparency falls entirely on the ruling class. Admitting the process failed exposes Romualdez and Zubiri to the exact scrutiny they now aim at the OVP. It strips lawmakers of the grease they use to negotiate executive favors and reopens Marcos’s own contingent fund practices to rigorous audit.

Nobody gets to supervise the spending and skip the explaining.