First of two parts
CAN anything good come out of the Senate impeachment court? Some say the hearing it conducts to try the case against Vice President Sara Duterte is costly and a waste of public resources. The point is that, it seems, no matter the outcome of the impeachment process, the taxpayer will come out of it worse off.
I agree. But something is costlier, which is electing to office people who are not worthy of public trust. One theory is that the “hidden” cost of funding the government is inversely proportional to the level of wisdom, courage, care and judgment by which the electorate exercise their right of suffrage. When voters act at a high level of judiciousness, acting as if they represent not only themselves but a country and the future generations, the cost of government is low. But when they vote like they have been doing for ages, at zero level of discernment, beholden to patronage and unable to discriminate the hype and false information from the truth, the cost of government is high.
The costs come in various forms. The most abhorrent of them is corruption. The billions of pesos that have been lost to the flood control fraud, for example, are relatively too recent for us to be able to fully grapple with the magnitude of such a loss. But offhand, there beckons a world of opportunities that otherwise have been lost: school facilities that could have been built, or farm subsidies that could have revived the agriculture sector. Truly, as Pope Francis once lamented, the poor pay for corruption.
Delays and inefficiencies are other forms of corruption, and they are equally costly to taxpayers. The easy explanation for why corruption happens combines the declining norms of conduct and character flaws with ineffective legal structures designed to mount deterrence. In the case of government inefficiencies, the easy explanation for why they persist is incompetence.
The national government operates above its means not only in infrastructure and ayuda, but it also has not shown it can ever shed its excessive fat. In the 1970s, when the population stood at 36 million, the total number of civil servants (career and noncareer, including men and women in uniform) was 400,000, or a public servant-to-citizen ratio of 1:90. In 2010, with a population of 92 million, the civil service personnel count grew to 1.4 million (1:65 ratio). In mid-2025, with an estimated population of 114 million, the national government workforce further ballooned to 2.1 million (1:54 ratio).
Then there is the so-called shadow bureaucracy run by a mass of “job order” and “contract of service” wage earners who, at the latest count, number 920,000. They do not enjoy security of tenure or are bound by an “employer-employee” relationship with the government, yet it is often upon them that most offices rely on for much of their heavy lifting and spade work.
The share of personal services (PS) in the national government budget has sharply increased from P215 billion in the late 1990s (or P2,825 per capita, that is, in relation to total population), to P1.3 trillion in 2021. The amount represented around 29 percent of the annual budget, and the PS per capita expenses shot up to P10,000. The PS share in the national budget has further increased in recent years, zooming up to as much as 60 percent in the P6.8-trillion 2026 national budget.
For an engineer of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) to rationalize one’s failure to verify inspection reports on account of “lack of personnel” is therefore disgusting.
Even in rare situations where irregularities appear to be uncommon, project implementation delays are costing taxpayers money. For example, the government has incurred a whopping P3.4 billion in total commitment fees since 2022. In 2024 alone, the national government reportedly “shelled out $16.8 million (approximately P1.05 billion) in commitment fees. This represents a 25.2 percent escalation from the $13.43 million paid in 2023.” A commitment fee is a fixed percentage penalty levied by creditors (like the World Bank or the Asian Development Bank) on the “undisbursed portion” of an approved loan. Essentially, the Filipino taxpayer is paying foreign banks simply for holding onto money that the government requested but failed to spend. Unlike overt corruption scandals where money is actively stolen, this “invisible drain” represents a form of institutional passive waste — where public funds vanish due to pure bureaucratic incompetence. Filipinos are paying a record P1-billion annual penalty for projects they desperately need but cannot seem to build.
The common causes of delays are both political and administrative. One, there is the “budget squeeze,” where Congress underfunds the counterpart requirements of foreign-assisted projects. Failure to provide the counterpart triggers the freeze, and the commitment fee clock starts ticking. Then there are right-of-way (ROW) problems. Despite years of experience in battling ROW issues, implementing agencies like the DPWH and the Department of Transportation have not shown in their resume a satisfactory success rate.
The heavily penalized projects for delays include the South Commuter Railway Project, the Davao Public Transport Modernization and the Cebu Bus Rapid Transit. World Bank data disprove the myth “that corruption ‘greases the wheels’ of policy execution. Instead, extortion, shifting procurement standards and middleman bickering deliberately prolong project timelines. Delay is the environment in which rent-seeking thrives.”
To be concluded on Oct. 24, 2026
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