CONFIDENTIAL & INTELLIGENCE FUNDS: CREATING & INVESTING FOR THE FUTURE

 

Could you connect the following headlines?

“Public Must Join Outrage Over Intel Funds – Pimentel” (Inquirer, Nov. 20, 2022)

“Sara To Set Up VP Offices All Over PH” (Global Daily Mirror, May 11, 2022).

As a backgrounder, Senate Minority Leader Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel III, the Inquirer reported, “called on the public to oppose the allocation of hundreds of millions of pesos in confidential and intelligence funds (CIFs) to agencies not responsible for national security or law enforcement […] mainly the P500 million for the office of Vice President Sara Duterte and the P150 million for DepEd also headed by Duterte.” The report added that Pimentel and Sen. Risa Hontiveros would move “to delete the proposed confidential funds.”

Likewise, Rep. Edcel Lagman called for a purge of “unnecessary, excessive” CIFs, saying that “no stretch of the imagination or flexibility of logic” could justify P9.3 billion for confidential and intelligence spending in the wake of the refusal of the Commission on Audit (COA) to disclose details of the use of confidential funds.

I would like to show Rep. Lagman how I could “stretch my imagination” and try to figure out (not justify) the probable spending of confidential and intelligence funds mainly in the OVP office by connecting the two above headlines.

Six months ago, right after I read the headline, “Sara to set up VP offices all over PH,” what crossed my mind was to take my hat off Sara and her team. Why? I got the impression they had been delving and bringing into play one of the lasting exemplar of former US President Barrack Obama’s presidential campaigns (2008 and 2012) – his feat in the much-heralded “ground game” that paved the way for his two presidential terms in office.

What is a “ground game”? The US has more than 234 million eligible voters; not all are registered though. Over 159 million voted in the recent US general election. A presidential candidate can’t reach, up close and personal, all voters. Only when he or she puts into action a “ground game” setting in motion media, surrogates, volunteers, and paid staff, will he or she be able to reach voters -- convince them to vote for him or her -- and just as important, to convince them to get out and vote.

Raved over by both the mainstream media and political scientists, Obama’s “ground game” in his presidential run flexed its muscle through its numerical advantage in laying down FIELD OFFICES. It set up 947 (vs. less than 400 for John McCain in 2008) field offices mostly in “battleground” or “swing” states (refer to states that could be won by either Democratic or Republican candidate). Obama’s re-election campaign put in place 789 (vs. 284 for Mitt Romney in 2012) field offices.

A US study explored the impact of field offices on election results for the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns and come up with a key finding implication – a decentralized campaign with widespread field offices is a cut above a concentrated campaign focusing its firepower only on strategically selected areas.

And here’s the one thing that Sara and her team proactively have pursued and laid bare – the power of incumbency – the advantage of creating and investing early for her political future adopting the world-class “best practices” in a presidential election campaign.

So far so good. But there’s the rub. This “ground game” costs piles of money – “sackloads of cash” -- a tagline vulgarized in the last election.

Looking back, PBBM spent P623 million, the most among all presidential candidates last elections, based on his statement of contributions and expenditures. Such a declared amount evolved from the typical PH traditional election campaign which, to a limited degree, comprises only a portion of the needed resources in making the most of an Obama-like “ground game” in the PH setting. Lest we forget, let’s add to such needed resources the “contingency” for vote buying to win leaving no stone unturned. A report by International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines gathered through an International Observer Mission reported that the last election showed “a higher level of failure of the electronic voting system than ever before, along with a higher level of blatant vote-buying.”

All in all, the “sackloads of cash” needed for Sara’s future political aspiration connects the above twin headlines. The connection paints a clear picture that illuminates the pleading words of Sen. Pimentel:

“We hope (fellow lawmakers will join us), especially once they feel the mounting public pressure that the people are now alarmed why we are giving P500 million in confidential funds for the OVP (Office of Vice President) and another P150 million for the DepEd [headed both by VP Duterte].”

Let’s rewind just a little bit to illustrate how bleak the CIF issue has turned as we watch the government spending while PH is grappling with a ballooning national debt with the following headline:

“Duterte spent P4.5B on confidential, intel funds in 2021 – COA” (CNN Philippines)

To feel in our bones the immensity of money involved, let’s try to break it down in plain language. P4.5B (A billion is a number followed by 9 zeros) could build 30,000 units of standard Gawad Kalinga (GK) houses (spending over P12 million every day of the year). Each GK house is estimated to cost P150,000 (2018 data), having a total living space of 22 to 24 square meters with expandable loft area and separate sleeping quarters and toilet & bath. That number of GK houses could even be doubled since PRRD’s CIF was only half of the total P9.082 billion used by the government for CIFs last year.

Since the COA itself could not disclose to the public how the CIFs are used, here’s what Rep. Lagman said about them being “shrouded in mystery”:

“These [CIFs] breed corruption and the more enormous the funds are, the greater the magnitude is for the possibility of graft.”

Other than breeding corruption, the CIFs, mainly for OVP and DepEd, could place VP Sara in a conflict-of-interest situation where her courses of action, like setting up OVP satellite offices nationwide, would be perceived publicly as covert use of taxpayers’ money in creating and investing for her future political ambition. Her reason “to speed up government services” could easily be foiled by the “redundancy” argument, let alone, the glaring multi-awarded performance of the previous OVP without the gravy of CIF, a big budget, and the former President’s goodwill.

Since the public will never know how CIFs are spent, they could turn into so-called “opportunity losses.” Like the 30,000 GK houses that could have been built out of last year’s P4.5B CIF -- such an opportunity in easing somehow the 6.5 million housing backlog evaporated within a year without a trace.

Unless the CIFs are nipped in the bud from this P5.26-trillion general appropriations bill for 2023, once and for all, every year for the next 6 years will come, behind the same path or worse, that is covered with CIF potholes “shrouded in mystery.”