The House of Representatives approved a ₱27.89-billion 2027 budget for the entire Congress of the Philippines on Sept. 17 without a single lawmaker raising a question, according to a report by the Philippine Daily Inquirer. The allocation covers the Senate, the House, both chambers' electoral tribunals, and the Commission on Appointments.
Rep. Maria Carmen Zamora of Davao de Oro sponsored the measure. Rep. Marlyn Primicias-Agabas of Pangasinan explained the absence of debate plainly: "there were no minority members to raise questions about the proposed allocation," she said, according to the Inquirer. Rep. Presley de Jesus of the Philreca party-list then moved to terminate debate, and the chamber's own budget sailed through — the one item in this year's ₱7.2-trillion national spending plan that nobody in the room was positioned to interrogate.
That is a notable contrast to how the House has framed its handling of everyone else's money. Two days earlier, on Sept. 15, Speaker Ferdinand John "Bojie" Dy opened plenary debate on the overall 2027 budget by pledging the chamber would "scrutinize every centavo," according to reporting at the time on the ₱644-billion Department of Public Works and Highways allocation, which includes a reduced flood-control component. Other agencies have not been spared: senators grilled the Department of the Interior and Local Government this month over a fire truck shortage and a "slot-for-sale" recruitment scandal within the Bureau of Fire Protection, and a lawmaker publicly accused the Department of Labor and Employment of turning into an "ayuda agency" over its ballooning emergency-jobs fund. Congress, it turns out, reserves its toughest questions for departments that are not Congress.
The Inquirer's report did not include a line-item breakdown of the ₱27.89-billion figure, nor a direct comparison to the Congress's 2026 allocation, so how much the legislature is asking for itself is going up — or by how much — is not yet publicly documented in available reporting. It also remains to be seen whether the amount will be revisited when the House and Senate versions of the 2027 budget reach the bicameral conference committee, where past national budgets have seen late insertions added with comparatively little public scrutiny.
No lawmaker is on record objecting to the process by which their own chamber's budget was passed, and neither House leadership nor the Senate had issued further comment on the specific figure as of this report.
Context: The self-approval comes amid broader concern about how the ₱7.2-trillion 2027 national budget — the largest ever proposed — is being reviewed. In August, the civil-society People's Budget Coalition flagged roughly ₱735.56 billion in the proposed budget as vulnerable to political insertions, split across what it called "soft pork," "hard pork" and "shadow pork." The Department of Budget and Management has separately projected that national debt will climb to a record ₱21.48 trillion by the end of 2027, driven in part by a bigger borrowing program, even as debt-service costs alone are set to hit ₱2.70 trillion. Against that backdrop, a budget line that clears the floor with zero questions is a small number in a ₱7.2-trillion bill — but it is also the one item lawmakers had every opportunity to interrogate and chose, or were left with no one, to skip.