| Photo by Pavel Danilyujk
Executive Order 76 designated the Tara, Basa! Tutoring Program of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) is a priority program. Executive Order No. 76 states that the Tara, Basa! Tutoring Program declaration will ensure the assistance of national and local government agencies in implementing a “collaborative learning program.” Tara, Basa! Tutoring Program is a community-based social welfare and development program that aims to help elementary students improve their reading skills while offering short-term work to tertiary students. Under this program, the DSWD is tasked to establish the following components:
- (1) Identification of eligible beneficiaries
- (2) Formulation of learning and development activities
- (3) Development of databases for progress reporting
- (4) Creation of evaluation and monitoring framework for the program
The DSWD was tasked with sending an annual report on the status and progress of the program’s implementation to the Office of the President and designing its appropriate organizational structure.
“Tara Basa” is undoubtedly an aspirational program that deserves every peso budgeted. However, the implementing department of government seems out of its element in this case. By any stretch of the imagination, a tutoring program would rightly belong to the Department of Education. The decision tree leading to assigning this program under the Department of Social Welfare and Development is quite befuddling. Except when the political atmosphere of the time is taken into consideration. The clarity of cabinet-level duties perhaps needs revisiting. Political infighting appears to have influenced this decision.
This bureaucratic chop-suey is also on full display with unrelated programs lumped together under confidential and intelligence funds. Safe houses are rented without consideration of cost. Agencies with little or nothing to do with intelligence surveillance submit unprecedented budgets, from previously zero budgets to hundreds of millions in appropriations.
“At the height of incredulity, as government borrowing fuels GDP growth, political leadership, in concert with policymakers, beams with pride at the prospect of the country achieving a higher income level. This is the irony of all ironies: bureaucratic chop-suey turning into chop-suey economics—often called voodoo economics.”
Filipinos who experience financial distress due to hospitalization, death, or other emergencies find themselves queuing up for assistance in every conceivable office, from the Mayor, the district congressman, the governor, and national agencies like the DSWD, PCSO AMD PAGCOR. This chop-suey approach to financial assistance is fraught with political patronage or, less politely, referred to as legalized vote buying. The administrative cost of these programs must be staggering and negate the availability of funds; every bureaucrat must be paid along the way.
Once upon a time, health issues were under the Department of Health, security intelligence was under the purview of the uniformed services, and at some level, the Department of Justice. Those were the good old days.
Creative accounting is so prevalent that it rises to the level of insulting auditors, so brazen as to be arrogant with a dose of a sense of impunity. Gaslighting the gaslighter, so to speak.
Subsidies for a specific purpose are unceremoniously repurposed in the guise of an imaginary surplus of funds. At the same time, it is evident that any perceived surplus exists only because the services to be provided by those funds are nowhere near the stated goals for which those funds were appropriated in the first place and when, in fact, those funds are derived from non-tax sources and more contributed explicitly by beneficiaries – at some incongruous logic it has thereby been concluded the subsidies are excess funds while the expected services are nowhere near the desired outcomes.
At the height of incredulity, as government borrowing fuels GDP growth, political leadership, in concert with policymakers, beams with pride at the prospect of the country achieving a higher income level. This is the irony of all ironies: bureaucratic chop-suey turning into chop-suey economics—often called voodoo economics.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dr. Crispin Fernandez advocates for overseas Filipinos, public health, transformative political change, and patriotic economics. He is also a community organizer, leader, and freelance writer.
