THE PURSE IS
THE PEOPLE’S.
Every peso the Republic spends passes through one sentence written in 1987 — and in October 2026 the Supreme Court enforced it against three national budgets at once. This surface shows the budget itself, the power that guards it, and the mandate beneath both: all spending according to law, or not at all.
One sentence guards
every peso.
Article VI §29(1)
This is the whole mandate in one line: spending is legal only when an appropriation made by law pursues it. Not a press release, not a memo, not a line item nobody voted on — law.
§§24–29 · the funnel
All appropriation bills originate in the House (§24); Congress may not increase what the President proposed (§24); the ceiling binds (§25(1)); and the Treasury rule closes the loop (§29(1)). Each section is a gate the peso must pass.
Art. XI §1 · the human layer
“Public office is a public trust.” Officers who move money outside the gates answer to the forums — COA, Ombudsman, the courts — not to excuses.
Art. VI §1 · the people’s share
Legislative power is vested in Congress “except to the extent reserved to the people” — initiative and referendum. The purse is the people’s twice over: they fund it, and they retain a constitutional lever over it.
October 7, 2026 —
the ceiling enforced.
Portions of the 2024, 2025, and 2026 GAAs voided.
The Supreme Court held that the Article VI §25(1) appropriations ceiling applies to programmed and unprogrammed funds together — and voided the portions of three consecutive national budgets that exceeded it. This is not commentary. It is a holding of the Court, final and fresh, and it re-arms the oldest sentence in the fiscal constitution: appropriation by law, within the ceiling, or not at all.
The “off-books” lane is closed. Unprogrammed funds are inside the ceiling the Constitution sets.
Seven budgets,
one trajectory.
Enacted General Appropriations Acts, FY2020–FY2026, in exact pesos — served live from the public Philippine Budget Data API with a pinned fallback so the page prints even offline. The outlined bar is the FY2027 National Expenditure Program: proposed, not enacted — labeled as such, because a proposal and a law are different things.
Source: General Appropriations Acts FY2020–2026, served via the public budget data API (budget.bettergov.ph) over the GAA datasets · FY2027: National Expenditure Program · amounts exact pesos, rendered in trillions.
Programmed + unprogrammed
against one line.
The ruling’s arithmetic: whatever Congress appropriates, the §25(1) ceiling is computed over the whole — programmed plus unprogrammed. Every bar on this page answers to that single computation now.
Marks, never verdicts.
The pattern is on the record: three consecutive budgets exceeded the ceiling until the Court said so. The register displays the holding; it declares nothing further.
The NEP is a proposal. What the House adds, what survives conference, and whether the whole clears §25(1) — that is this cycle’s watch.
Inherited from the budget-data discipline the API itself uses: versions are compared, never added; exclusions are listed, never silent. Same grammar as the witness register.
Open doors,
pointed to.
COA
P.D. 1445 §79 — disallowed expenditures. The Commission audits every peso the ruling now guards.
Ombudsman
R.A. 6770 §§11–13 — complaints against officers who move money outside the gates.
The Courts
Art. VIII §1 — grave-abuse review, the very door the October ruling came through.
Companion surfaces: the anchor cards behind every quote live in the register · the case documents in the Case File · the constitutional audit across all fourteen categories in the compliance matrix.