Senator Panfilo Lacson disclosed Sunday that Senator Pia Cayetano secured P4.7 billion in congressional insertions within the 2025 budget, widening the scope of a controversy that had until now centered on her brother, Minority Leader Alan Peter Cayetano.
Speaking in a radio interview, Lacson stopped short of tying Pia’s insertions to the flood control irregularities that have dogged Taguig. “I hope she had no role [in the anomalous flood control projects], but as for the insertions, she did. I think there is about P4.7 billion of that in the 2025 [GAA],” he said in Filipino.
He cautioned that his office had not finished its review, noting the documents connecting Pia to the insertions still needed to be examined. How much of the P4.7 billion translated into actual projects likewise remains unverified, he said.
By contrast, the paper trail on Alan is further along. Of the P6.79 billion in insertions attributed to him in the 2025 General Appropriations Act, Lacson said roughly P75 million appears to have gone unimplemented. Those funds were purportedly directed toward infrastructure work in Taguig, the family’s longtime political base.
Lacson’s disclosure lands amid an escalating quarrel with Alan over Taguig infrastructure spending clouded by graft accusations. He has tied the minority leader to supposed “ghost” and substandard projects, and alleged that certain undertakings carried duplicate budgets of roughly P100 million apiece. According to Lacson, the arrangement took hold in 2020 while Alan served as House Speaker, and between then and 2025 the city amassed P14.4 billion in infrastructure projects.
Alan has consistently rejected claims of nonexistent projects in Taguig, inviting scrutiny and insisting his initiatives can survive review. He has also questioned why Taguig draws attention while alleged “ghost” projects in Ilocos Norte, the President’s home turf, go unremarked.
Once a legitimate legislative prerogative rooted in Congress’s power of the purse, budget insertions have since become shorthand for steering public money toward favored districts, frequently surfacing in connection with overpriced, substandard, or fictitious works.
Much of that money has been traced to the unprogrammed appropriations in the 2025 GAA—standby funds released only when the government collects surplus revenue or secures additional grants or foreign loans. Opposition lawmakers and watchdogs contend that legislators pushed Marcos administration flagship projects into these standby accounts during closed-door bicameral negotiations to create space for their own priorities, and the UA has ballooned to nearly P2 trillion as of 2025, its highest level since Marcos’s first full year in 2023.
The 2025 budget started at P6.352 trillion before settling at P6.326 trillion, after Marcos struck down P194 billion in line items he judged misaligned with his priorities, among them P16.7 billion earmarked for flood control.
