An Act Appropriating Funds for the Operation of the Bangsamoro Government from January One to December Thirty-One, Two Thousand and Twenty, and for Other Purposes

This is the Bangsamoro Government's first annual budget, covering 2020 — and it is the only one that never says how much it is.

Section 1 appropriates “the following sums, or so much thereof as may be necessary… out of any available funds in the Bangsamoro Treasury Office of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao not otherwise appropriated”. There is no grand total, and no list of where the money comes from. The only figure for the whole appears in the Introduction, before the enacting clause: “The PhP65.91 billion budget”.

The money is organized by agency across 17 ministries, a single other executive office — the Office of the Wali — and 3 special purpose funds. The Bangsamoro Transition Authority, through the Office of the Speaker, receives ₱2,591,131,798.60. But the two largest items in the act are not ministries at all: a Contingent Fund of ₱13,201,891,779.81 and a Miscellaneous and Personnel Benefit Fund of ₱9,280,558,584.58.

The last 23 pages carry 71 sections of general provisions setting the rules for how any of it may be spent, and most of them have been carried into every budget since. Personnel Services across government may not exceed 45% of total revenue, a ceiling drawn from the Organic Law. At least 5% of every ministry's budget must go to a Gender and Development Plan. Deductions may never reduce an employee's monthly net take-home pay below ₱5,000. Infrastructure contracts, winning bidders and final costs must be published within 30 days. Officials who fail to file their quarterly reports have their salaries automatically suspended until they comply.

A few provisions belong to this year alone. Section 2 put every appropriation on the Unified Accounts Code Structure — the one-off act of giving a brand-new government a standard set of books. Section 34 allowed up to ₱1,500 a year per employee for uniforms and costumes in cultural and athletic activities. And Section 70 directed the government to “expedite the enhancement of the Transition Plan and the enactment of the Bangsamoro Administrative Code” — the code that became BAA 13, and that every later budget cites as the source of its own rules.

The Bangsamoro Government assumed office in February 2019 and needed an appropriations act to run through 2020. The act's Introduction is unusually frank about the circumstances: the budget call was released only in July 2019, 5 months after the new government took over, and preparing the budget “proved to be a herculean feat considering that this is the first ever budget of the new Bangsamoro Government”.

The most telling thing about the region's first budget is the sentence it does not contain. Section 1 appropriates “the following sums, or so much thereof as may be necessary… out of any available funds in the Bangsamoro Treasury Office… not otherwise appropriated”. That is an authorisation to spend what is there, on the things listed, in whatever amount turns out to be necessary. It names no total and no revenue source. From the FY 2021 act onward every annual budget opens with an exact figure to the centavo and an itemised list of where the money comes from. The Introduction here supplies the missing number, ₱65.91 billion, but the Introduction is not the law.

The structure of the spending tells the same story. The largest single item in the act is not a ministry — it is the Contingent Fund, ₱13,201,891,779.81, about 20% of the whole budget and more than five times Parliament's own appropriation. Second largest is the Miscellaneous and Personnel Benefit Fund at ₱9,280,558,584.58, set aside for salary increases anticipated from a bill still pending in the Senate and for “the offices and bureaus to be created”. Together those two lump sums are roughly 34% of the budget: a third of the region's first year of public money appropriated to purposes that had not yet been decided. That is what governing from a standing start looks like, and the act is not coy about it — the Contingent Fund's own special provisions list “funding requirement for offices that will be created by the Bangsamoro Transition Authority and appropriate authority” as its first permitted use.

The arc from there is worth following. The Contingent Fund falls to ₱5.44 billion in FY 2021, ₱5.47 billion in FY 2022, ₱5.03 billion in FY 2023, ₱3.78 billion in FY 2024 and ₱666.8 million in FY 2025 — from 20% of the budget to 0.7% in 6 years — while a Local Government Support Fund that does not exist here grows to ₱10.15 billion by FY 2025. A government that began by reserving a third of its money for undecided purposes has been steadily converting lump sums into line items.

The act is candid about why it started that way. The budget call went out in July 2019, 5 months after the government assumed office, and the Introduction calls the result “a herculean feat”.

What followed is the more durable finding. Section 47 gave the money one year. Parliament then extended it twice — BAA 14 pushed it to 31 December 2021, BAA 24 to 31 December 2022 — and BAA 38 was still authorising the release of unpaid FY 2020 obligations in June 2023. Money appropriated for the region's first year was still being disbursed in its fourth. That pattern of appropriating faster than the government can spend runs through the whole series and surfaces again in the supplemental acts of 2024, 2025 and 2026, each of which re-appropriates money earlier budgets did not use.

One line here recurs across the whole registry. The Contingent Fund's special provisions include a “provision for cost of acquisition of Al-Amanah Islamic Bank and other related costs”. The identical line appears in the Contingent Fund of every annual budget from this one through FY 2026 — 7 consecutive years of setting money aside for the same acquisition.

Section 42 is the other provision that reads differently now than it did then. Hazard duty pay goes only to personnel in “strife-torn or embattled areas as may be determined and certified by the Secretary of National Defense” — a national cabinet officer deciding, for the purposes of the region's own budget, which parts of the region are at war. The provision was carried unchanged through FY 2023 and quietly dropped from FY 2024 onward.