An Act Further Continuing the Validity of the 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 Special Development Fund, and for Other Purposes

This does two things, and the second matters far more than the first.

The first is routine: it moves deadlines. Special Development Fund money from 2020, 2021 and 2022 can be released and obligated until 31 December 2024; money from the 2023 fund until 31 December 2025. Four budget years of development spending, extended in one act.

The second is a change of kind rather than degree. Each of the three provisions ends with the same phrase — the appropriations 'shall continue to be available for disbursement until fully expended'. That removes the payment deadline altogether. Under a cash budgeting system an appropriation dies on a date whether or not it has been spent; under this wording, the money for these four funds does not die at all. It ends when it runs out.

Projects funded from four successive Special Development Funds were unfinished, and the earlier extension in BAA 34 was itself expiring. Rather than return year after year for another date, Parliament removed the date.

Follow the chain and the shape of it is clear. BAA 22 appropriated ₱10 billion under a cash budgeting rule with hard dates. BAA 14 and 24 extended the general budgets, always keeping outer limits. BAA 34 extended this fund with staged deadlines — obligate by end-2023, pay by mid-2024. And this act extends it again and takes the payment deadline away entirely.

The wording did not originate here. BAA 38, 6 months earlier, had already made the 2020–2022 general appropriations 'effective until fully released and disbursed' — but only for amounts already obligated, to settle unpaid bills. This act goes further: it removes the limit on the fund's availability itself, not merely on paying debts already incurred.

'Until fully expended' is four words that undo the central discipline of the system the region wrote for itself. A deadline is what forces an agency either to spend money on the thing it was voted for or to give it back to be voted again; without one, an appropriation can sit obligated indefinitely, and the question of whether the project was ever delivered stops having a date attached to it. Note also what is not here: no reporting duty, no progress requirement, no review — none of the quarterly publication machinery that BAA 33 imposed on the general budget a year earlier reaches these funds.

There is a real argument on the other side, and the registry should state it. A post-conflict government building roads and clinics from nothing, through a pandemic, with procurement capacity it was still constructing, cannot deliver on an annual cash cycle — and repeated short extensions are their own kind of waste, consuming parliamentary time and leaving contractors uncertain. Removing the deadline is the honest version of what the previous three acts were doing anyway.

But it is a decision about accountability, made in a sentence at the end of three subsections, in an act whose title says only that it continues validity. Anyone tracking where the region's development money actually goes should treat this as one of the most consequential provisions in the registry.