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

This is the region's budget for 2024 — ₱98,467,200,000.00, a 15.4% jump on the year before, published under the theme “Accelerating Structural Reforms, Boosting Sustainable Development, and Enhancing Human Capital in the Bangsamoro”.

The money comes from the annual block grant, other national subsidies, the region's share of national taxes collected inside its territory, projected collections on its own taxes and fees, and two categories of money the government already had: unutilized prior years' appropriations, and unutilized prior year's allotments reverted to the Treasury.

It funds 17 ministries, 11 other executive offices and 6 special purpose funds. The Bangsamoro Transition Authority receives ₱4,831,206,302, about 4.9% of the total. Local governments do markedly better than before: the Local Government Support Fund nearly triples to ₱6,536,000,000, and a new ₱2,033,183,600 line appears for their share of taxes collected within the region.

But the change that matters most is in Section 49. Every Bangsamoro budget until this one expired after a single year, and every one of them had to be rescued by a separate act the following December — BAA 14, BAA 24, BAA 33, BAA 52, four laws whose only job was to extend a budget that had run out of time. This act gives itself 2 years. Appropriations stay available for release and obligation until 31 December 2025; Personnel Services and General Administration and Support running costs still expire at the end of 2024; and anything obligated by the end of 2025 for construction, goods or services stays “valid until fully expended”. Local government transfers do not lapse at all.

The familiar rules carry over: Personnel Services capped at 45% of total revenue, at least 5% of every agency's budget for gender and development, engineering and administrative overhead held to 1% on projects over ₱1,000,000, a ₱5,000 floor under monthly net take-home pay, published contracts and actual costs for every infrastructure project, and automatic salary suspension for officials who miss their accountability reports.

One long-standing provision is gone. Hazard duty pay for personnel in “strife-torn or embattled areas”, granted in every budget since the region's first, does not appear here.

The Bangsamoro Government needs an annual appropriations act to function. This one was passed on 21 December 2023 and signed by the Chief Minister on 29 December, 3 days before it took effect. Its cover sets out the theme as an acronym — A for Accelerating, B for Boosting, E for Enhancing — the initials of Chief Minister Ahod Balawag Ebrahim. The FY 2025 budget carries the same theme.

Four separate laws exist for no reason other than that a Bangsamoro budget ran out of time. BAA 14 extended FY 2020. BAA 24 extended FY 2020 and FY 2021 together. BAA 33 extended FY 2022. BAA 52 extended FY 2023. Each was passed in the same December week as the next year's budget, each pushed an expiring appropriation out by 12 months, and each was an admission that the government could not spend within the year what Parliament had given it.

Section 49 of this act ends that. The appropriations run to 31 December 2025; obligated capital outlays and goods and services stay valid “until fully expended”; and local government transfers do not lapse at all. There is no extension act for FY 2024, because there did not need to be one. That is a real reform, and it is the clearest thing the theme's promise of “structural reforms” actually delivered.

It is also an accommodation rather than a cure. The same Section 1 that names the total lists two sources that only exist because money went unspent — “unutilized prior years' appropriations” and, new this year, “unutilized prior year's allotments reverted to the Bangsamoro Treasury”. And 9 months into the fiscal year, BAA 63 appropriated another ₱8,441,261,975 in supplemental funds, drawn from the same pool of previously unspent money. Giving the money two years to be spent removes the annual embarrassment of the extension act; it does not, by itself, get the money spent.

The Contingent Fund tells the underlying story better than any single provision. It was ₱13.2 billion in FY 2020, 20% of the entire budget. Here it is ₱3,775,038,731, or 3.8%. Over the same period the Local Government Support Fund went from nothing to ₱6.54 billion, and a further ₱2.03 billion was carved out as the constituent LGUs' tax share. The region has been steadily converting a large discretionary reserve into formula-driven transfers with named recipients — which is what a maturing budget looks like.

Against that, two figures have not moved since 2020. PERA is still ₱2,000 a month and the floor under an employee's monthly net take-home pay is still ₱5,000, while representation and transportation allowances rose this year for every rank from the Chief Minister down. The allowances attached to office were adjusted; the floor protecting the lowest-paid was not.

And hazard duty pay is simply absent. From FY 2020 through FY 2023 the general provisions granted it to personnel serving in “strife-torn or embattled areas as may be determined and certified by the Secretary of National Defense”. There is no repealing clause and no explanation — the section is just not there, and it has not returned in any budget since.