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

This is the region's budget for 2026 — ₱114,077,644,141.90, drawn from the annual block grant, other national subsidies, the region's share of national taxes collected inside its territory, its own regional taxes and fees, and whatever earlier budgets failed to spend.

The money is organized by agency across 17 ministries, 11 other executive offices and 8 special purpose funds, and the bulk of the 349-page document is that line-item detail. What is more interesting for a general reader is the last 30 pages: 83 sections of general provisions that set the rules for how any of it may be spent.

Some of those rules are structural. Personnel Services across the whole government may not exceed 45% of total revenue, a ceiling drawn from the Organic Law. At least 5% of every agency's budget must go to a Gender and Development Plan. Appropriations expire — 31 December 2026 for salaries, 31 December 2027 for everything else — except the constituent LGUs' share of tax collections, which never lapses at all.

Others are unusually concrete. Agencies must publish geo-tagged photographs, with stamps, of the sites of every completed and ongoing infrastructure project. Rainwater collection systems are required in public markets, school sites and government buildings. Deductions may never reduce an employee's monthly net take-home pay below ₱5,000. Government lawyers get ₱5,000 for each court appearance, but not for appearances before administrative agencies. And Section 60 flatly prohibits spending public money on partisan activities “such as Voters Education Program and similar programs”, reverting any appropriation already made for them.

The Bangsamoro Government needs an annual appropriations act to function. This one was published under the theme “Building a Future-Ready Bangsamoro”, and was passed and signed on the same day — 16 December 2025 — a fortnight before it took effect.

Section 29 is the provision that resolves a question running quietly through this entire registry. Act after act — the Youth Commission, the Sports Commission, the Education Code — names Sulu among the provinces it covers, and each record has had to note that later districting acts no longer include it. Here the budget states the position plainly: Executive Order No. 91 declared the Province of Sulu part of Region IX (Zamboanga Peninsula), and the Bangsamoro Government is nonetheless still paying the salaries of the personnel in its Sulu provincial offices, “until such time that a permanent funding mechanism or arrangement is established or until the end of the fiscal year, whichever comes earlier”. The same appropriation may fund their retirement benefits and separation incentives, and may not be declared as savings. That is a government winding down an obligation it no longer formally holds, and doing so through a line in a budget rather than a statute.

Section 60 is the other clause worth pausing on. Prohibiting public funds for “partisan programs, activities, and projects” is unremarkable in itself; naming voters education programs as an example of one is not. Voter education is ordinarily treated as civic rather than partisan work. Placing it on the prohibited list in the budget for the year the region held its first parliamentary elections — and reverting any appropriation already made for it, obligated or not — is a deliberate choice, and the act does not explain it.

The Parliament's own share deserves stating plainly: ₱7,257,475,847, or 6.4% of the entire regional budget. Within that sits a Representation Program of ₱1,966,656,000 — larger than the Legislation Program's ₱1,706,586,130 — and a Constituency Servicing Program of ₱480,000,000. Legislatures fund their own operations everywhere, and constituency service is real work. But a representation line exceeding the legislation line, in a body of appointed members, is the sort of proportion that belongs in the public record rather than page 3 of a 349-page document.

What the general provisions get right is verification. Geo-tagged photographs of every infrastructure site, published contract estimates and winning bidders, published actual costs and variation orders, searchable disclosure of every special account with its legal basis and allowable uses, published cash advance reports naming recipients, and the automatic salary suspension that runs through every one of these fiscal acts. Taken together they describe a government that has decided the answer to weak spending controls is publication — and that is a defensible bet, provided somebody reads what gets published.