What It Means
- JV Ejercito is pushing an open bicam for the 2027 national budget, with hearings made public and documents tracked online from proposal to final version.
- The open bicam plan targets the closed-door small committee that produced the 2025 budget’s most disputed insertions.
- Senators lose formal post-enactment authority under the plan, with implementing agencies made sole validators of project execution.
- The plenary stage, where legislators can still request project changes through the proper process, keeps its full discretionary reach.
- No Senate rule or resolution has been filed yet. The open bicam plan is currently a stated intent, not a binding mechanism.
Senator JV Ejercito wants an open bicam for the 2027 national budget, and he wants the shift on record before Congress finishes deliberations. As Senate Finance Committee Chairperson, JV Ejercito is proposing to make bicameral conference committee hearings public and to publish budget documents online, tracking every change from the National Expenditure Program through the Senate and House versions to the final bicam output. The proposal follows renewed allegations of leadership funds and insertions tied to the flood control scandal, and it lands as Congress opens work on the 2027 budget cycle.
JV Ejercito framed the goal in direct terms: restoring public trust in how government spends money, not just producing a budget that balances on paper. That is a real target, and it is aimed at a real failure. The 2025 budget’s most damaging insertions were negotiated inside a four-person small committee, Escudero, Co, Romualdez, and Poe, meeting without a published transcript. Nobody outside that room could see what changed or who asked for it. An open bicam closes exactly that gap.
An Open Bicam Answers the Small Committee Problem
The 2025 small committee is the reference case for why an open bicam makes sense. House Deputy Speaker Ronaldo Puno has said publicly that Romualdez and Poe skipped several sessions, leaving Escudero and Co to finalize roughly 20,000 DPWH projects on their own. Zaldy Co has alleged that instructions to insert ₱100 billion in projects moved through that same closed process, relayed by then Budget Secretary Amenah Pangandaman and confirmed before reaching Romualdez. None of that could be checked against a public record, because no public record existed at the time.
An open bicam removes that specific cover. If hearings are public and documents are tracked from the NEP forward, whoever sits on the next small committee cannot rely on a closed room to shield what gets added, cut, or moved. That is a genuine structural fix, and it targets the exact mechanism that produced the 2025 controversy.
The Plenary Stage Keeps Its Full Reach
What an open bicam does not touch is the stage before bicam. JV Ejercito was explicit that Congress retains what he called the power of the purse, a constitutional duty to study and scrutinize every line of the proposed budget, and that legitimate amendments, including projects endorsed by local governments and adjustments requested by agencies, should continue through the proper plenary process.
That carve out is not unreasonable on its own. LGU-endorsed projects and agency-requested adjustments are a normal part of budget work. But it means the same discretionary insertion power that produced the 2025 scandal remains fully legal and fully available at a stage an open bicam does not reform. Nothing in JV Ejercito’s plan changes how a legislator gets a project added during plenary. It only changes how that project gets altered later, behind closed doors, in bicam.
The scandal was never really about bicam as a location. It was about legislators directing where public money goes with limited independent verification. Bicam was where that discretion became visible and, eventually, controversial. Plenary is where the same discretion operates in daylight, procedurally clean, and untouched by the open bicam plan.
Agencies Absorb the Accountability Senators Are Stepping Back From
JV Ejercito also drew a firm line on execution. Senators, he said, can only propose, and it is departments and agencies that will validate. He said this to rule out post-enactment interventions, the practice of legislators reaching into a project after the budget has already passed.
That line sounds like accountability, and in one sense it is. But it also relocates where accountability sits. If a project runs into trouble after enactment, ghost delivery, cost overruns, a contractor tied to earlier controversy, the agency that validated and implemented it now carries that exposure alone. The legislator who originally pushed the project onto the NEP or secured it through plenary amendment is no longer in the room for what happens next, by JV Ejercito’s own design.
Agencies were always the implementing body. What changes under an open bicam is the informal political cover that legislators used to share, quietly, when a project needed defending after the fact. JV Ejercito’s rule formalizes agency isolation on execution risk at the same moment his reform is silent on the plenary stage where project selection itself still happens.
Legitimate Spending Continues Regardless of the Scandal
JV Ejercito also pushed back on calls for a blanket suspension of infrastructure projects following the flood control controversy. A scandal, he said, is not a reason to stop legitimate projects, and slowing spending further would weigh on an economy already growing at a reduced pace. Accountability and continued spending are not mutually exclusive goals, and that position fits the rest of his framing. JV Ejercito is not proposing to shrink Congress’s role in the budget. He is proposing an open bicam that makes one part of that role visible while leaving the part with more discretionary reach exactly as it was.
The Reform Fixes Where the Scandal Was Caught, Not Where It Started
None of this reads as a deliberate gap. JV Ejercito is responding to the failure that was documented and litigated in public, the closed small committee. That is where the 2025 controversy became visible, so that is where an open bicam lands. The plenary stage was never the part of the process that made headlines. It carries the same discretionary power the bicam room did, and it stayed out of the story precisely because it was already visible.
An open bicam for the 2027 budget will make the next small committee’s work far harder to hide. It will not change who gets to request a project, or how much room that request has to move before it ever reaches a bicam table. The insertion power that built the 2025 scandal does not disappear under an open bicam. It stays exactly where it already had the least scrutiny attached to it, while the agencies that implement what Congress decides now carry a larger share of the accountability Congress used to share with them.
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