MoneyPolitics Online update:
Pork in public works projects

SINCE THE Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism launched its MoneyPolitics Online website in the middle of 2013, thousands of scholars, academics, civil society leaders, and even government officials have browsed through the database for a peek at the numbers that drive this country.

Through the months too, the PCIJ’s Research Desk has pored through volumes of documents and scraped government databases to ensure that the MoneyPolitics site is up-to-date. For such is the nature of money, politics, and databases – the numbers keep growing and changing, in the same way that we the public should keep watching and monitoring.

Today, we feature the updated Public Funds page, under the heading Pork-Funded Infrastructure Projects (DPWH). Here, we will find all the pork releases going as far back as 1992, moving forward to 2013, or a period of more than two decades.

When one looks at all the money released through the pork barrel system just for public works infrastructure, one would think that the country is already one big concrete parking lot. But the reality is that there are too many towns without good roads, too many barangays cut off without bridges, and too many communities without the most basic infrastructure. And so, the question on everyone’s mind even before the pork barrel scandal broke out in 2013 – where does all the money go?

Check out the updated public works-pork barrel database here.