Each year, the Philippine Congress performs its most consequential act: translating a nation's aspirations into numbers. This year, the House of Representatives received a record 7.2-trillion-peso spending proposal — the largest in the country's history — carrying with it not only fiscal ambition but the unresolved weight of last year's flood control corruption scandal. Speaker Faustino Dy III now holds the full stewardship of a budget process that was reformed under crisis, and the deeper question is whether accountability, once demanded, can become a permanent feature of governance rather th