Underlings

His offer of reconciliation with the Duterte camp was a non-starter. Unsupported by any substantial concession, President BBM’s offer was totally ignored.

Meanwhile, the May 12 vote count brought out more embarrassing details. The Local Absentee Vote (LAV), mainly reflecting the political sentiments of police and military personnel, showed a landslide for the pro-Duterte PDP-Laban. All 10 of its senatorial candidates won. Not a single candidate associated with the pro-administration Alyansa figured anywhere near the win-column. It was a total shut-out.

The number of voters involved here was small, to be sure. But the outcome was dramatic. Our uniformed personnel are generally disenchanted with the administration. That is never a good sign.

Anxious to demonstrate reforms in his administration were forthcoming in the face of dramatically waning public support, BBM pulled another rabbit out of the hat. He asked all his appointees to submit their courtesy resignation. Still, there was no dancing in the streets.

By doing this, BBM converted a problem (diminishing legitimacy) into a predicament (quickly rebuilding an effective governance team).

There was another, less disruptive, way to rid his team of ineffectual members: weed them out one-by-one. Each case of termination carefully justified. Each replacement appropriately introduced to the public.

But taking the less disruptive course will not produce the drama BBM wants to create. He wanted to convey the image of a presidency reborn. He wanted the shock and awe of an administrative bloodbath.

He also needed to deliver the subtext as convincingly as possible: that whatever failings there were happened because of the President’s underlings, not because of the Chief Executive himself. This was a method for assigning blame – at the expense, of course, of the hapless appointees.

The subtext of the forthcoming Cabinet revamp was not readily accepted. Social media burst with memes calling on the President to resign.

This administrative purge could still backfire.

Machiavelli warned all leaders: the most difficult thing is to manage change. BBM raised expectations for a wholesale reconfiguration. By his words: nothing short of a “reset.”

If he ends up replacing only a handful of officials, the public will be severely disappointed. They will feel gaslighted. They will feel shortchanged.

If we are going to have a purge, the public expects this to be sweeping. There is some depth in the public perception that this administration failed to deliver. The bar for reversing public disappointment is much higher. A critical public will not be swayed by glibness.

Replacing a large number of senior officials will not be easy. Executive talent is rare. Most of that talent is happily employed in the private sector. They may not be ready to drop everything (including good pay) to rush to serve the nation – especially a presidency with no demonstrable momentum and with evaporating political capital.

Recall how long it took for BBM to find an Agriculture secretary he finds suitable. The President himself held on too long to this portfolio and delivered no tangible results. Neither has his alter ego delivered convincingly in this vital post. The impression is that the Agriculture secretary’s solution to any shortage is to increase imports.

Appointing new officials quickly will be a challenge. Most of the members of the Marcos Cabinet are technocrats with little political skills to navigate a difficult policy terrain. Most do not feel empowered to challenge the existing order and advance new thinking.

Empowering a vigorous executive team requires the President to have immense political capital. After the midterm elections, few are convinced BBM has enough political capital left to power imaginative policies. The real peril is that the President will be left with an executive team that resembles a skeleton crew sufficient only to complete the journey.

The easier thing for BBM to do is to corral a team of traditional politicians nursing ambitions for 2028. They will accept the low pay for the opportunity to build their political networks. They will tend to grandstand and gaslight in place of crafting more far-sighted policies.

Assembling a team of politicians is the worst BBM could do. It will deepen the disillusionment of the career bureaucracy. It will widen the openings for more corruption to happen. It will very likely deepen public skepticism and further sabotage BBM’s legacy.

Finally, there is a lagging sense that BBM chose the wrong group to sacrifice. The problems facing his presidency today were largely inflicted not by political appointees but by duly-elected political allies.

It was not the technocrats in the Cabinet who conspired to mangle the 2025 national budget in order to fund patronage programs designed to win votes. The mangling resulted in priority projects losing funding. It undermined our defense modernization. Most crucially, it conserved the sorry state of our educational system: leaving our young seriously unable to compete in a new global economy.

It was not the appointed executive officials who undermined our representative democracy leading to general disillusionment about the country’s future. The undermining was done by the traditional powerbrokers. The more our representative democracy fails, the deeper they are entrenched.

Many of the problems plaguing our country requires hard-nosed policy responses. From his assumption of office, BBM did not seem to have the boldness to undertake necessary reforms. Allowing land consolidation to make our farms more efficient is one of them.

BBM might have rounded up the wrong group to be purged.