House begins plenary debates on P1.64-trillion budget

MANILA, Philippines – The House of Representatives will begin today marathon plenary deliberations on next year’s proposed P1.64-trillion national budget.

Some House leaders vowed to realign tens of billions of pesos in allocations prone to abuse.

Speaker Feliciano Belmonte Jr. said the floor debates, which would cover practically all government agencies, will start at 10 a.m. and would be held five days a week in the next two weeks.

“Actually, House leaders will continue working during recess to consolidate the budget, and I’m sure we’ll come up with a good product that would boost our economy and reduce poverty,” he said in a telephone interview.

Belmonte said he hopes to finish deliberations before Congress goes on recess on Oct. 16.

“This is going to be a reform budget,” he said.

Congress will resume session on Nov. 8.

Belmonte said the House’s bias would be toward allocating resources for the poor and the vulnerable while ensuring transparency.

The budget will be crafted in such a way that it will promote growth despite lack of funds, he added.

Camarines Sur Rep. Rolando Andaya Jr., House committee on appropriations vice chairman, said the General Appropriations Bill represents 18.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product.

“We may have the power over the purse but we cannot make the purse bigger,” he said.

Vowing to realign vague allocations, Pampanga Rep. Anna York Bondoc said officials of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources up to now could not justify their allocation of P1.5 billion to purchase 50,000 computers, software and web cameras.

The 50,000 is more than twice the number of the agency’s employees based on the DBM’s staffing summary for this year, she added.

Bondoc said she found out that the DENR was given P1 billion last year for the same computerization project that was not implemented.

“Up to now, they could not justify why they wanted such a large amount and why the implementation was delayed,” she said.

Environment Secretary Ramon Paje could have allocated the P1.5 billion for reforestation and other environment programs, Bondoc said.

DENR officials said the agency paid Microsoft Corp. some P80 million up front as software licensing fee to make it the first government office to use “legal software.”

However, the agency could have just opted for open source software used extensively by foreign governments, Bondoc said.

Ang Kasangga Rep. Teodorico Haresco warned he would question at the floor the so-called “public-private partnerships (PPP)” budgets inserted in various agencies, including the Department of Public Works and Highways and the Department of Agriculture, amounting to over P20 billion.

“These could be budgetary ‘black holes’ and appropriations where no money can ever escape and we will never know what happened to them,” he said.

House Minority Leader Edcel Lagman scored the lack of funds allocated to key agencies and entities including state colleges and universities.

For example, the budget of the Department of Foreign Affairs was cut by almost 40 percent, including the legal support for overseas Filipino workers, which was slashed from P100 million to P27 million in violation of the newly amended Migrant Workers Act, he added.

Allocations for the Supreme Court and the judiciary were reduced by nearly 50 percent from the original submission, Lagman said.