Government hikes WPP budget

MANILA, Philippines - The government has increased the budget of the Witness Protection Program from around P84 million in 2010 to P151 million this year so the administration can take better care of witnesses and whistleblowers integral to the quest for truth, President Aquino said.

“Make no mistake about it: we promised reform, and we are putting our money where our mouth is. The DBM (Department of Budget and Management)’s current efforts to trim the fat from the bureaucracy will be reinforced by the support of our new appointees at COA (Commission on Audit), namely (chairperson) Grace Tan and (commissioner) Heidi Mendoza,” Aquino said during the DBM’s 75th anniversary at the Reception Hall of the Philippine International Convention Center in Pasay City on Monday night.

“But our search for truth and justice may remain difficult to achieve if our judges and justices are not well-compensated. This is why the DBM signed a memorandum of agreement with four judges associations to provide almost P108 million to augment the gap in the pay of judges, which will allow their salary levels to catch up with salary increases under the Salary Standardization Law 3,” the President said.

Aquino said these changes were being implemented to help ensure that those who were working in government and would want the anti-corruption efforts to succeed are able to do their job well.

The President said the government could now allocate more funds to programs and projects for the people because of the zero-based budgeting where the money would only go to worthwhile causes.

“This renewed culture of governance is becoming ingrained, not just in the DBM, but in the way all our departments work. The clearest example of this, perhaps, is the amount of money the Department of Public Works and Highways has saved from the clutches of the corrupt,” Aquino said.

“So far, we have already generated savings of about P1.3 billion, and we are still looking at saving roughly P6 to P7 billion by the end of this year. If DPWH can do it, then other agencies can too,” the President said.

Aquino said the biggest challenge of his new administration was to start the budgetary process afresh and do away with outmoded or irrelevant budgetary assumptions.

“Implementing a zero-based budget was no easy task. You can imagine the kind of behind-the-scenes lobbying that (Budget) Secretary (Florencio) Abad must have dealt with in order to pass this budget. But instead of sitting back and giving in to the system that has kept this country in the dark, he, along with the rest of you in the Department of Budget and Management, stayed true to your jobs as public servants – putting the interests of the common Filipino first,” Aquino said.

“The concept of zero based budgeting is simple: using clear performance based guidelines, you take the people’s money out of projects that don’t work and put it into projects that do,” the President said.

He cited that the government was able to allot P21 billion for the conditional cash transfer program to improve the health, nutrition, and education of extremely poor families.

Aquino said this would benefit 2.3 million households-1.3 million more than the one million households that benefited from this program last year.

“By the end of the first quarter of this year, we already had almost 1.6 million families enrolled, nearly double the 325,000 families targeted per quarter. As of last Friday, we have also deployed almost 9,950 nurses to provide essential health services to poor communities in the country. The project, billed RN HEALS or Registered Nurses for Health Enhancement and Local Service, seeks to address the shortage of skilled and experienced nurses in more than 1,200 rural and unserved or underserved communities by training and deploying 10,000 unemployed nurses,” he said.

The President also noted the 20,000 houses for the police and military this year.

“These homes will be provided to our men and women in uniform at two hundred to three hundred pesos a month, much lower than the three to five thousand a month that some of them are paying for rent and amortization. We have also been able to more than double the combat pay of our soldiers, who are putting their lives on the line to win the peace in this country,” he said.

“In short, the government is finally giving the Filipino people what they deserve - a government that truly serves them and provides them with the services they urgently need,” Aquino added.

The President said the administration was also enjoying the confidence of foreign aid agencies as demonstrated in their support for the Philippine Energy Efficiency Project.

“Recently, we launched the electric tricycle program of the Department of Energy that is financed by the Asian Development Bank. This project aims to produce 20,000 e-tricycles that will serve as a better alternative to the tricycles we now have that still depend on fossil fuel and contribute to air pollution.

“It shows that if we embark on something good, we will attract even more good, and perhaps a small amount of luck too. We look forward to more similarly worthwhile projects in the near future that the donor community is now more inclined to support,” he said.

“But the bottom line is this: the improvements we are experiencing are really just a result of our revival of a long forgotten concept that public funds are not for public officials. They belong to the Filipino people, and must therefore be spent for the Filipino people. If we can consistently put this into practice in the next five years and three months, then it will become part of the norm rather than the exception, such that the next president, the next batch of elected public servants, and our people will merely continue the good we have already begun,” the President said.