House sets plenary debate on 2026 budget next week

MANILA, Philippines —  The House of Representatives will start its plenary debate next Monday on the proposed P6.793-trillion national budget, House majority leader and Ilocos Norte Rep. Sandro Marcos said.

“We start plenary debate on Monday. No committee hearings during the plenary debates. It will be up to dawn,” Marcos said on Wednesday.

“All members are encouraged to be on the floor. If there is no committee hearings, there is nothing that need changes in terms of the composition of the chairmanships and the leadership of the House,” he added.

Marcos also said that there should not be any changes at the moment in the composition of the leadership of the House despite the election of a new House speaker.

“We are in the middle of the budget (deliberations). We need to pass it. The budget is the most important law of our country,” Marcos said after casting his vote for newly installed Speaker Faustino Dy III.

Asked if there is a need to elect new chairmen of the various committees in the House, Marcos said: “I don’t think there should be changes in the composition of the leadership because of the fact that it’s too disruptive.”

DPWH cost cutting

Public Works Secretary Vince Dizon has expressed openness to a proposal that the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) cut its costs on its projects by as much as 10 percent, as proposed by Batangas 1st District Rep. Leandro Leviste.

“I have already talked to former DPWH secretary Babes Singson, and I agree with him that it has been one of our plans, and we will be doing it in the coming weeks and in the coming months,” Dizon told Leviste during Wednesday’s budget hearing.

To lower the cost of projects, Leviste proposed the Detailed Unit Price Analysis (DUPA), which the former cabinet secretary said was doable, and could in fact go down even to as low as 15 to 20 percent reduction in the unit costs of overpriced DPWH projects.

Leviste said lowering the DUPA could result in significant savings.

Budget insertions

Two officials of the DPWH have confirmed that the P289 billion insertions in the 2025 national budget came from the bicameral conference committee, not in the House of Representatives, Marikina 2nd district Rep. Miro Quimbo said yesterday.

During the hearing of the House committee on appropriations on the proposed 2026 budget of the DPWH, Quimbo said he asked Secretary Dizon and other officials to confirm if the controversial insertions in the 2025 national budget came from the bicam.

Quimbo noted that the House reduced the DPWH budget by P73.7 billion, from P898 billion in the National Expenditure Program to P825 billion when it transmitted the General Appropriations Bill to the Senate last year.

He said after the bicam, the DPWH budget ballooned to P1.13 trillion, an increase of nearly P289 billion. He said the DPWH officials confirmed his account.

He added that Undersecretary Ador Canlas and Director Alex Bote said the department had no knowledge of changes after Senate plenary deliberations, only discovering them when the final General Appropriations Act was released. “That’s on the record,” Bote told lawmakers.

Quimbo said this proves that the real changes – and the so-called “insertions” – happened during the bicam, not in the small committee of the House as often portrayed.