As the deliberations on the proposed P3.002-trillion national budget for 2016 starts today, several lawmakers on Sunday vowed to scrutinize next year’s budget.
House Independent Bloc Leader and Lakas Rep. Ferdinand Martin Romualdez of Leyte said the lower chamber should examine carefully the hundreds of billions of so-called Special Purpose Funds (SPF) of the Office of the President and other lump-sum appropriations that could be included in next year’s national budget that have been unscrutinized and unchecked the past many years.
“It’s our role to scrutinize the national budget for next year to guarantee that no funds are misused. We will dissect and analyze the contents of the national expenditures” program, Romualdez said.
Party-list Rep. Lito Atienza of Buhay said so-called pork-barrel funds should no longer form part of the national budget following a Supreme Court (SC) decision declaring the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF), a lump-sum budgetary item, unconstitutional.
“The people were made to believe that this year’s national budget did not contain pork-barrel funds. We thought that members of Congress can only identify projects that need funding before the budget is approved. We should look into this to know the truth. How about in next year’s budget? Will there be pork barrels again?” Atienza asked rhetorically.
Party-list Rep. Neri Colmenares of Bayan Muna, meanwhile, said the unconstitutional pork barrel and other lump-sum allocations have proven even heftier under the 2016 budget.
“So far, we noticed the P145-billion lump sum under the 2016 budget. We expect this to increase when we scrutinize the budget [some] more,” Colmenares said.
Party-list Rep. Carlos Isagani Zarate of Bayan said the proposed record-high national budget submitted by the administration and up for consideration beginning on Monday supposedly remains “cured and littered with so much pork.”
“Lump-sum allocations were a central issue in the 2015 budget deliberations because it bred corruption throughout the entire government bureaucracy. These large lump-sum amounts, which they slyly concealed in various departments as SPFs, that do not go through public and congressional scrutiny, are the meal tickets of the corrupt,” Zarate said. The disbursement of SPFs is under the sole control and discretion of the sitting President.
“Yet, it is very alarming that in the 2016 National Expenditure Program, the SPFs increased by P61.7 billion [from 2015] and now amounts to P430.4 billion,” Zarate added. “This is how pork is being kept alive by the Aquino administration.”
Zarate also said one of the lump- sum items, “cleverly distributed” to various local government units, has jumped 269 percent from P15.3 billion in 2015 to P56.5 billion in 2016.
“This is a blatant use of public funds to ensure its continued grip on power, and, this must be exposed and opposed,” Zarate said.
He said Bayan Muna and the rest of the Makabayan bloc members “will scrutinize in detail not only the pork-littered lump sums but all anti-people allocations in the budget.”
Earlier, Budget Secretary Florencio B. Abad said there will be no limits to the amount of projects that district lawmakers can introduce under the 2016 national budget.
“It depends [on how many they want to introduce]. They can totally turn this budget around because they will be answerable to the people,” Abad said.
According to Abad, the two chambers still have the oft-cited “power of the purse” and to introduce projects under the 2016 budget.
Under the 2014 and 2015 General Appropriation Acts, members of the chamber are allowed to recommend projects to the the departments of Health, Social Welfare and Development, Labor and Employment, and of Public Works and Highways, and the Commission on Higher Education. This was the result of an SC decision in 2013 declaring the controversial PDAF unconstitutional.
The House Committee on Appropriations will begin its deliberations today (Monday) on the proposed P3.002-trillion national budget, starting with a briefing by members of the Development Budget Coordination Committee (DBCC), the interagency body that sets the broad economic goals,
expenditure levels and budget of the government.
Liberal Party Rep. Isidro T. Ungab of Davao City, appropriations committee chairman, said their panel followed the same calendar and sequence in coming up with the timetable of committee hearings and deliberations, except that it took into consideration the schedule of the filing of Certificates of Candidacy (COC) from October 12 to 16 for the May 2016 elections.
“Hopefully, the plenary debates and voting on second reading on the national budget by that time [the COC filing] are already completed,” Ungab said.