A PETITION has been filed before the Supreme Court (SC) seeking to stop Congress from implementing the 2015 proposed national budget of P2.606 trillion for being unconstitutional.
In a 16-page petition, former Rep. Augusto Syjuco Jr. of Iloilo, claimed that the lump-sum amounts in the National Expenditure Program (NEP) can be considered pork-barrel funds, which the Court earlier declared as illegal.
Named respondents in the case were Budget Secretary Florencio B. Abad, Senate President Franklin M. Drilon and House Speaker Feliciano Belmonte Jr.
The NEP 2015 is intended to be the basis for Congress to pass the General Appropriations Act for 2015.
Thus, aside from the proposed budget, Syjuco also asked the Court to declare as unconstitutional the NEP.
He said the NEP and 2015 General Appropriations Bill (GAB) are unconstitutional as they redefined the term savings to circumvent the SC’s decisions on the unconstitutionality of acts and practices under the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP).
Under the Constitution, Syjuco said the term “savings” refers to a surplus in budget after the completion or payment of a particular line item budget included in the general appropriations law.
Syjuco noted that if the money was never used in the first place, then it cannot be classified as savings.
Heed the warning
Malacañang on Tuesday vowed to heed Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago’s warning that renewed efforts to redefine “savings” in defiance of SC ruling and retain multibillion-peso porkw-barrel funds in the 2015 national budget is unconstitutional.
“We have adhered to the Constitution and to recent SC rulings,” Communications Secretary Herminio B. Coloma Jr. said, referring to the Tribunal’s decision affirming restrictions on use of government savings when it handed down a unanimous verdict outlawing the controversial DAP of the Department of Budget and Management.
Coloma also assured that the Palace would abide by the congressional authority over the disbursement of public funds under an annually approved national budget law passed by the Senate and the House of Representatives.
“We respect Congress’s power of the purse,” Coloma said in a text message to the BusinessMirror.
Sought for a Palace reaction to Santiago’s move questioning the legality of a proposal to include a redefinition of savings in the 2015 budget bill, Coloma said the Executive would leave it to the legislators to resolve the issue.
Coloma also recalled Palace Chief Spokesman Edwin Lacierda pointing out that “about 80 percent of the so-called errata (in the 2015 budget bill) actually pertained to clerical or typographical errors and the balance contained itemization of programs activities and projects that had been requested by members of the House themselves so that there could be greater clarity and there will be fleshing out of the items that had been indicated in the proposed national expenditure program.”
Syjuco pointed out that under the NEP 2015, the Aquino administration expects that some P251.78 billion of the P2.26 trillion national budget for the year 2014 will not be spent, thus, can be considered as savings.
This estimated savings, according to Syjuco, is greater than the actual amount that was spent for the 116 projects under the whole duration of the DAP.
“With such huge ‘savings set up for kill’ now targeted by the national government, clearly any re-emergence of DAP or another DAP-like mechanism in the near future, will not certainly need to occur,” Syjuco said.
Likewise, Syjuco said the lump sum appropriations contaiend in the NEP 2015 and the proposed budget for 2015 are unconstitutional in line with the Court’s ruling in Belgica et. al versus Secretary Paquito Ochoa, et. al. where it declared lump-suym budgeting as unconstitutional.
The lump-sum items in the proposed budget include the President’s Special Purpose Funds (SPF), also known as the President’s pork barrel amounting to P501.67 billion or 29 percent of the proposed appropriations for 2015; and the Grassroots Participatory Beudgeting (GPB), previously called “bottom up budgeting, amounting to P20.9 billion.
Syjuco also noted that the P20.9 billion budget for the projects Local Government Units (LGUs) is on top of the P2.9 billion Local Government support Fund included in the P501.670 billion SPF
Butch Fernandez