THE Constitution gives to the Congress of the Philippines — composed of the House of Representatives and the Senate — the power of the purse. In simple words, Congress has the authority to legislate how much is to be spent by the government year after year, and what these expenses are.
The procedure calls for the Executive branch headed by the President, through the Department of Budget and Management, to craft and submit a National Expenditure Program (NEP) to Congress, which after thorough deliberations by the lawmakers and voting at various levels (committee, plenary and bicameral conference committee) becomes the National Budget bill for signing into law by the President.
With the new Marcos administration, it would seem that members of Congress have become very lenient with the budget, many of them approving with only a modicum of scrutiny the requested budgets of certain departments.
‘Both Pimentel and Lagman are seeing that Congress this time is surrendering its power of the purse to the President, something that can only result in budgetary
imbalances and economic disaster.’
The importance of judiciously vetting the budget cannot be overemphasized, as these are the people’s taxes being used to govern us.
This task is best taken up by the minority members in both the House and the Senate, with Sen. Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel taking the lead. He said priorities contained in the administration’s P5.3-trillion national budget for 2023 are “misplaced” as nearly P480 billion in lump-sum allotments may end up being squandered.
In the House, the Makabayan bloc and Albay 1st District Rep. Edcel Lagman urged members to stop the practice of servility to the offices of high officials, like the Office of the President and Office of the Vice President. To put the admonition in context, the relevant House committee terminated discussion on the OVP budget in less than 10 minutes, and approved the same.
Senator Pimentel noticed that “it’s business as usual” for the executive department with regard to handling the budgetary requests and identifying projects or worse, just the lump-sum amounts from which their pet projects would get funding.
He took the executive branch to task for allotting billions of pesos to items that lacked specific details as required by the Constitution. He said among these “objectionable” proposed budget items were the P300 billion allotted for “support to foreign-assisted projects” and the more than P9 billion in intelligence funds of civilian agencies.
Both Pimentel and Lagman are seeing that Congress this time is surrendering its power of the purse to the President, something that can only result in budgetary imbalances and economic disaster.
