President Rodrigo Duterte will sign the proposed P3.757-trillion national budget for 2019 on April 15, Malacañang said Wednesday.
The Palace made the announcement even as the chairman of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Appropriations on Monday urged the Senate to explain the fund sourcing sufficiency of government employees’ salaries, bonuses and allowances under the 2019 budget after it allegedly unilaterally slashed P13.4-billion from the Miscellaneous Personnel Benefit Fund.
Camarines Sur Rep. Rolando Andaya Jr. said the MPBF was being used to augment the budget shortage for the state workers’ financial benefits.
Andaya said Senate leaders led by Senate President Vicente Sotto III and Senator Loren Legarda, chairman of the Senate committee on finance, must be able to explain what would happen to the benefits of employees should a shortage arise.
“The MPBF is one of three sources of money paid to government personnel,” Andaya said.
“The other two are the budgets lodged under each agency and the Pension and Gratuity Fund.”
Earlier, Senate President Vicente Sotto III urged President Duterte to veto the P75-billion allocation for programs and projects under the Local Infrastructure Program of the Department of Public Works and Highways, which was made through internal realignments after the bicameral conference report was ratified.
“The President may wish to consider disapproving these unconstitutional realignments pursuant to his constitutional power to veto particular items in the General Appropriations Bill,” Sotto said in a letter to Duterte dated March 26.
Duterte’s spokesman Salvador Panelo had repeatedly said the President would exercise his veto power if some items in the budget bill failed to comply with the Supreme Court ruling in 2013 that declared unconstitutional the pork barrel system.
Congress in February ratified the version of the budget approved by the bicameral conference committee, but the House of Representatives admitted itemizing lump sum allocations even after the ratification.
This did not sit well with some senators, particularly Sotto and Panfilo Lacson who both claimed that such a move was contrary to the 1987 Constitution.
But Andaya said they were only itemizing lump sum appropriations “without departing from the approved specifications” of the ratified budget and “by so doing make the budget more transparent and easy to scrutinize.”
The government has been operating on a reenacted budget since January after Congress failed to pass the 2019 General Appropriations Act before 2018, ended due to the disagreements between the Senate and House over the realignments in the budget bill.
Last month, Duterte warned of the negative effects of a prolonged implementation of the reenacted budget on the economy. The Palace, however, assured the public that the government was prepared to cushion the impact of a reenacted budget.