Senator Risa Hontiveros lashed back at Vice President Sara Duterte on Thursday, saying she doesn’t want her respect.
“I am not asking for your respect VP Sara. What I was asking from you… was accountability,” Hontiveros said.
“So, you have to account where you will spend the confidential funds (Duterte requested for the Department of Education and the Office of the Vice President),” she said.
Earlier, Duterte said she has no respect for Hontiveros and ACT Teachers party-list Rep. France Castro, who have questioned her office’s use of confidential funds in 2022.
She thanked President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. for supporting the P125-million confidential and intelligence funds (CIFs) the Office of the Vice President (OVP) requested from the Office of the President (OP) in December 2022, despite the lack of a line item for it under the 2022 General Appropriations Act (GAA).
But Hontiveros shot back that if Duterte does not know how to respect her colleagues, she should at least respect the public in spending its funds.
Hontiveros said it has been a week since Duterte faced the senators during the deliberations on the proposed budget of the OVP and the DepEd, which she also heads.
In that time, Hontiveros said, Duterte has offered more tirades than explanations of where and how she intends to spend the confidential funds.
Hontiveros also said her questioning of the budget is part of her job as a senator.
In the House, a senior lawmaker on Thursday said the controversial confidential and intelligence funds were retained in the proposed 2024 budget.
Marikina Rep. Stella Luz Quimbo, senior vice chair of the House appropriations committee, said the committee made “few technical changes” in the budget measure and that these items were retained.
Her remarks indicated that the House appropriations panel did not touch the government’s request for P5.277 billion in intelligence expenses and P4.864 billion in confidential funds under the GAA.
The panel did not accede to the appeal of Ombudsman Samuel Martires, however, to remove the requirement to publish Commission on Audit reports, Quimbo added .
Quimbo also played down claims by Gabriela party-list that the budget did not focus on programs for women and children, saying these concerns were lodged in different agencies of the government.
The House aims to approve the budget on final reading before Congress goes on break from Sept. 30 to Nov. 5.
Also on Thursday, AKO Bikol party-list Rep. Elizaldy Co, chairman of the committee on appropriations, said he received a letter from the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) assuring Congress that the Office of the President did not subvert the House’s power of the purse when it released contingency funds to the Office of the Vice President last year.
The letter from DBM Secretary Amenah Pangandaman clarified that the P125 million released to the Office of the Vice President came from the P7 billion budget set aside as Contingent Fund for 2022, and was intended to support the OVP’s good governance engagements and social services projects.
The amount of P125 million is the larger part of the total P221.42 million released to the OVP and sourced from the Contingent Fund under last year’s General Appropriations Act approved by Congress, she said.
Pangandaman said the release of funds to Vice President Duterte’s office “was not an augmentation or transfer of funds from the Office of the President,” an action declared in 2014 as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in its ruling penned by then-Justice Lucas Bersamin, who is now Executive Secretary.