Senators on Wednesday agreed to increase the proposed budget of the Department of National Defense from P116.2 billion to an undetermined amount to be able to address the country’s security concerns.
Senator Loren Legarda, the finance committee chairman, took up the cudgels for the Defense department, citing what she called “multifarous threats” to national security.
“So if [the budget] is not enough, is the chair of the finance committee defending and presenting this budget agreeable to augmenting the budget of this department in order to secure the safety and security of the Filipino people, given the [present] security environment of the country?” Senator Juan Ponce Enrile asked Legarda.
“Of course, Mr. President. In fact before your interpellation and during the weekend when we were working, I already augmented their budget based on the amendments presented and contained in my committee report today and that includes P250 million to the Office of the Secretary’s (quick response fund) which was not grated by Congress for year 2015,” said Legarda.
Aside from the P250 million, Legarda said there were other requests of the Philippine Army.
Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin told reporters they were directed during the plenary deliberations on their proposed budget to submit how much additional funding would be required.
Gazmin admitted that the current budget is not enough especially with the AFP Modernization program.
Legarda said the DND’s initial proposed budget to the Department of Budget and Management was P202.3 billion but it was slashed to P115.8 billion at the House of Representatives. Her committee approved a higher budget of P116.2 billion.
Meanwhile, Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago blasted Malacañang for proposing an inflated budget in 2016 despite the notorious underspending throughout the Aquino administration, and for retaining lump-sum appropriations similar to the nullified Priority Development Assistance Fund.
She urged her colleagues to be vigilant about the budget, noting that the Constitution vested on Congress the power of the purse, or the power to determine how people’s taxes should be spent.
The Senate is deliberating on the P3-trillion budget Malacañang proposed for 2016, 17.4 percent or P447 billion higher than the 2015 budget. Santiago called the proposal “ambitious” given the Aquino administration’s “epic underspending record” since it came to power.
The senator explained that the government underspent by a total of P670 billion from 2011 to 2014. She added that in the first seven months of 2015, underspending was already “colossal” at P190 billion.
“It is not as if the Aquino administration is meeting its promised outputs and outcomes at less cost. It is simply failing in meeting its promises to the Filipino people,” Santiago said, citing poor infrastructure, high unemployment rates, and chronic poverty.
Reasons for underspending, the senator said, include “sheer incompetence”, the practice of “deliberatively bloating the budget request so it can play around with the artificial ‘savings’”, and “poor budget planning by including projects that are not implementation-ready.”
Santiago warned that a bloated 2016 budget, like the 2015 budget, is prone to electoral politics. “Decisions about fund transfers in the guise of ‘savings’ are not necessarily for public purposes but for election-related objectives,” she added.
However, she warned the most dangerous budget threat is “the continued presence of PDAF-like allocations and the provisions for lump sum appropriations,” which she said was “in open defiance of the Constitution and three recent decisions of the Supreme Court.”