DAVAO CITY—Incoming Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno said he plans to raise infrastructure spending to end the neglect of the last six years, and slammed the Aquino administration for using bottom-up-budgeting (BuB) as a political tool.
“We have to make up for the past neglect of infrastructure,” Diokno told the ANC news channel on Monday, noting that it took the Aquino government five years to bid out the Daang Hari road project in Las Piñas and Bacoor, Cavite.
Diokno also said an 8 percent growth in gross domestic product would be achievable in the last three years of the Duterte administration.
Diokno, one of the lead petitioners against pork barrel and the Aquino administration’s Disbursement Acceleration Program before the Supreme Court, said there was a need to determine if underspending was caused by an agency’s low absorptive capacity or the ineptness of the department head.
“If there’s a huge budget for school buildings, and it’s not moving, why are you going to penalize the kids for this ineptness [or] incompetence of the secretary?” he said.
“There are so many projects that are not moving. Why not remove the secretary? Replace him with someone who’s more capable,” he added.
The Aquino administration, he said, underspent in the last six years, while the Bureau of Internal Revenue and the Bureau of Customs consistently failed to meet their revenue targets.
The BuB, he said, designed as an alternative to the top-to-bottom approach to bankrolling infrastructure projects in communities, became politicized and was used to favor the administration’s allies.
“That’s a political tool,” he said.
He said he planned to limit the BuB to its original mandate of assisting local governments of third-, fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-class municipalities, subject to the approval of President-elect Rodrigo Duterte.
“I will continue it, but I think it will be… limited to depressed municipalities,” he said.
The internal revenue allotments (IRA) of local governments will be strengthened under the Duterte administration, which would take a “formula-based, no-questions asked” approach to disbursing funds to local government units.
“They have more than enough. They receive one-fourth of the internal taxes of the national government. I think it’s close now to P400 billion. The local governments are getting this in terms of grant-in-aid,” he said.
The next administration will also be pushing for a new budget reform act.
“There are many improvements [that] I want this embodied in a budget reform act, consistent with the recent Supreme Court decisions on PDAF [Priority Development Assistance Fund] and DAP,” he said.
