Converting NEDA into a regular Cabinet department is not the answer to what ails national economic development in this country.
Two things happened recently that gave rise to the thought of disconnection in the minds of thoughtful Filipinos. One was the airing of allegations that the 2025 General Appropriations Act (GAA) submitted to the President of the Philippines for approval was a heavily pork-laden document, with spaces for appropriations left blank and unprogrammed projects—projects with no certified funding—switched with programmed projects. The second thing was the filing of a bill seeking to convert the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) into a regular Cabinet department, complete with a secretary and undersecretaries.
Where lies the disconnection? It lies essentially in the fact that legislature has the power of the purse—the power to tax and direct public spending—while the Executive Department of the government, of which NEDA is a part, merely executes the expenditure decisions of the legislature. The Executive Department proposes, the legislature dispossess.
The differences between the functions and powers of Congress and the Executive Department with regard to the making of the annual national budget are best shown by the cases that have been filed by various private groups to declare the 2025 GAA unconstitutional. Besides the switching of unprogrammed items with programmed items, the petitioners cited non-compliance with the Constitutionally mandated primacy of education in the National Expenditure Program (NEP) and the failure to provide a subsidy for national health insurer Philhealth.
After a quick review of the GAA proposal approved by the Congressional bicameral committees (bicam), President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. signed the bill into law.
If the bill seeking NEDA’s conversion into a regular Cabinet department is approved, national economic planning in this country will have come almost full-circle. National economic planning in the Commonwealth era was done by a National Economic Council (NEC) headed by a chairman and a bipartisan board of directors. That structure remained in place until the late 1960s, when it was replaced by a NEDA governed by a director-general/Secretary of Socio-Economic Planning and a board of directors composed of Cabinet members and private-sector figures. In the latter part of the martial law regime, NEDA became an entire-Cabinet entity – with the Chief Executive as chairman – in the belief that national economic planning needed a whole-of-government approach.
What improvement in national economic planning in this country can reasonably be expected from the conversion of NEDA into a regular Cabinet department? I haven’t read the ‘Whereas’ part of the proposal, but I dare say that little, if any, improvement in national economic planning can be expected from the proposed structural change.
Economic planning should not be a sterile, aspirational exercise. It should be much more than preparing a six-year development plan and helping draft an annual NEP. A largely sterile exercise is what this country’s economic planning becomes (1) when Congress fools around – through insertions, illegal transfers and deliberate numerical errors – with the Executive Department’s economic priorities and (2) when a highly politicized Department of Budget and Management (DBM) allows, and often participates in, fund releases and transfers that are clearly political in character.
The record of national economic planning in this country leaves much to be desired. NEDA has good economists, social scientists and statisticians on its staff, but the administrative structure in which they operate militates against their being able to do a good economic-planning job.
Converting NEDA into a regular Cabinet department is not the answer to what ails national economic development in this country. As just another Cabinet department, NEDA’s policy recommendations are bound to be regarded with less respect than they are today.
What this country needs is not a national economic development authority but a national economic management authority (NEMA for short). NEMA would embody representation from Congress, in the manner of the Legislative Executive Development Advisory Council (LEDAC), and DBM would be absorbed by NEMA.
A NEMA composed of NEDA, LEDAC and DBM is the ideal national economic planning structure for this country.
(llagasjessa@yahoo.com)