Marcos tells Cabinet to bring back ‘critical’ initiatives

President Marcos wants key socioeconomic programs originally contained in the National Expenditure Program (NEP) but defunded by Congress in the 2025 national budget to be restored and implemented.

The chief executive told members of his official family to take a second look at the canceled programs with an emphasis on how to put them back on track.

He issued the directive on Tuesday, during the first full Cabinet meeting of the year at Malacañan Palace.

“We have to reexamine so that the programs that we wanted, that we put in the NEP, can somehow be restored,” Mr. Marcos told his Cabinet.

“For the rest of the departments, I need you to give me the priorities — the things that we prioritized in the NEP that were removed in terms of budgeting, in terms of appropriations,” he added.

Marcos said many items need funding, citing the P12-billion decrease in the budget for  road maintenance, the P500-million reduction in the funding for routine bridge maintenance, and the P21-billion budget cut for feasibility studies.

He said he is willing to sit down with each department to ensure the government’s actual expenditure program this year would be closer to the originally envisioned NEP.

He added that he wants to know what became of each department’s budget allocations, specifically the funds for critical projects.

On Dec. 30, 2024, Marcos signed into law the P6.326-trillion General Appropriations Act for 2025 and vetoed over P194 billion in line items he deemed inconsistent with his administration’s priorities.

He directly vetoed some provisions not responsive to the peoples’ needs and pursued conditional implementation on certain items to ensure prudent utilization of public funds.

The 2025 expenditure program is 9.7 percent higher than the FY 2024 budget of P5.768 trillion and 22 percent of the projected FY 2025 gross domestic product.