SENATOR Panfilo Lacson has raised several questions to bolster his suspicions about the presence of the Priority Development Assistance Funds or the so-called pork barrel in the 2018 budget.
“That’s what the Department of Budget and Management and the House appropriations committee always say before, during and after our budget deliberations,” said Lacson, when asked if he believed the assertions of the DBM and House leaders that there was no pork in next year’s capital outlay.
Lacson, who never received a single centavo from his pork barrel since he became a senator, demanded an explanation on the huge lump sums in several government agencies like the Department of Public Works and Highways, Department of Education and Department of Agriculture, among others.
He also asked why legislators in both houses of Congress were being asked to submit lists of their projects just before the period of amendments of the appropriations bill or even before that.
He also cited the billboards in some jurisdictions/districts where some congressmen boldly claim that ongoing projects were theirs.
“How would they account or explain the P8.3 billion that they discovered and realigned to fund the free tuition of students in state universities and colleges in the 2017 General Appropriations Act?” he asked.
The senator earlier said the Senate last year excised some P8.3 billion in pork barrel allocations tucked in the budget of the DPWH to fund the free tuition in SUCs this year.
“Let’s be honest to our people and to ourselves,” he said, after calling on his fellow lawmakers to give up their pork barrel in the proposed 2018 budget so that the Universal Access to Quality Tertiary Education Act or the free college education law could be funded.
But Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno has maintained there are no pork barrel allocations in the proposed P3.767-trillion national budget for 2018.
He said Lacson himself was not sure whether there were indeed pork barrel allocations in the proposed fiscal spending program for next year.
He vowed to ferret out pork barrel allocations during the budget deliberations in the Senate in the coming months.