THE Senate begins today the floor debates on President Rodrigo Duterte’s maiden national budget”•a P3.3-trillion spending request, with billions in lump sums that the Senate’s minority leader has insisted “can still be itemized.”
Ralph Recto claims there is a “bipartisan consensus” to demand the “unbundling” of many lump- sum allocations “in the interest of transparency, fast implementation and accountability.”
“Itemization,” Recto said, “is the antidote to the underspending” that hounded the previous administration, with one estimate pegging at P1 trillion the amount of appropriations “not spent in time or in full.”
“By knowing where funds will go, who will implement it and the details of what will be implemented, the projects will be delivered on time and the people win,” Recto said.
While it was ideal that lump sums “be fleshed out” in the general appropriations bill, “we can settle for a system in which the projects to be funded by a lump sum allocation be listed by agencies immediately after the budget has been enacted.
“This is just for this year because it’s their first budget, and they didn’t have enough time to prepare it because seven weeks after the inaugural last June 30, it was already submitted to Congress. But for 2018, it should be detailed.
“Itemizing the budget, to the extent that can be allowed, makes it FOI-compliant. To make the budget terrific, make it specific.”
Recto cited the case of the proposed P135- billion capital outlays budget of the Department of Education “which should be specified in order to avoid the massive delays in school building construction in the past three years.”
He said the exact location “of where the 47,492 new classrooms will be built, the 20,385 rooms to be repaired and the 17,652 vocational buildings to be constructed next year should be listed.”
The same “elaboration,” he said, must be applied to the P5.4-billion farm-to-market budget of the Department of Agriculture, “which is not only a pittance but is P2 billion less than the budget for this year.”
If the National Irrigation Administration says it will bring water to 29,181 hectares of new farmlands, then the budget must say where, Recto said.
He said the towns covered by the P3.7-billion proposed budget of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources for “forest rehabilitation” must be identified in advance.
Another big-ticket item bereft of details was the “mega P34.6-billion Local Government Support Fund or LGSF.
“This supposedly displaced the Bottom Up Budgeting which has P19 billion this year. Now it has been super-sized. At least the BUB was detailed. In the case of the LGSF, though there are broad rules, the grant, to a large extent, is still discretionary.”
There were more items that could be “bettered if accompanied with details,” Recto said.
“There’s P1.7 billion for free Wi-Fi spots. There’s at least P15 billion for road right-of-way.”
Recto said the deployment of new personnel hires could even be done per region or province.
“That’s not at an unreasonable demand,” he said. “If 53,831 new teaching positions will be hired, then it is not too much to ask that the quotas per division be revealed.”