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Friday, February 7, 2025

Bersamin slams ‘blank check’ claims on 2025 budget as ‘fake news’

Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin strongly refuted Monday allegations that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. signed the 2025 General Appropriations Act (GAA) with blank sections, describing such claims as “outrightly malicious and should be condemned as criminal.”

Bersamin’s statement comes amid accusations, including from former president Rodrigo Duterte, suggesting that portions of the GAA were deliberately left blank, supposedly allowing the administration to allocate funds at will.

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“No page of the 2025 National Budget was left unturned before the president signed it into law,” said Bersamin, a former Supreme Court Chief Justice.

“All 4,057 pages of its two thick volumes (which were printed in fine print—with nearly sixty lines on each page) were exhaustively reviewed by hundreds of professional staff from Congress and the Department of Budget and Management,” he added.

Bersamin noted that funding items in the national budget cannot legally be left blank. He also pointed out that the GAA’s full details are accessible to the public via the DBM website, leaving no room for misinformation.

“It is impossible for any funding items to be left blank, as alleged by misinformed and malicious sources. The true facts and the printed figures appearing in the GAA easily debunk the malicious claims of deliberate blanks being left for filling in,” the Executive Secretary explained.

Bersamin urged the public to examine the GAA themselves and draw conclusions based on the official document, which he assured contains no program, activity, or project with unallocated appropriations.

“The former president and his cohorts should know better that the GAA could not contain blank items,” he concluded his statement.

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