House, Senate delay 2020 budget approval

MANILA, Philippines — The House of Representatives and the Senate will not be able to approve the final version of the proposed P4.1-trillion 2020 national budget today because the conference committee tasked to come up with a common draft is seeing a delay of up to two days in finishing its job and submitting its report to the two chambers.

The panel, jointly headed by House appropriations committee chairman Rep. Isidro Ungab of Davao City and his Senate counterpart Sonny Angara, is supposed to meet this morning but had it cancelled because its staff was still reconciling the diverse changes made by both chambers in the proposed outlay.

Senators and House members sitting in the committee were to agree on the reconciled draft of the outlay and sign their report, which the two chambers would later ratify. But that is not happening today.

 “Hopefully, we could do that – signing of the report and its plenary ratification – on Tuesday,” Ungab said yesterday.

He said the two chambers are still aiming to send the final version of the budget to President Duterte for his scrutiny and signing into law before Dec. 21.            

The slight delay in coming up with a common draft is apparently due to the disparate realignments or changes made by the House and the Senate in their respective versions of next year’s spending program.

The House had approved a number of realignments, including P3 billion for the National Food Authority (NFA), which would have a total of P10 billion for buying palay next year.

Congressmen are hoping that NFA’s increased procurement would prop up palay prices, which have fallen to levels that are below production cost, resulting in hundreds of millions, even billions, in losses on the part of the country’s more than two million rice farmers.

The other House augmentations include P850 million for the Department of Education, P200 million for the Department of Health, P1 billion each for the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police, P500 million for the Philippine General Hospital, P500 million for the hiring of additional traffic enforcers by the Metro Manila Development Authority, another P500 million for rural electrification and P500 million for the training of Filipino athletes competing in next year’s Tokyo Olympics.

On the other hand, senators realigned a total of P206.2 billion to their projects, programs and advocacies in their version of the proposed national budget for next year.

They scrapped the House-approved P3-billion increase in NFA’s palay procurement fund, diverting it to the Land Bank for lending to local government units at an annual interest rate of two percent. Land Bank stands to make P60 million a year in interest income on money belonging to taxpayers.

By tradition, any realignment, augmentation or diversion is classified as a pork barrel fund belonging to its lawmaker-proponent. Since last year, some of these adjustments have been described as “institutional amendments.”

According to Albay Rep. Joey Salceda, a member of the House contingent in the budget conference, senators funded their projects by making “dagdag-bawas” (add-cut) in the budgets of scores of agencies. Another House conferee called it “fund juggling.”

A summary of the changes made by senators showed that they initially reduced appropriations of agencies for their projects and subsequently restored such items and allocated them for their own programs or advocacies. In some cases, they augmented those items from other funds in the budget.

For instance, in the Department of Public Works and Highways, for which the House approved P529.7 billion for 2020, the Senate first took away P28.1 billion from various projects before adding P34.9 billion, for a net addition of P6.8 billion, increasing the agency’s funding to P536.5 billion.

In the Department of Education, senators first removed P11.3 billion, after which they added P12.8 billion, for a net addition of P1.5 billion. They cut P2.8 billion in the Department of Agriculture before adding P6.9 billion for a net addition of P4.1 billion, increasing the agency’s budget to P59.1 billion.