‘Congress creating an agency for every problem’

MANILA, Philippines — Rep. Lito Atienza of party-list group Buhay yesterday denounced what he described as the “propensity of Congress to create a department for every problem the nation is facing.”

“We have a water distribution problem. The solution of Congress: create a department of water resources. We have a slow response to disasters and the need to rehabilitate devastated communities. The answer: create a department. The legislature is forming a third department for overseas employment,” he said.            

He would rather have both the Executive and Legislative departments force the existing state offices dealing with the country’s problems to do its jobs efficiently and effectively instead of constituting additional agencies that would cost taxpayers tens of billions to fund and maintain.            

“We have multiple departments and agencies, and secretaries and other officials who are supposed to address these concerns. They just have to do their work,” Atienza stressed.

The President, he added, could simply dismiss officials who are not performing well or are underperforming their jobs. Congress could also cut or even scrap their budgets.

Atienza disagreed with proponents of new departments that there is diffused or scattered responsibility and accountability under the present setup. “No, there is no such thing. There is only one person who is ultimately responsible and accountable, and that is the President. The buck stops with him.”

He said President Duterte could use his usual profanity-laden, tough talk to force officials to do their job effectively, as he pointed out that the creation of new agencies would just “bloat the bureaucracy further and add to the tax burden of taxpayers.”

“We are expanding the bureaucracy, instead of right-sizing it, which is what the President has advocated in his last State of the Nation Address (SONA),” he said.

He noted though that Duterte, in his SONA, also pushed for the creation of the departments for water resources, disaster management and overseas employment.

Atienza lamented that Congress is about to form new departments even while two recently created agencies – Department of Information and Communications Technology and the Department of Human Settlements and Urban Development (DHSUD) – have not been fully organized.

“In fact, the DHSUD is still headless because its secretary has not been appointed. In the meantime, the agencies have stopped building housing units for typhoon victims,” he said, noting that thousands of displaced families are still homeless six years after Super Typhoon Yolanda devastated Eastern Visayas.

As for the water crisis in Metro Manila and neighboring areas, Atienza said it is a distribution problem.

“We have enough sources of water in Rizal, Bulacan and Quezon. We can even tap Laguna de Bay and Manila Bay. The problem is processing it into potable supply and distributing it, which the government had contracted two companies to do,” he said.