Pimentel vows to monitor 2023 spending

MANILA, Philippines — With the approval of the 2023 national budget laden with confidential and intelligence funds (CIFs), Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel III vowed yesterday to monitor next year’s spending and do better at scrutinizing the proposed budget for 2024.

In an interview with Senate reporters via Zoom, Pimentel said the minority will not get tired of sifting through problematic affairs in government and finding better strategies to keep the next spending bill in check.

“As I’ve told Sen. Risa (Hontiveros), we will even be better next year, because what we learned this year is still applicable next year. More intensive and down to the numbers (scrutiny of the budget) next year,” he said mostly in Filipino.

Pimentel and Hontiveros, the only members of the opposition in the 24-member Senate, had argued against the hefty CIF allocations for the Office of the President at P4.5 billion; Office of the Vice President (OVP) at P500 million; and the Departments of Education (DepEd) at P150 million and of the Interior and Local Government at P100.6 million, among others.

During the budget deliberations, Hontiveros made a motion to realign the P100-million budget earlier realigned from the confidential fund of the DepEd to the OVP’s maintenance and other operating expenses or MOOE back to the DepEd MOOE for its healthy learners’ institution program found in the “Support to Schools and Learners Program.” Angara accepted the motion.

However, Hontiveros failed in seeking the realignment of the remaining P50 million of the confidential fund of the DepEd, as Angara rejected the motion.

Last Wednesday, the Senate approved on third and final reading the P5.268-trillion budget for 2023, the first spending program of the Marcos administration designed to address the nation’s post-pandemic needs.

The minority tried to prevent lump sum allocations and have it realigned to other government agencies and functions to promote transparency but failed.

“If you’re not in law enforcement, you’re a civilian, you’re not or you don’t have the law to enforce, you have no business conducting surveillance activities,” said Pimentel, arguing his point that CIFs should be allocated only for law enforcement agencies.

To ensure transparency, the Senate has created an oversight committee that will monitor the disbursement of the proposed P9.28 billion CIFs lodged in the 2023 national budget.

Senate President Juan Miguel Zubiri, who will chair the oversight panel in this 19th Congress, reiterated that the creation of a select committee to oversee the CIFs has been a tradition of the Senate since the 10th Congress.

Zubiri said the CIFs are “essential” to empower government agencies to conduct necessary programs, operations and activities for the safety and security of Filipinos, especially now that Filipinos are “facing strange new challenges.”

Pimentel said he welcomed the constitution of the special oversight committee as a second level of defense, in the name of the people and for the people in the name of transparency, though the better practice was to “discourage the allocation of lump sums.

Subsidy for 12.4 M families

At the House of Representatives, three party-list groups known as the Makabayan bloc filed a joint resolution urging President Marcos to provide a P10,000 cash subsidy to each of the 12.4 million Filipino families belonging to the “bottom half” of the economy.

In House Resolution No. 13 filed last Nov. 22, Representatives Arlene Brosas of Gabriela Women’s Party, France Castro of ACT Teachers, and Raoul Manuel of Kabataan stated that the cash assistance is needed by these families amid “record-high inflation, depressed wages, (and) series of calamities.”

“Despite the loosening of restrictions and resumption of economic activities, Filipinos continue to suffer from the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, widespread joblessness, high prices, massive poverty, and economic turmoil,” the resolution read.

It cited how the inflation rate has surged to 7.7 percent in October 2022 from 6.9 percent just the previous month, hitting a 14-year high or since December 2008 “amid the consistent rise in food, utilities and transport costs.”

“Roughly two-thirds or 66 percent of Filipinos consider the need to control inflation as the national issue that requires urgent action,” the lawmakers noted, citing a recent Pulse Asia survey.

Another survey done by the Social Weather Station showed that around 2.9 million Filipino families, representing 11.3 percent of total families, “experienced involuntary hunger at least once in the third quarter of the year,” they added.

Their resolution also pointed out that the current minimum wage of P570 per day in Metro Manila, which remains unchanged since June 2022, is “not sufficient to cover the basic needs of Filipino families, much less the lower minimum wage levels in regions outside” the capital region. – Sheila Crisostomo