Senators OK sked for passage of proposed P3-T nat’l budget for 2016
SENATORS held a caucus on Monday and agreed on the schedules for the passage of the proposed P3-trillion national budget in 2016 before the year ends.
After the caucus, Senate President Franklin Drilon announced on the floor the schedules of the target approval of the budget.
Drilon said six subcommittees of finance will have until this Wednesday, November 11, to submit their reports to Senator Loren Legarda, chair of the Senate finance committee.
And at 9 a.m. on November 16, he said, Legarda will sponsor the proposed General Appropriations Act followed by interpellations on general principles and at 3 p.m. on the same day, the chamber will start the interpellation of different agencies.
“We’ll continue the interpellation on November 23 to 25,” Drilon said.
He said the approval of the proposed 2016 national budget on second and third reading, has been scheduled on November 26.
“And the bicameral conference committee is scheduled to meet on November 28 to December 1 and we will hopefully have the bicameral conference committee report approved on December 8, 2015,” Drilon added.
While promising to cooperate with the budget deliberations, Minority Leader Juan Ponce Enrile requested that the minority members should also be allowed to scrutinize the budget.
“I’d like to put into the record that as far as the minority is concerned, we want to cooperate but we want also at the same time to scrutinize the budget and I hope that the majority will not apply any cloture on any of the members of the minority in this chamber when they want to ask questions during the discussion of the budget,” Enrile said.
“We’re dealing here with the P3 trillion budget and I think to be fair to the people of this country, we must have all the leeway to scrutinize it to find out whether indeed the allocations of fund for each program, for each project , for each department is to the best interest of the people for after all, it’s Congress that grants the money to the executive…,” he said.
“The function of the executive is not really to tell what they want us to do but we must tell them what we want them to do because we represent the people. They are the executive , the implementing body, we are the policy-making organ of the republic and we must perform the job in order to better serve the interest of the people,” Enrile added.
