Legarda: House, Senate break budget impasse

Loren Legarda

Sen. Loren Legarda on Monday said the Senate-House conference committee had agreed to break the impasse over the P3.8-trillion proposed spending bill for 2019, easing worries that the Duterte administration would have to make do with a reenacted 2018 budget this year.

Addressing the Senate plenary, Legarda said she had a meeting with Camarines Sur Rep. Rolando Andaya Jr., who agreed to have the stalled spending bill ratified by the contingents of the Senate and the House of Representatives on the conference committee on Friday.

The approval of the proposed expenditure program had been delayed after Andaya and Sen. Panfilo Lacson questioned pork allocations in the annual budget submitted by the Department of Budget and Management.

“I think there’s a breakthrough in a sense… as [the Senate and the House] technical staff are working on the fine print and details [of the national budget],” Legarda told the session.

Friday ratification

Legarda, chair of the Senate finance committee, described her meeting with Andaya, the head of the House appropriations committee, as “more congenial and open.”

She said she and Andaya, leader of the House conference panel, also agreed to reconvene the “small group” conference committee on Wednesday “so that we can finalize it for a targeted ratification on Friday at the latest.”

The senator said her next meeting with the Camarines Sur representative may be the last, as Congress was set to take on a recess starting on Feb. 8.

Lacson then asked Legarda if she would present the amended conference report first before seeking their approval or just submit a final document for ratification.

“Can we have a lowdown first before we see the formal bicameral report for our signatures?” Lacson said.

In a text message, Lacson said the senators and House members would have to agree on how to slice the “pizza pie” before they could move forward and resolve the budget deadlock.

He was referring to the P75 billion that Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno arbitrarily added to the budget of the Department of Public Works and Highways without the knowledge of the agency’s officials.

The senator had insisted that President Duterte’s budget for 2019 was pork-laden and not pork-free as claimed by Speaker Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her allies.

Most contentious

Said Lacson: “The most contentious is how to deal with the P75-billion ‘adjustment’ inserted by … Diokno … Why? [Because] it is basically one and the same piece of pie, from which both [the Senate and the House] used as fiscal space to carve out their realignments.”

Andaya had threatened to withhold approval of the budget bill by his conference panel unless Diokno submitted a report on government savings for 2018.

But with little time left, Andaya withdrew the threat on Monday.

“We can no longer wait for Secretary Diokno’s report on the DBM (Department of Budget and Management) pork report,” he said in a statement.

“The time for passing the 2019 national budget is running short. We will go on with the approval of the budget as scheduled,” Andaya said.

But he said he was not letting Diokno off the hook, insisting that the budget chief should be compelled to “make public the fund releases drawn from budgetary savings” from 2018.

“Secretary Diokno cannot unilaterally release savings without complying with laws or without the signature of the President,” he said. —With a report from DJ Yap