House eyes crafting budget with Palace

MANILA, Philippines — In the future, lawmakers may tinker with the budget proposal for the succeeding year even before it is submitted to Congress, spelling a radical change in the annual budgetary process and blurring the lines of executive and legislative functions in budget-making.

House leaders on Tuesday announced a plan to “take a second look” at the “traditional way” of enacting the appropriations measure from its preparation to passage into law, and introducing a mechanism in which the House and the Senate would work with the executive branch in crafting the proposal for approval by the same two chambers.

Speaker Alan Peter Cayetano and Majority Leader Martin Romualdez separately issued statements heralding what they considered a novel way to speed up the typically lengthy budget season and to avoid presidential vetoes.

Consultation

“Even before the President submits the budget to Congress, there is consultation with the proper committees of both the House and the Senate, instead of them preparing it and the House revising it and the Senate doing its own revision,” Cayetano said, explaining the proposal.

“That is what we want to do and that is what Budget Secretary (Wendel) Avisado wants to do,”the Taguig lawmaker said.

At present, the outlay is drafted by the country’s economic managers after collecting the proposals of all government agencies and is submitted to Congress by the President as the National Expenditure Program or the President’s budget.

Based on that, the House files the general appropriations bill, which goes through the typical legislative processes from committee deliberations to plenary debates, amendments, and approval on second and third reading.

Once passed by the House, the bill goes through the same processes in the Senate.

The two chambers then meet in conference to reconcile conflicting provisions, and once a final version is agreed upon, it is ratified and sent to the President for signing into law, or what becomes the General Appropriations Act.

Romualdez said the plan was still consistent with the constitutional mandate that “the power of the purse lies with the legislature.”