Bersamin on 2025 budget: ‘There is no program with blank appropriations’
Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin (Photo from HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES)
MANILA, Philippines — The Palace on Monday denied claims that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. signed the P6.3 trillion national budget for 2025 with some sections of it supposedly left blank.
This move was to allegedly allow the administration to fill in amounts later, like a blank check, to facilitate theft.
In a statement from Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin, he stressed that “peddling of such fake news is outrightly malicious and should be condemned as criminal.”
“Some quarters, including a former president, have maliciously peddled fake news about President Marcos having signed the GAA (General Appropriations Act) of 2025 with certain parts of the enactment purposely left blank to enable the administration to simply fill in the amounts like in a blank check.”
“No page of the 2025 National Budget was left unturned before the president signed it into law,” he clarified.
Bersamin further said that all 4,057 pages of the two thick volumes of the 2025 General Appropriations Act were “exhaustively reviewed by hundreds of professional staff from Congress and the Department of Budget and Management.”
These pages were printed in fine print with nearly sixty lines on each page.
This “meticulous line-by-line scrutiny,” Bersamin said, was a pre-enactment check done by dedicated civil servants to make sure that the budget had no single discrepancy.
“It is impossible for any funding items to be left blank, as alleged by misinformed and malicious sources,” he said.
“The true facts and the printed figures appearing in the GAA easily debunk the malicious claims of deliberate blanks being left for filling in,” Bersamin added.
He further said, “Anyone who conducts the same rigorous examination of the 2025 National Budget—which the public can view on the DBM website—will come to the same conclusion: that there’s no program, activity or project at all with blank appropriations in that carefully vetted law.”
In a Facebook post from private citizen Jun Abines, he accused Marcos and his “co-conspirators” of stealing money from the national budget.
He also called the president “the greatest thief who ever lived.”
Abines claimed that there were “at least 10 pages with blank spaces where the amount of budget was supposed to be written” in the national budget.
“Now we learn that of the P6.3 trillion 2025 GAA budget, there were loopholes and blank spaces that will allow them to put the desired amount and redirect those funds to whoever, wherever and whenever they want!” he said in his post.
He said that it was Davao City 3rd District Rep. Isidro Ungab who “blew the whistle” about the alleged stealing from the budget, and former President Rodrigo Duterte “responded and exposed it.”
The post of Abines has gained over 130,000 thousand shares and over 163,000 reactions from the netizens as of posting time.
