House hopes to pass P3T budget before poll season

With next year’s elections already on the minds of most lawmakers, the House of Representatives will try to pass the P3-trillion national budget for 2016 before the period for the filing of certificates of candidacy (CoC) in October.

The appropriations committee will open the hearing Monday on the proposed budget, starting with a briefing by the Development Budget Coordinating Committee, an interagency body composed of the Aquino administration’s economic and budget managers.

House panel chair Isidro Ungab, representative from Davao City, said the timetable for the budget deliberations took into consideration the CoC filing schedule, after which many lawmakers are expected to be busy in their districts.

“Hopefully, the plenary debates and voting on second reading on the national budget by that time (CoC filing) will be finished,” Ungab said in a statement.

The CoC filing period is from Oct. 12 to 16.

The budget hearings will be conducted Monday to Thursday, but this could be extended to Friday if necessary, Ungab said.

Ungab urged his colleagues to “do their share in studying and scrutinizing the proposed national budget to determine if the allocation for each agency is justified.”

Bayan Muna Rep. Neri Colmenares said the House must be wary of suspicious lump sum appropriations and hidden pork barrel funds in the 2016 expenditure program.

He said the Makabayan bloc, in studying the 2016 budget, had found at least P145 billion in lump sums, or funds for no specific purpose.

“The Special Purpose Funds were the biggest, at about P97.4 billion. Then the rest are for the departments. We will examine them one by one,” Colmenares said.

Speaker Feliciano Belmonte Jr. earlier said that Congress would study the budget well to ensure that government programs and their funding were justified.

The proposed 2016 budget is 15.2 percent higher than the P2.606-trillion 2015 national budget.