Senate approves P3-trillion budget

The Senate on Thursday night approved on second and third reading the proposed P3.002 trillion national budget, which Senate President Franklin Drilon said was “one of the fastest” budget approvals in the chamber’s history.

Fourteen senators voted for the approval of the budget measure, with Sen. Koko Pimentel being the lone dissenter.

The 14 senators were Drilon, Ralph Recto, Paulo Benigno Aquino, TG Guingona, Loren Legarda, Antonio Trillanes IV, Sergio Osmeña, Francis Escudero, Grace Poe, Vicente Sotto III, Nancy Binay, JV Ejercito and Senate Minority Leader Juan Ponce Enrile.

Pimentel questioned the chamber’s decision to more than double the budget next year for the Office of the Vice President (OVP).

During the period of amendments, Pimentel asked why the Senate approved a budget of half a billion pesos for the OVP, against the original P230.5 billion, similar to the House version.

The proposed increase in the OVP budget of the OVP was P269.4 billion.

The Senate version of the national budget is higher by P18.5 billion than the House appropriation, particularly when it came to allocations for individual departments and agencies.

The Senate made big cuts in some of the proposed budgets, the biggest being the P20 billion slashed from the unprogrammed funds. The contingent funds was slashed by P1 billion while the pension and gratuity fund suffered a cut of P4 billion.

One of the departments whose budget were increased was the Department of National Defense (DND), which got an additional P10.7 billion, raising its proposed budget to P126.6 billion.

It was Enrile who pushed for more budget for a bigger appropriation for the DND in order to address security concerns in the country in wake of the global terror threat.

Bicameral conference

Drilon told reporters that the Senate and House will devote the whole of next week to thresh out the differences in their versions of the budget bill at the  bicameral conference committee in the hope that they will all be done by Dec. 4.

Congress is aiming to submit the approved budget for signing by President Aquino by Dec. 14.

“We will ratify the bicam report on the week of Dec. 7 to 11, including the printing of the budget. So we expect to send the budget of 2016 to Malacañang by Dec. 14,” Drilon said in a news conference.

Drilon underscored the importance of having an approved budget law by December as this would include the allocation of the first of a four-tranche package amounting to P57 billion in pay increases for government employees next year, under the Salary Standardization Law 4 (SSL4).

Under SSL4, the government will allocate a total of P225.8 billion over the next four years starting next year to benefit more than one million government employees.

Prioritize SSL4

That’s why the Senate and House would prioritize the passage of the implementing law of the SSL4, which would define the scale of each salary grade of government employee, Drilon said.

Congress intends to pass the measure before it goes on a Christmas holiday break on Dec. 19 so that the new pay hikes can be implemented starting in January 2016, he said.

Drilon also said he has asked for the reinstatement of the P500 million that Senate finance committee chair Legarda removed. The amount was intended to augment the Commission on Elections’ budget to speed up the transmission of the results of the May 2016 elections.

Meanwhile, Drilon defended the national budget from Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago’s warning in a privilege speech delivered for her by Sen. JV Ejercito that the proposed 2016 budget was “bloated” and “ambitious” and contained pork barrel-like appropriations.

Santiago said the budget was inflated and raised question of government being able to spend it properly given its record of underspending.

Still good for another year

Drilon acknowledged that not all the projects in the budget could be bid out and executed within a calendar year.

But he said the budget was “still good for another year and therefore, the expenditure programs will continue for another year.”

In her privilege speech, Santiago said the “most dangerous” threat in the budget was the “continued presence of PDAF-like (pork barrel) allocations and provisions” in defiance of the Constitution and the recent Supreme Court rulings that deemed the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) unconstitutional.

“Every time a lump-sum appropriation exists it potentially means that the original budget approved by Congress, the General Appropriations Act, is illegally superseded and replaced by a mechanism created by one department or agency,” she said.