The congressional bicameral conference committee met on Tuesday to discuss the proposed P3.002 trillion national budget for 2016. However, it lasted for only about five minutes.
The hearing by the committee opened a little past 10 a.m. However, House Minority Leader Ronaldo Zamora’s move to suspend the proceeding to allow both heads of the Senate and the House of Representatives panels to meet first and come up with a matrix to compare their different versions of the approved national budget.
“Mr. Chairman, we’ve just received the budget work sheet for fiscal year 2016. I’m not sure if we’ve received additional papers but may I suggest in the meantime as this is only our first meeting that the House panel and subsequently the Senate panel authorize each chairman to meet … in order to discuss the preliminary details with each chairman authorizing their respective staffs of the House and the Senate to meet and work our matrix so that we can compare our version with the Senate version,” Zamora said.
“Subsequently Mr. Chairman, perhaps you can meet at some other time, perhaps later this week or if it’s necessary to give a little more time, perhaps early next week so that we can sit down and work out the details. I so move Mr. Chair,” he added.
No member of the committee objected to Zamora’s motion that prompted the suspension of the hearing.
In an interview before the meeting, Zamora said the House has yet to see the version of the Senate but noted the reported huge deductions it made on the House version of the budget bill.
“Hindi pa namin nakikita yung deductions na ginawa ng Senado ha, mukhang napakalaki P45 billion. We haven’t even seen the specifics,” he said.
(We have yet to see the deductions made by the Senate, it seems like it became huge, P45 billion.)
The Minority Leader said he would specifically want to see if the budgets they allocated for social services, social welfare, education and infrastructure had been cut by the Senate. RAM
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