2018 budget passage faces delay

There may be a chance that passage of the proposed 2018 national budget will be delayed as the Senate has decided to tackle in open session the amendments to the budget bill, Senate President Aquilino Pimentel III said on Sunday.

The Senate is seeking to conclude this week its deliberations on the proposed P3.7-trillion national budget for this year, having wrapped up interpellations to the measure last week in a special extended session day.

“We will try the procedure (on Monday). It may delay (passage of the budget) but it really depends. Let’s just wait,” Pimentel said in a text message.

Pimentel said that tackling the budget amendments in open session had been provided for in the Senate rules ever since.

“Although the past Senates did not really strictly follow this procedure. We will find out in the next few days the reason why past Senates didn’t observe this procedure,” the Senate president also said.

Sen. Panfilo Lacson last week said there was an agreement among senators that individual amendments would be discussed on the floor openly, a departure from what had become a practice where senators would just have individual submissions of their amendments to the budget measure.

Lacson had been insisting that pork barrel funds continued to be present in the national budget even if the Supreme Court had already outlawed these funds.

He said the discussion of the amendments to the budget bill in open session would enable them to justify them as well.

In a radio interview on Sunday, Senate Minority Leader Franklin Drilon said senators would discuss the proposed amendments “item-for-item” for transparency and these included proposals to realign funds.

Drilon said he did not think there would be a delay in the passage of the budget measure especially if the proposed realignment of funds would not create any problems.