© File Make proposed budget amendments public, Lacson dares lawmakers

MANILA,Philippines — Sen. Panfilo Lacson challenged yesterday his colleagues in the Senate and the House of Representatives to bare to the public their amendments to the proposed P4.1-trillion national budget for 2020 to dispel suspicions that intended changes are embedded with “pork.”

“Instead of whispering proposed amendments to the 2020 national budget or scrawl them on napkins, why not post them online?” Lacson said.

“We should make everything public. That includes all amendments we submit, whether institutional or individual. We have our own websites, we should use them for this purpose, as I did for the 2019 budget,” he told dzBB.

For the 2019 budget, the senator posted online his proposed amendments, all of which, he said, are institutional, meaning these pertain to programs and projects that have undergone planning and vetting and are based on requests from the implementing agencies concerned.

Such institutional amendments are proposed by lawmakers who find merit in them after vetting with the relevant agencies, he said.

He said individual amendments pertain to projects based mainly on lawmakers’ intervention and are considered legislators’ pet projects.

Facebook Messenger users

Get top MSN news straight to your inbox!

Click here to subscribe



“In most cases, these do not involve consultations with the implementing agencies concerned, nor are they part of the local development plans of the local government units,” Lacson said.

He said such programs can be considered pork barrel, based on the 2013 ruling of the Supreme Court (SC) that deems as unconstitutional projects that are whimsical and arbitrary.

The 2013 SC ruling declaring pork barrel as unconstitutional covers “all informal practices of similar import and effect, which the Court similarly deems to be acts of grave abuse of discretion amounting to lack or excess of jurisdiction.”

He lamented that in past years, some lawmakers submit their amendments to their respective finance or appropriations chairpersons without having them go through floor deliberations.

Lacson, in pushing for transparency in the crafting of the national budget, said the people have the right to know where their taxes are going, especially amid a growing national debt that now stands at more than P7.9 trillion.

“The national budget involves the people’s money. It should benefit the people and not a few senators or congressmen or even government officials who implement projects. And the budget is funded by our taxes, as well as borrowings if our tax collections fall short,” he said.

House denies ‘pork’

Leaders of the House of Representatives denied allegations that there are “parked” funds, pork barrel or anything unconstitutional in the proposed P4.1-trillion budget bill approved by the lawmakers.

Speaker Alan Peter Cayetano and Cagayan de Oro 2nd district Rep. Rufus Rodriguez contested the claim of Lacson that there are P20 billion in “parked” allocations in the House version of the proposed 2020 budget.

“We scrutinized this budget closely, that’s why we are also interested to know if there’s a single peso that’s questionable in it,” Cayetano said. – With Edu Punay