A BREWING “power struggle” among pro-administration factions for the coveted Speakership of the House of Representatives, aggravated by bickerings over multimillion-peso allocations for congressional districts, is feared to derail timely approval by Congress of the P4.5-trillion 2021 national budget.
Senate Minority Leader Franklin Drilon aired this apprehension on Monday amid reports on stepped up jockeying by certain lawmakers to install Marinduque Rep. Lord Allan Velasco, who is supposed to take over the post by October under a term-sharing deal with incumbent Speaker Alan Cayetano.
The brewing House power struggle, aggravated by “bickering among congressmen supposedly over infrastructure funds of legislative districts lodged under the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), could affect their timetable and derail the passage of the P4.5-trillion national budget for 2021,” Drilon said in an interview with cable channel ANC.
At the same time, he warned against the misuse of billions tucked into “soft projects” under an unprecedented funding to end the communist insurgency, which he said state auditors may find hard to track, as they are to be implemented by 800 local government units.
On the House leadership battle, Drilon said that “certainly, a power struggle in the House of Representatives will affect our timelines [for approving the national budget], and I hope not, because we are still in the middle of a pandemic and we have about 10-percent unemployment.”
The Senate Minority Leader pointed out that the annual budget provides the spending authority for the government. “If there is no spending authority because of the delay in the budget, what would happen is, there will be a re-enacted budget, and a re-enacted budget would mean new programs will not be funded or would have to wait until the budget is passed.”
More than any other time in the past, the senator stressed, “it is critical that the budget be enacted on time,” adding that “we cannot delay the budget for 2021 because of the condition we are in today.”
The opposition senator also acknowledged that the 2021 national budget seeks to address the pandemic, unemployment and the imminent economic contraction, projected to be in a range of 6 percent to 9 percent by the end of 2020. “If the budget for 2021 is delayed, the country’s recovery from the pandemic will be derailed, too.”
He recalled how “a power struggle and bickering” over infrastructure funds in 2018 delayed passage of the 2019 national budget for over four months, which the economic managers then blamed for the slowdown.
At the same time, Drilon declined to link “bickerings” over infrastructure funds to the upcoming 2022 elections, saying he would rather “attribute good faith,” even as he conceded that “you cannot discount that this is part of the preparations for 2022.”
Drilon said he has been in Congress “long enough to know that if there is anything you should exercise extra vigilance, it is what is called the election year budget.”
He thus suggested that the P469-billion lump-sum allocations in the DPWH budget be “disaggregated in the spirit of transparency.”