THE Department of Budget and Management (DBM) chief said they are currently “polishing” the details of the current administration’s plan to “rightsize” government agencies.
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In an interview on Wednesday, Secretary Amenah Pangandaman expressed support for the administration’s plan of “rightsizing” government agency processes and personnel to streamline the bureaucracy’s functions and potentially cut operational costs.
Pangandaman said they are now currently looking which among the 187 government agencies and government-owned and -controlled corporations (GOCCs), with more or less 2-million personnel, may be streamlined through merging, restructuring or abolition.
The proposal for rightsizing excludes teaching and teaching-related positions, medical and allied medical positions or those in the health sector, and the military as well as other uniformed personnel.
The budget chief said the proposal to rightsize the bureaucracy is now being polished for submission to Congress before the delivery of the President’s State-of-the-Nation Address (SONA).
“Ang overarching objective nito [rightsizing] ay magkaroon ng maliit na burukrasya na agile at responsive sa makabagong panahon. Aayusin po ng programang ito ‘yung mga ahensya na mayroong [The overarching objective of rightsizing is to have a small but agile and responsive bureaucracy that suits the times. The program will reform those agencies with] repetitive functions or overlapping functions,” Pangandaman said.
With the proposed rightsizing, the budget chief said the government will be able to save a “significant amount of the budget” which in turn may be used to fund priority projects such as in building much-needed infrastructure, for social services, programs in the health sector, agriculture, among others.
She cited an example: “If 5 percent [of manpower] is affected by the rightsizing program, this translates to P14.8 billion annually that government can save in personnel services,” she said, in a mix of English and Filipino.
The affected personnel, she added, may apply for positions that will be created as an effect of the rightsizing. The government is also expected to provide a retooling program for personnel so they may apply in vacant positions. Those who opt to retire will also receive appropriate retirement benefits.
“The (affected personnel) may apply for other positions that we may create because of the rightsizing. For the others, we will come up with suitable programs for their retooling. We will be working on this with the Civil Service Commission. Those who retire will get retirement benefits,” Pangandaman said.
Villanueva backs DBM
Meanwhile, incoming Senate Majority Leader Joel Villanueva said he supports moves from the national government to improve its efficiency and institutional capacity to deliver public service.
But, Villanueva said in a statement, “before we start discussing the issue of rightsizing of the government bureaucracy, we need to discuss two pressing questions:
“First, why is it that roughly 1 out of 10 (or 178,128 out of 1,899,925) authorized positions in the national government remain unfilled? We want to know how these unfilled positions will be filled up. There should also be a comprehensive study of the staffing pattern of government agencies to determine whether some existing plantilla positions are already obsolete, redundant or unnecessary. We have been calling the attention of the Executive on this issue since 2016, but unfortunately, this remains unaddressed.
“Second, why is there a significant number of government workers under Job Order (JO) or Contract of Service (COS) positions in the government, when there are a lot of unfilled positions? Based on data from the Civil Service Commission as of August 2021, there are 100,895 JO and COS positions in the national government and more than 40,000 additional JO/COS positions are in GOCCs and SUCs.”
In the view of Villanueva, long-time chairman of the Senate Labor committee, the DBM can, by addressing these two issues first, “identify which agencies can be rightsized and this could mean an efficient way of delivering public services in the most economical way.”
In any case, the senator said “the government should be prepared with its employment generation program, in the event that it determines, after a comprehensive study, that there is really a need to let go of some people.”
He noted that he had filed a bill institutionalizing the National Employment Recovery Strategy to become the National Employment Action Plan (NEAP) “to ensure that the government will have a concrete and achievable job generation strategy in the coming years.”