SENATE President Vicente C. Sotto III gave assurances on Sunday that senators will complete their budget deliberations quickly when sessions resume on January 14, in order to move to bicameral talks on the P3.7-trillion 2019 budget shortly after. This, he said, would shorten the period that the government will run under a reenacted budget early next year.
Sotto promptly allayed concerns that the budget delay will affect the government’s “Build, Build, Build” projects as Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph G. Recto put in a special provision in the budget bill to allow ongoing government projects to continue even during the upcoming election ban.
“The Omnibus Election Code can be amended with a special provision in the General Appropriations Act,” Sotto said.
The Senate President over the weekend said he expects bicameral talks to hammer out a reconciled final version of the 2019 budget to last one week.
“When we resume [sessions] on January 14, we will finish the budget bill and go to bicameral talks to harmonize the Senate-House versions of the annual money measure,” Sotto said in a radio interview.
He also clarified that President Duterte already knew “there will be a reenacted budget.”
“It should be clear that the delay was not caused by the Senate,” Sotto stressed, noting that the 2019 budget bill submitted by Malacañang was transmitted to the Senate just this December.
This developed as Sen.Panfilo M. Lacson Sr. noted Malacañang’s disappointment over the failure of Congress to pass the 2019 budget bill.
“They have a reason to be disappointed, but we cannot do anything, unless we want to see a half-cooked budget that was not well-studied, that could be more disadvantageous,” Lacson said in an interview with DWIZ over the weekend.
Under the congressional calendar of the 17th Congress, the Senate and the House adjourned session from December 15 to January 13 and will resume work from January 14 to February 8. They will adjourn anew from February 9 to May 19 to make way for the campaign period and the midterm elections; and resume sessions anew from May 20 to June 7, 2019.
In clarifying what went wrong with the budget timeline, Sotto noted that apart from delayed transmission of the money measure, senators discovered insertions of so-called bukol budget items, or bloated lump sum allocations that senators said need to be scrutinized.
“Don’t blame us for the delay,” Sotto said, citing the recent change in leadership of the House of Representatives and committee chairmanships that saw former President now Pampanga Rep. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo taking over the Speakership following the ouster of Rep. Pantaleon D. Alvarez.
Not ‘insertions’
In the same interview, Senate President Sotto clarified that the entire 2019 budget bill was crafted by Budget Secretary Benjamin E. Diokno’s department “and cannot be called insertions,” disputing the term used by some congressmen. During the Question Hour at the House last week, Diokno had explained that one of the contested parts of the budget—a P75-billion outlay—was not an “insertion” but an “augmentation” made by the Executive when it crafted the budget for submission to Congress.
For his part, Sotto said on Sunday, “We will look at the reported lump sum items that the Department of the Interior and Local Government [DILG] claim they don’t know about…. If it is not explained, then we will cut…it will result in lesser deficit.”
Sotto said they expect to wrap up the final version of the budget and approve the Senate version of the 2019 budget bill on second and third reading by January 21.
The sooner, the better
As Congress adjourned without passing the proposed 2019 budget, Diokno held out hope at the weekend that the budget will be passed before end-January. Diokno said he will not let the government operate under a reenacted budget for one whole year in 2019, citing its economic consequences.
“It’s academic. We have no choice but to live with a reenacted budget. Yet, the sooner Congress act on the 2019 budget, the better for the economy,” he said in a text message to the BusinessMirror.
Diokno did not discount the possibility that the “worst” can still happen, meaning passage not in January but after the May polls.
“Worst case: 2019 elections will get in the way, the 2019 budget will be passed by the new Congress. We will not allow the 2018 budget to be reenacted for one whole year. That will significantly affect growth, employment and poverty incidence targets,” Diokno added.
Earlier, Diokno also said Congress’s failure to pass the budget on time will also result in an implementation gap in infrastructure projects as there will also be an election ban from March to May 2019.
Butch Fernandez and Bernadette D. Nicolas