House railroading 2018 budget approval?

The House of Representatives is set to rush the approval of the proposed P3.8-trillion 2018 budget next week.

The chamber is devoting only five days, Monday through Friday, for speeches for and against the budget, floor debates and the voting-approval process. It is scheduled to pass the measure on Friday.

The five-day period the House leadership has allotted for budget deliberations prompted opposition Rep. Edcel Lagman to accuse the chamber of railroading the passage of the single most important piece of legislation Congress passes each year.

He said he could not understand why the House is rushing the approval of the proposed national budget.

“They are trying to establish a record, but what kind of record is that?” he asked.

Lagman noted that in the past, plenary debates took at least two weeks, while committee hearings lasted for a month.

This time, committee scrutiny of the 2018 budget proposal was done for only two weeks, he said.

Over the weekend, Davao City Rep. Karlo Nograles, who is appropriations committee chairman, announced that his panel has wrapped up its hearings on next year’s outlay.

“It was a fruitful two weeks of deliberations,” he said.

Nograles said his committee is now ready for plenary debates set to start on Sept. 4.

Some agencies got their budget proposals approved in the committee level without much scrutiny.

In fact, the proposed P6billion funding for President Duterte’s office was endorsed without a single question being asked about it or this year’s P20.2-billion Palace budget.

The budget for the Office of the President (OP) was approved in less than two minutes.

The short period Palace officials led by Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea stayed inside the hearing room was not even a small fraction of the time they spent on the road going to the House of Representatives in Batasan Hills, Quezon City.

Nograles said the speedy approval of the President’s budget was a manifestation of the courtesy the House was extending to Duterte.

Bayan Muna Rep. Carlos Zarate told reporters that Nograles requested them to not ask questions.

“But we were informed that we could propound questions during the plenary debates on the budget,” Zarate said.

Zarate said he would have wanted to know where Duterte was using his P2.5-billion intelligence budget for this year.

“Is he using it in his bloody anti-drug war?” he asked.

Zarate noted reports that policemen were being rewarded P10,000 to P15,000 for every suspected drug peddler killed.

“Since there are at least 10,000 drug suspects so far killed, at P10,000 per kill, the total amount of rewards would come up to between P100 million and P150 million. Those are very big sums. Where are they getting the money?” he said.

Medialdea submitted to the Nograles committee a threepage briefer that contained very basic information about the proposed Palace budget.

The document shows that funding for OP would go down from P20.2 billion this year to P6.031 billion in 2018.

Allocation for salaries will go up by P286.7 million, from P707.4 million to P994.2 million. There was no explanation on where the huge increase will go.

Appropriation for maintenance and other operating expenses (MOOE) will fall from P19.3 billion to P4.7 billion, while capital outlay will increase by P189.5 million, from P180.7 million to P370.2 million.

As in the increase in salaries, the adjustment in capital outlay was not explained.

Budget documents earlier submitted to the appropriations committee show that Duterte is proposing to retain his P2.5 billion intelligence fund next year.

The bulk of this year’s Palace funding – about P15 billion – is allocated for expenses related to the 50th Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) anniversary celebration.

There was no explanation on how much of the ASEAN fund has already been spent and for what.