‘Last chance to pass 2019 budget in May’

It now appears the Senate and the House of Representatives only have until after the May elections to break the impasse over the proposed 2019 national budget.

“If the Senate is indeed serious in enacting a General Appropriations Act for 2019, we have until May this year to complete our task. Both chambers will resume legislative session on May 20 until June 7. That is our last chance to pass the national budget,” House appropriations com- mittee chairman Rolando Andaya Jr. of Camarines Sur said yesterday.

He said he and his colleagues have done their duty by approving the proposed budget “in accordance with all the agreements forged with senators during the bicameral conference committee meetings.”

He said they have sent the enrolled copy of the spending bill to Senate President Vicente Sotto III, to Malacañang and to the Department of Budget and Management “so that they will have a proper appreciation of the issues at hand based on an official document and not from uninformed innuendoes.”

Sotto has vowed not to sign the bill because he and antipork barrel Sen. Panfilo Lacson claimed it contained unauthorized realignments made by the House leadership amounting to at least P95 billion.

They said House leaders took away funds from at least 62 congressional districts and diverted these to their own pork barrel.

They want the larger chamber to recall the printed copy of the budget it sent to the Senate and to send instead the version of the outlay contained in the bicam report the two chambers ratified last Feb. 8.

That version contained lump sums which, by Andaya’s computation, amounted to at least P99 billion. Sotto and Lacson said the President could veto those lump-sum appropriations.

Andaya’s Camarines Sur colleague Luis Raymund Villafuerte decried the “undue delay” in the transmittal by the House of the proposed budget to President Duterte for signing into law.

“This has only deepened suspicions that underhanded acts fueled by greed are taking place during this congressional break to ensure that billions of pesos in budgetary outlays are realigned or padded to the ‘pork’ of favored lawmakers,” he said.

Villafuerte said the delay in sending the budget to the President “is highly suspicious and is a blatant violation of the legislative process, given that both chambers of Congress had ratified the bicameral conference committee (bicam) report on the measure more than a month ago.”

Lacson has accused the House leadership of manipulating the spending bill to favor certain members.

Presidential spokesman Salvador Panelo, after talking to Speaker Gloria MacapagalArroyo by phone, denied there was such manipulation.

Administration officials have warned lawmakers that the continued use by the national government of the reenacted 2018 budget would result in slower economic growth.

Sen. Aquilino Pimentel III said both chambers of Congress should just stick to the ratified budget program.