REQUIEM FOR THE CONGRESSIONAL
POWER OF APPROPRIATION
By:
REP. EDCEL C. LAGMAN
Minority Leader, House of Representatives
The Office of the President did not only propose the national budget through the National Expenditure Program (NEP). It also virtually appropriated the national budget through a rubberstamp majority in the Congress – both in this House and in the Senate.
For the first time in Philippine legislative history after martial law, Malacañang has effectively transformed the Congress into a colossal subservient and faithful photocopying machine – reproducing the NEP in the General Appropriations Bill (GAB) almost in the entirety of the President’s proposal with minimal realignments but an exact total of P1.645 trillion as a reflected in the President’s original submission.
I am informed that there is a categorical and persistent instruction from Malacañang to have the NEP untouched and undiminished, effectively subverting the power of the Congress, particularly this House, over the public purse as enshrined and mandated by the Constitution.
As a result of Malacañang’s undue and omnipresent interference in the budget process, not a single centavo was cut from the original proposal of P1.645 trillion as if the Office of the President drafted a magnum opus of a national budget highlighted by a P21 billion Conditional Cash Transfer program and a P15 billion Public-Private Partnership hazy outlay, among other huge lump sums.
Compare this to previous years where the Congress reduced the President’s budget by P400 million in 2010; P300 million in 2009; P300 million in 2008; and P200 million in 2007. For 2011, to reiterate, not a single centavo was cut.
For 2011, the Congress (the House and the Senate collectively), realigned only P2.306 billion which much less than one percent of the 1.645 trillion budget.
Compare this with the previous years when Congress truly exercised its plenary power of appropriation with the following realignments: P67.1 billion in 2010; P56.5 billion in 2009; P38.5 billion in 2008; and P20.5 billion in 2007.
What is worse is that even the meager realignments in the 2011 national budget were obviously errant and unwarranted. Consider again the following:
1. P750 million was slashed from the school building program which is already inadequate to respond to the huge classroom backlog. This amount was realigned to 5,000 additional teacher positions which should have been funded from the CCT since education is an allied program.
2. P200 million was reduced from the already small appropriation of P931 million for “family health and family planning”, thereby reducing this allocation to P731 million. It should be underscored that the bulk of the original outlay was not for the purchase of contraceptives.
3. And what happened to all of the proposed individual amendments of Members of the House who were told to submit their proposals to the Committee on Appropriations? Not a single significant amendment found fruition in the GAA, except the proposal of the Minority for the creation of a Congressional Oversight Committee on the CCT and the realignment of 2011 savings from the CCT to the Department of Health and the Department of Education, which unfortunately and improvidently were both effectively scuttled by the Senate.
We might as well have a requiem for the demise of the congressional power to appropriate public funds.