Senators to president: Veto 2025 budget cuts
Several senators have called on President Marcos to use his veto power to restore budget cuts made by the bicameral conference committee on the government’s key programs next year.
This includes the P50-billion cut made on the financial aid program of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD)—a move that will deprive some 4.4 million poor Filipino households of direct cash assistance, Sen. Imee Marcos said on Monday.
Marcos, who had defended the DSWD’s spending plan for 2025, urged the President, her brother, to overturn the budget cuts because they are inconsistent with the policy programs he laid out in his third State of the Nation Address in July.
She also asked Mr. Marcos to closely study “line by line” the ratified version of House Bill No. 10800, or the 2025 General Appropriations Bill (GAB).
Unaware
“I’m pleading to you. Please pay attention to this issue of (national) budget and remind the lawmakers who were meddling in the budget of government agencies that what they are doing is unlawful,” she said.
She added that among the casualties of the bicameral committee’s controversial move was the DSWD’s Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps), which provides up to P8,000 in cash aid to qualified beneficiaries.
The senator added that she and several of her colleagues were not informed about the significant decrease in the funding of the DSWD, which lost P96 billion in the bicameral report compared to the GAB version that the Senate had approved in November.
“I heard that P50 billion was removed from the 4Ps program. That means that the poorest of the poor will get nothing,” Marcos said.
Sen. Juan Miguel Zubiri, a former Senate president, said this was the first time in over two decades that the upper chamber failed to augment the outlay of the education sector and other departments that sought the senators’ assistance.
Aside from the DSWD, Zubiri noted that the bicameral committee also reduced the annual outlay of the Department of Education and the state universities and colleges by P12 billion and P30 billion, respectively.
Zubiri also rued his fellow lawmakers’ decision to block his proposal to augment the Department of Science and Technology’s budget for the purchase of new equipment for the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (Pagasa).
“We always say that there’s ‘no hope with Pagasa,’ but we don’t provide them with enough funds,” he said.
But Zubiri said the President could still “remedy” these budget cuts through his veto power.
