DU30 ally: Will raise budget ‘blanks’ issue before SC
A lawmaker aligned with the camp of former President Rodrigo Duterte on Wednesday said he would challenge the 2025 General Appropriations Act (GAA) at the Supreme Court on how the alleged blanks in the bicameral conference committee report were filled in before it became the national budget law.
In a message to the Inquirer, Davao City Rep. Isidro Ungab said that “considering that the P6.326-trillion GAA has already been signed by the President, there is no other recourse than to go to the Supreme Court. There are several groups who are going to the Supreme Court and I have manifested my intention to be one of the petitioners.”
Ungab was referring to other critics planning to challenge the GAA, which before this was already under fire for several issues, including the zero subsidy for state insurer Philippine Health Insurance Corp., the P12-billion budget cut of the Department of Education, as well as possibly not meeting the constitutional requirement of education having the highest budgetary priority.
Last week, the Davao lawmaker alleged that the bicam report that reconciled the Senate and House versions of the General Appropriations Bill (GAB), which was signed by President Marcos into law last Dec. 30, contained multiple blanks.
This prompted Duterte to claim the 2025 national budget law was invalid, which the President quickly lambasted as “fake news” and called his predecessor out for “lying.”
Different copy
In Congress, Senate President Francis “Chiz” Escudero said the copy of the supposed bicam report that Ungab and Duterte showed during their press conference was not the enrolled bill of the 2025 GAA.
“The enrolled bill is a thick three-volume document. If I’m not mistaken, it contained more than 200,000 (budget) items,” he said.
The Senate leader reiterated that the enrolled bill and the final copy of the GAA that Mr. Marcos signed did not contain any blank entry.
Sen. Imee Marcos, the President’s elder sister, also conceded that the enrolled bill and the actual GAA that her brother had signed had no blank items.
Escudero twitted Ungab for claiming that the bicam report flouted the Constitution, saying the questions on the legality of any approved measure should be directed at the law itself and not at the bicam report.
“It’s not right to accuse Congress of giving a blank check (to President Marcos). That’s wrong. That’s a lie,” Escudero noted.
The Senate leader said he did not immediately address Ungab’s allegations as he thought that the Davao lawmaker understood the entire budget process as former head of the House appropriations panel.
Escudero said he could not remember any bicam report that the high court had struck down for being unconstitutional.
“In fact, no bicameral conference committee report has ever been brought to the court for it to be declared unconstitutional,” he pointed out.
“According to the Supreme Court in its previous decisions, what will be followed is the enrolled bill. That’s the version of the measure that the President, the Senate President, the Speaker and the secretary generals of the two chambers of Congress sign,” he added.
Blank appropriations
For public budget analyst Zy-za Suzara, there were actually three different documents that needed scrutiny: the bicam report, which contained the summary of the amendments that were reconciled by the House and the Senate; the enrolled bill, which is constituted from the amendments of the bicam panel and is forwarded to the President, and the GAA itself.
A copy of the alleged report, seen by the Inquirer, showed that several line items in the amendments to special provisions for the Department of Agriculture (DA) did not have appropriated amounts.
Suzara confirmed that she also saw the same document stamped Dec. 11, the day that the bicam panel led by former House committee on appropriations chair and AKO Bicol Rep. Elizaldy Co and Senate finance committee chair Sen. Grace Poe approved the report.
This included the supplemental appropriations from the National Irrigation Administration and the Philippine Coconut Authority to fund the P146.34 billion budget for the Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization Program; as well as small-ticket DA projects such as small-scale irrigation projects, seed buffer stocking and agricultural machinery.
These items, however, all had appropriated amounts under the 2025 GAA signed by the President and which is available on the Department of Budget and Management website.
The Inquirer reached out to three congressmen who supposedly signed the pages in the report but had yet to hear back.
More questions
Suzara clarified that the issue was not exactly the blanks themselves, but “whether there were irregularities in filling out the blanks, which is why we need to see the bicam report versus the enrolled bill, the GAB that President Marcos Jr. signed.”
Under the 1987 Constitution, only Congress has the power to appropriate public funds and the President can merely veto line items.
“The GAA, of course, is already the final form of the budget. But we don’t know if those final figures were actually the same figures that were in the enrolled bill. Under the presumption of regularity, it’s possible that it was in the enrolled bill. But the question still remains: who filled that up?”
“It also raises questions about the process of lawmaking. Does that make the enrolled bill invalid if the bicam report contained blanks?” she asked.
Ultimately, she said, the issue only highlighted the opaque process of the bicam conference, often called the “third Congress” as it has the power to realign billions of pesos of public funds and insert major amendments to the GAB, often away from the public eye.
This was in contrast to the committee and plenary level deliberations that are open to the public both on-site and online.
“That’s the only portion of the entire budget process that’s not transparent, and that’s where all the major changes happen,” Suzara said.
She urged Ungab to pursue his legal challenge “so that the bicam process is opened up.”
