House to send 2011 budget to Noy this week

MANILA, Philippines –  The House of Representatives is scheduled to send to President Aquino this week the proposed P1.645 trillion 2011 national budget.

Grace Andres, chief of staff of Speaker Feliciano Belmonte Jr., said yesterday that Belmonte instructed her to transmit the three-inch thick budget documents to Malacañang before Dec. 25.

She said the printing of the document would be finished over the weekend.

She said the President has enough time to sign the budget bill into law before the end of the year.

Belmonte earlier said both the leadership of Congress and Aquino did not want the government to operate on a reenacted budget when 2011 starts.

The House and the Senate approved the 2011 budget last week after giving Vice President Jejomar Binay an additional pork barrel fund of P200 million.

Cavite Rep. Joseph Emilio Abaya, appropriations committee chairman, said the additional P200 million in pork barrel fund for Binay was one of the changes in the budget the two chambers agreed on.

He said the amount given to the Vice President was the Priority Development Assistance Fund allocation of Aquino when he was a senator.

He said the other changes include increases of P590 million and P345 million for the budgets of the House and the Senate, respectively.

He said the adjustments were taken from cuts in the appropriations of certain agencies and lump sums, the biggest of which is P993 million that was slashed from the personnel benefits fund.

The Senate and the House have kept the controversial P22-billion conditional cash transfer (CCT) fund intact.

Upon the suggestion of congressmen, the two chambers created a congressional oversight committee that would check on the use of the huge fund.

But Minority Leader Edcel Lagman complained that although the proposal to create the oversight committee was kept, there is no timetable for its creation and its membership, including minority representation, is unclear.

Belmonte has assured Lagman that the House would closely monitor the implementation of the CCT program through the oversight committee or other oversight mechanisms.

Lagman said Congress realigned only about P2 billion of Aquino’s budget proposal and did not take away even a peso from it, unlike last year when Congress juggled more than P65 billion of then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s budget proposal.

Abaya said the P65 billion that the previous Congress realigned came from debt service funds, which Aquino no longer included in his proposed 2011 budget.

Earlier, Abaya told a news forum that the “old playground of debt service for congressional initiatives (euphemism for budget insertions) is no longer there.”