Senate either to scrap PDAF from budget or realign funds

MANILA, Philippines - The Senate is faced with two options on what to do with the controversial pork barrel fund – either to delete entirely the P25 billion from the national budget or realign the funds to different line agencies for the implementation of specific programs and projects.

Senate President Franklin Drilon and committee on finance chairman Sen. Francis Escudero presented the same options as part of the ongoing efforts to abolish the pork barrel, officially called the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF), following various reports on its alleged misuse over the years.

According to Drilon, the first option would involve totally scrapping the estimated P25-billion PDAF from the proposed P2.268-trillion national budget for 2014. Drilon explained that this would result in the 2014 budget or General Appropriations Act going down to P2.243 trillion after subtracting the P25 billion from the original P2.268 trillion submitted by Malacañang.

Since there would be no realignment of funds, Drilon said that the final result would just be a reduction in the budget deficit for 2014, which the government programmed at P266.2 billion.

Under the law, Congress could reduce but not increase the national budget proposed by Malacañang.

Drilon noted that this has been done in the past.

The second situation would be what the President proposed when he stated his position to abolish the PDAF last Aug. 23, which is to realign the P25-billion PDAF to the different line agencies for the implementation of specific programs and projects that will be introduced by the legislators.

“What will happen here is the line agencies will now have P2.268 trillion while the PDAF will now be zero,” Drilon said.

Drilon said that he believes that 15 senators support the option to abolish the pork barrel fund.

He said the realignment of the PDAF was merely the preference of the President, which Congress does not necessarily have to follow.

Escudero said that he would support either of the two options but if the decision is made to realign the funds, he said that it would have to go to education and health items only.

However, he said that the Senate would have to decide on this issue, hopefully by the time that the House of Representatives approves the proposed budget on third and final reading.

“We will vote upon it, given the resolutions Sen. Alan Cayetano, myself and some other senators filed. We will vote upon it before we approve the budget. We have to settle it one way or the other. We cannot leave this hanging,” Escudero said.

Cayetano and Escudero have both filed resolutions calling for the abolition of the PDAF.

Escudero’s resolution expresses the sense of the Senate to abolish the PDAF while Cayetano’s version is a concurrent resolution supporting the abolition, which has to be adopted by both the Senate and the House.

Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago has also filed her own bill that calls for the gradual abolition of the PDAF.

Escudero said that there would be a hearing to discuss the bills and resolutions, after which each senator would have to vote on their respective preferences.

He said that one of the possible outcomes would be that the Senate and the House would have different positions.

“It might come out that (an option) is applicable to the entire Congress or the abolition of the pork barrel is applicable only to the Senate,” Escudero said.