Duterte budget veto faces House of Representatives' challenge

MANILA, Philippines — The House of Representatives will question before the Supreme Court any veto or rejection by President Duterte of pork barrel insertions in the 2019 national budget, Camarines Sur Rep. Rolando Andaya Jr., appropriations committee chairman, said yesterday.

While expressing support for the call of Sen. Panfilo Lacson for the President to use his line item-veto power to rid the budget of “pork”-type funds, Andaya said the House “will elevate the veto message to the Supreme Court to clarify, not to defy, such message.”

“We need to know the clear implications of the line items to be vetoed,” Andaya said.

The House and the Senate will hold plenary sessions tomorrow with the aim of ratifying the P3.7- trillion General Appropriations Bill (GAB).

Congress is scheduled to adjourn this week to give way to the 90-day campaign for the May national and local elections.

Plenary sessions of the Senate and the House were supposed to end yesterday but with the proposed national budget still unapproved, sessions will have to be conducted tomorrow, Senate Majority Leader Juan Miguel Zubiri said.

“(The legislative calendar) is really up to Friday but we’re adjourning Wednesday if there’s nothing important to tackle, but since Malacañang was requesting the budget, we’ll likely extend (session) to Friday,” Senate Vicente Sotto III told reporters.

He stressed the Senate will stand by the amendments it made to the GAB approved by the House.

There are hundreds of billions of pork barrel fund insertions in the proposed budget for this year. According to the House, the Senate made adjustments amounting to P190 billion in its version of the budget. On top of that huge amount are the congressmen’s own insertions in the tens of billions.

Those are the appropriations Lacson wants Duterte to scrap from the proposed budget for this year.

Andaya said there are issues in the 2019 spending bill still unresolved due to the alleged refusal of Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno to cooperate with lawmakers.

Yesterday, his committee decided to subpoena Diokno to its next hearing tomorrow on the latter’s allegedly questionable budget allocation practices.

Andaya said among the unresolved budget issues were the “P75-billion insertion in the DPWH (Department of Public Works and Highways), the flood control scam, the P81-million bank deposits to Aremar Construction (in which Diokno’s son-in-law is a shareholder) and the anomalous bidding of big-ticket projects by the DBM-PS (Department of Budget and Management Procurement Service).”

They also include the “P50-billion stagnant funds in DBM-PS and PITC (Philippine International Trading Corp., which is attached to the Department of Trade and Industry), and now the multibillion 2017 and 2018 savings that serve as DBM’s pork barrel,” he said.

“A veto message prepared by Sec. Diokno will surely perpetuate these unanswered issues, unfortunately with the President as unwitting victim,” Andaya added.

He said the House would also “seek to intervene in the exemption being sought by the DBM from the Comelec (Commission on Elections) on the infrastructure ban.”

“We need to be informed what types of projects are to be exempted from the election ban and the sourcing of funds for these projects,” he said.

Last Thursday, Diokno told reporters that the administration’s economic team, of which he is a member, would submit to President Duterte its recommendation to seek an infrastructure ban exemption.

“We are ready to submit a memo to the President and he, in turn, will ask the Comelec to exempt at least the 75 big-ticket projects so that there will be little disruption in our ‘Build, Build, Build’ program,” he said. – With Paolo Romero