Senators decry proposed budget increase for NTF-ELCAC in 2022

MANILA, Philippines — Three senators this week said they will oppose the Duterte administration's proposal to increase the budget of its controversial National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict by P9 billion next year amid the ongoing coronavirus crisis. 

Sen. Nancy Binay on Wednesday questioned Malacañang's plan to allocate P28 billion to the NTF-ELCAC in 2022 even as it slashed the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine's proposed laboratory services budget by P170 million. 

"At a time when we need a reliable and stable lead center in our fight against the pandemic, the [budget department] chooses to cut back RITM's budget. Year-in year-out, it always gets cut," she said in a statement written partially in Filipino. "Is it not the right thing to do to strengthen our public health institutions rather than to weaken them?" 

“How can we level up if we are always shrinking the meager budget for health, testing and [COVID-19] response, but there are billions budgeted for red-tagging?" 

Meanwhile, Sen. Risa Hontiveros told ANC's "Headstart" that NTF-ELCAC's proposed budget for 2022 is higher than the P20 billion budget proposed for the University of the Philippines system which includes the budget for the Philippine General Hospital, the country's largest public hospital. 

READ: PGH halts emergency room admissions amid more COVID-19 patients

Senate Minority Leader Franklin Drilon, who in June accurately predicted that Malacañang would seek a budget of P28 billion for the controversial task force for next year, said the proposed funds should either be deleted or redirected and used for cash aid. 

"Given our limited resources, we must prioritize ayuda over NTF-ELCAC," Drilon said in a statement released Tuesday. "We must cut funding for the security sector in favor of the social services sector."

'Election war chest' 

A bulk of the NTF-ELAC's current budget, P16.4 billion of the total P19 billion, goes to its Barangay Development Program — the manner of disbursement for which Drilon has flagged on several occasions as affording the task force too much discretion. 

In 2022, he warned, the billions of pesos in funds could serve as an "election war chest" used to hand out money to barangays. 

Sen. Panfilo Lacson earlier this month cited inside sources who said that the PNP was engaged in illegal data gathering in some barangays using the same development funds from the NTF-ELCAC.

The Philippine National Police, after initially denying this allegation, acknowledged that "advocacy groups" backed by the police have been collecting data on the barangay level, claiming also that the information is freely given to them.

Just a month before, Police Gen. Guillermo Eleazar, chief of the PNP, assured the public that the funds it received as a member agency of the NTF-ELCAC are being used "wisely" in remote areas where communist rebels operate.

Eleazar said this in response to state auditors flagging that the PNP only spent 12% of the P722.95 million in anti-insurgency funds it received in 2020. 

Drilon at the time said the PNP's low spending of NTF-ELCAC funds is proof that it was excessive to give P19.2 billion to the task force in 2021. 

In April, Sens. Drilon, Hontiveros, Sherwin Gatchalian, Francis Pangilinan and Joel Villanueva called for the realignment of the NTF-ELCAC's entire 2022 budget to the government's pandemic response. 

Senate President Vicente Sotto III, however, opposed realigning the task force's funds, telling several news outlets that it should be "defanged" instead of defunded. — Bella Perez-Rubio