FOR almost a month now, the national government has been operating on a reenacted budget, as the P3.75-trillion 2019 National Appropriations Bill has yet to be approved by Congress and signed into law by President Duterte.
Despite the delay, all government offices remain open and all government employees continue to work, because of our constitutional provision for an automatically reenacted budget in case of any delay in Congress. The US government does not have this provision, which is why it is now in the middle of a worsening crisis as many agencies such as national prisons and airports have had to let most of their personnel go on furlough. President Trump has refused to sign the budget until Congress includes $5.7 billion for a wall along the US-Mexico border.
While the Philippine government does not have this problem, the continuing non-enactment of the 2019 National Budget is holding back several major programs of the Duterte administration, notably the “Build, Build, Build” infrastructure program. If the 2019 National Budget is still unenacted by the end of the first quarter in March, some P44 billion planned for these and other projects cannot be released.
There was hope last December that all differences between the Senate and the House of Representatives could be resolved by the middle of this month of January so that the 2019 National Appropriation Act would now be in effect. But after the Senate eliminated what it considered “pork barrel” inserted by congressmen in their bill, the House has announced that it too will now take its time scrutinizing the Senate version to root out what they believe to be the senators’ own “pork barrel.”
We realize that the senators and congressmen are only doing their job in thoroughly going through the national budget proposals but the exchange of charges and the recriminations have been particularly bitter his year, with a House official daily and openly accusing a Cabinet member of inserting billions for projects.
Now that the two chambers of Congress have approved their versions of the bill, the next step will be a meeting of the bicameral conference committee to resolve differences between the two bills. Sen. Panfilo Lacson said he expects a “bloody” confrontation between the senators and congressmen.
We hope, however, that the bicameral sessions will not take too long, that the differences can be amicably resolved, and a consensus can be quickly arrived at, so that the 2019 National Budget can go into effect and all those long-delayed national development projects can begin.