House Majority Leader Rolando Andaya Jr. should not let his frustrations on having his way on public funds and his pathetic effort to compete with Budget Secretary Ben Diokno get the better of him.

Andaya was chief of the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) during the term of former President and now Speaker Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, but he should accept that he is more of a politician than a fiscal manager which Diokno is.

He may have an outstanding political career, but Andaya’s record on economics set side by side with Diokno’s pales miserably.

Yet Andaya is trying to hector Diokno into submission after the Budget chief told the truth about House members’ arm-twisting efforts for him to release funds from the P45-billion Motor Vehicle User’s Charge.

Diokno’s refusal to play along with the congressmen’s wishes to have their way on the anomalous Road Board, which seems a standard operating procedure, got him into his current predicament.

Andaya is now employing what he is familiar with, political muckraking, to try to box in Diokno and presumably to force the hand of President Rody Duterte to find a replacement which would preferably be him.

Andaya, however, is playing with the lives of 110 million Filipinos in his effort to hijack the budget just so he and his cabal can dip their hands into the public treasury during an election year.

Andaya on Monday said he will reexamine the already delayed 2019 national budget “due to the country’s fiscal deficit.”

Andaya agonizingly tried to don his technocratic cap and said government disbursements continue to outpace the increase in revenues, as he added the government may fail to meet its deficit ceiling for the year.

Economic managers had long said the massive infrastructure buildup will result in massive spendings that would have its payback in stimulating economic growth. It was the plan right at the beginning.

In contrast, during Andaya’s term, the DBM was notorious for impounding funds in the budget.

Impounding of funds became the progenitor of the patently illegal pool of funds created under the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) of former President Noynoy Aquino.

The DAP funds circumvented the authority of Congress to check the disbursement of funds as it was moved from the budget to a specific program.

The Supreme Court declared the Executive act illegal in 2013.

Andaya also has been issuing confusing signals as a supposed ally of Rody by saying the Road Board abolition will be facilitated but not according to the bill that the Senate already approved.

The abolition of the body and the House approval of the budget were proven intricately linked after Andaya’s mob recalled from the Senate the bill abolishing the Road Board and had it rescinded.

The economic managers had already considered the anomalous body slain until it was resurrected from the grave by Andaya.

Andaya and the House leadership’s agenda clearly show in holding up the budget so that their interests are served.

Rody even had to appeal through the Palace for Congress to urgently pass the budget. The Palace said a further delay would be “unacceptable” to the Filipinos who voted for them.

Andaya should now state where his true loyalty lies and the real interest that he seeks to serve.

Clearly, shoving Diokno into the ridiculous allegations of corrupt practices is meant to further delay the approval of the budget with the unspoken warning that the standoff may last until after the May polls when Andaya and company are expected to be dislodged from their House leadership posts.

Another implied suggestion is that the House assault stops if the Palace gives in to the leadership’s importuning.

It is nothing but transactional politics all over again.