PBBM ‘carefully’ filling vacant gov’t posts

The administration is taking a "careful" move towards filling up vacant government positions, Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin told the Commission on Appointments Wednesday.

Bersamin's statement was in response to CA member Senator Imee Marcos' query on why the administration is taking a "slow rollout" of appointing key positions, such as the Secretary of Health.

Marcos said the concern was also raised against the previous executive secretary, lamenting that co-terminus and Career Executive Service officer positions remain vacant as of this posting.

"Is there a timeline for filling in these vacancies because we're all getting impatient, please tell that to my brother," Marcos said as the CA deliberated Bersamin's confirmation as the executive secretary.

"The Office of the Executive Secretary right now Ma'am is carefully studying this situation because we have a self-imposed deadline for considering all these co-terminus employees. That is on December 31 this year. But the president has a good heart and he has instructed us to be as kind and as generous to those who may be affected," said Bersamin in response.

He added that as for the co-terminus positions, the Office of the Executive Secretary pushed a self-imposed deadline to fill up all the positions before the year ends.

Bersamin also vowed to consider retaining employees.

"The President has a good heart and he has instructed us to be as kind and as generous to those who may be affected. We share the same compassion and we are actually devising a way of absorbing as many as we can," he said, noting that there were no proper transitions or turnover of papers when he assumed the office.

"We did a lot of digging into these documents until we found them because we were always readily blamed by the respective cabinet secretaries about this slow pace of appointments," he added.

Bersamin emphasized that the slow pace of appointments was unintentional and the Office of the Executive Secretary is already resolving the underlying issues.

"We are slowly creeping up but we have an instruction to our staff to do complete staff work to avoid misfits getting into positions that we can no longer unravel. We assure you that everything is slowly going to be placed into proper order," Bersamin said.