Several senators have expressed an intent to increase the budget for the Office of the Vice President for the coming fiscal year, Senator Juan Miguel Zubiri said Thursday.

According to Zubiri, the senators’ “appetite” is to increase the proposed budget of the OVP, headed by Vice President Sara Dutete, “a bit.”

“We have several colleagues that already said they want to increase the budget allocation. I think it was Senators Joel Villanueva and Jinggoy Estrada,” he told reporters in a press conference.

The former Senate president made the remarks after the House of Representatives approved the General Appropriations Bill that contains the P6.352-trillion national budget for next year.

The approved national budget includes the reduced budget allocation for the OVP amounting to P733 million, far from its original proposed budget of P2.037 billion.

Senator Grace Poe, who chairs the Senate Committee on Finance, earlier said the proposed budgets of each government agency will be approved by the Senate based on their merits and not on who are heading them.

“Every department will undergo intense scrutiny to make sure its proposed budget is allocated for the right purpose and spent accordingly,” she said in a statement.

“We will approve or modify the budget based on the merits of the proposals of each office — not on who sits as its head,” she added.

According to Poe, the Senate would rather approve budget proposals that would “allow agencies to perform their mandates of delivering timely, efficient and relevant service that will be felt by the people.”

The House Committee on Appropriations, the counterpart of the Senate Committee on Finance, moved to reduce Duterte’s proposed budget after she refused to answer questions related to her office’s spending in the previous years.

Duterte skipped the House panel’s deliberations on her office’s budget without sending any representatives, drawing the ire of the lawmakers, whom she accused of politicizing the OVP’s budget.