President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. dismissed the accusation made by former President Rodrigo Duterte regarding alleged discrepancies in the General Appropriations Act (GAA) for 2025, calling the former president’s statements a lie.

In a press interview, Marcos responded to Duterte’s claim of “blank entries” in several budget items, stating that such an allegation was unfounded.

“He’s lying. He was a president. He knows that you cannot pass a GAA with a blank. He’s lying. And he’s lying because he knows perfectly well that that doesn’t ever happen,” Marcos said.

“Throughout the history of the entire Philippines, the GAA is not allowed to have an item that does not state what the project is, and what the cost is, or what the funds are. So, it’s a lie,” he stressed.

Marcos encouraged the public to verify the budget posted on the Department of Budget and Management’s (DBM) website to disprove Duterte’s claim.

“Take a look at the budget, don’t go through each one. Look for what they call a blank check. See if there is even one. To prove that what I’m telling you is true,” Marcos said.

Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin echoed the President, defending the 2025 national budget against the accusation. He explained that the budget, consisting of 4,057 pages, underwent a thorough review by both Congress and DBM staff before it was signed into law.

“All 4,057 pages of its two thick volumes (which were printed in fine print — with nearly 60 lines on each page) were exhaustively reviewed by hundreds of professional staff from Congress and the DBM,” Bersamin said.

“This meticulous line-by-line scrutiny is a pre-enactment check performed by dedicated civil servants to ensure that the GAA contained no single discrepancy in the amounts being appropriated,” he added.

Bersamin also criticized the statements made by Duterte and Davao City 3rd District Representative Isidro Ungab about alleged discrepancies in the GAA, dismissing them as “fake news.”

A blank check

“Some quarters, including a former president, have maliciously peddled fake news about President Marcos having signed the GAA of 2025 with certain parts of the enactment purposely left blank to enable the administration to simply fill in the amounts like in a blank check,” Bersamin said.

“The peddling of such fake news is outrightly malicious and should be condemned as criminal. No page of the 2025 national budget was left unturned before the president signed it into law,” he added.

Meanwhile, former Chief Presidential Legal Counsel Salvador Panelo defended Duterte, stating that the former president was simply expressing a legal opinion based on the assumption that the statements made by Ungab were true.

“FPRRD’s remarks were based on the validity of Cong Ungab’s findings plus on the assumption that the GAA as signed into law by PBBM contains the same omissions,” Panelo said.

“Hence, FPRRD is saying if, as charged by Ungab, the GAA was signed with infirmities, then those responsible could go to jail,” he added.

Panelo also clarified that Duterte did not claim there were blank items in the national budget or budget allocations lacking specific programs.

Marcos signed the P6.326-trillion 2025 national budget late last year, after discovering discrepancies between the National Expenditure Program (NEP) and the budget proposal from Congress.

According to the DBM, the NEP is submitted to assist Congress in the review and deliberation of the proposed national budget for legislation of annual appropriations for the next fiscal year. It also contains the details of the government’s proposed programs.