Who fills in the blanks?

Responsible officials must carefully examine the recent allegation of blank checks in the national budget instead of merely dismissing it.

Former President Rodrigo Duterte and former House appropriations committee chairman, Rep. Isidro Ungab of Davao City’s 3rd District, should have known what they were talking about when they presented their findings.

Nonetheless, Palace officials said they were merely peddling misinformation since President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and the Cabinet members had meticulously combed through the 2025 General Appropriations Act (GAA).

While there are strong partisan considerations, Duterte and Ungab presented documents to back up their claim.

Copies of portions of the national budget that contained the apparent anomaly came from Ungab who had been assailing the bicameral conference committee report.

The joint body of the Senate and the House of Representatives — which is the bicam — has been pinpointed as the source of most of the pork barrel insertions found in the budget.

If the blank items do exist, then it may imply that Congress and the Executive had conspired to bastardize the budget.

Who else would fill in the blanks but those in the Executive to whom the budget is transmitted for a final review.

But then again, the allegation was branded as malicious and outright criminal since “the 4,057 pages of the P6.326-trillion budget’s two thick volumes were exhaustively reviewed by hundreds of professional staff from Congress and the Department of Budget and Management.”

Yet the allegation was made and the involvement of the 2025 GAA, which is a sacred document on the disposal of the people’s money, should prompt a more serious response than mere dismissal.

If, however, Duterte and Ungab told a lie with the intention to deceive then they should be held accountable.

A forum should be provided likely through the courts since Congress, whose members are among the accused, cannot be trusted with an impartial inquiry.

The bicameral report was ratified on 11 December 2024, and approved by both chambers of Congress.

Ungab, in a television program with the former president, said it was the first time in his 15 years in Congress, including during his tenure as chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, that he encountered a bicameral report with blanks.

Earlier, he said he was not given a copy of the proposed GAA 2025, which emerged from the bicameral conference committee, “upon the resumption of Congress after the Christmas break.”

This was also the first time such an incident occurred during his tenure as a legislator.

The accusation has the strength of precedence since the bicam has been the target of budget watchdogs for alleged manipulation of the budget to revive the pork barrel scheme.

It was in the bicam’s proposed 2024 budget that a provision was embedded that allowed the Department of Finance (DoF) to sweep excess funds from government-owned and -controlled corporations.

That part of the GAA was cited by the DoF for its directive to the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. and the Philippine Deposit Insurance Corp. to surrender a combined P167 billion of their reserve funds to the National Treasury.

A Supreme Court ruling barred the Executive from transferring funds without the approval of the Bureau of Treasury.

From the national coffers, the so-called idle funds will be reallocated to unprogrammed items in the national budget.

Budget watchdogs said the DoF needed to scour for funds for the unprogrammed appropriations after regular budget items were shoved aside to make room for the pork barrel projects of legislators.

The private groups said the insertions happened twice during the drafting of the budget — during the outlining of the National Expenditure Program and when last-minute additions were made in the bicam.

Ungab seems confident about the blank items, stating that they cannot be dismissed as typographical or printing errors.

The public, as the rightful owners of the funds in question, deserves to be presented with the unvarnished truth about the national budget.