Why shoot the messenger?

Defenders of the 2025 General Appropriations Act (GAA) appear misguided in running after Davao City who spilled the beans on the attempt to manipulate the budget.

The Senate through its leaders denied that the enrolled bill that came from the House of Representatives had missing parts, while the Palace insisted that the GAA signed by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was complete.

Thus, Executive Secretary Luca Bersamin issued a challenge to Ungab to prove his “invention” that the GAA or the process of creating it was defective.

“I cannot stop Congressman Ungab and other similarly minded people who would want to put up a challenge,” Bersamin said, of the call to challenge the validity of the 2025 GAA before the Supreme Court. Bersamin was a former Chief Justice.

In a way, Bersamin is trying to distance the Palace from the controversy by issuing the challenge to Ungab.

“The problem there is, we won’t be the ones who will answer for any shortcomings because it’s the bicam report,” he said.

“We have nothing to do with the bicam report. We are only involved with the finished product that the President signed, not the blank check,” he added.

“He (Ungab) should prove his claim because we have nothing to do with him. We have nothing to do with the blanks. That’s his invention. If there were really true omissions, let Congress, the Lower House, the Upper House explain it, if any,” he said.

But didn’t Ungab present the budget documents that spoke for themselves on several occasions where the blank spaces were clearly seen?

Senator Bato dela Rosa also attested to the existence of the documents with the glaring spaces between the texts.

The Palace can’t toss the blame for the anomaly elsewhere since the buck stops at its doorstep as the final signature on it was affixed in its office.

According to former budget undersecretary Zy-za Suzara, three different documents need to be scrutinized, which are the bicam report that contains the summary of the amendments that the House and the Senate reconciled; the enrolled bill that the Senate approved and forwarded to the President; and the GAA itself.

In the documents that Ungab exposed were several items in the amendments to special provisions for the Department of Agriculture (DA) that were left blank.

The document had an 11 December stamp which means that it was sent the day that select members of the bicam led by former House Committee on Appropriations chairperson, AKO Bicol Representative Elizaldy Co, and Senate finance committee chairperson Sen. Grace Poe approved the report.

The missing items in the bicam report, however, all had appropriated amounts in the 2025 GAA that was signed by the President, which the Department of Budget and Management said is available on its website.

Suzara said the suspicions of irregularity in the budget process could have been avoided had the bicam been transparent.

The bicam composed of select senators and House members fine-tunes the budget. The deliberations are held behind closed doors.

Suzara said the real issue is “whether there were irregularities in filling in the blanks, which is why we need to see the bicam report versus the enrolled bill and the bill that President Marcos signed.”

“The GAA, of course, is the final form of the budget. But we don’t know if those final figures were the same in the enrolled bill. Under the presumption of regularity, it’s possible that they were in the enrolled bill.”

This does not resolve the issue, however, as the mystery is about who filled in the blanks.

Through all the exchanges that occurred, what stood out was that no one denied the existence of blank items in the bicam report.

Was the enrolled bill invalid if the bicam report contained blanks?

The SC is the best forum to resolve the budget quandary.