Back-to-back pork

It is not the blank items in the Bicameral Conference Committee report that matter but what happened after it was filled up since it will reflect the manipulation that transpired.

In defense of the blank items in the Bicameral report, House Committee on Appropriations chairperson Marikina 2nd District Rep. Stella Quimbo said blanks were left out in the Bicameral Conference Committee report on the 2025 national budget for the final computation of the amendments.

The difference is a P25 billion reduction from the regular items in the budget which were believed reallocated to make room for the pet projects of legislators.

The legislator, while admitting the incomplete bicam report, reiterated that the 2025 General Appropriations Act (GAA) was legal as the allocations were already decided on by the Bicam before the House of Representatives and the Senate ratified the report.

“Notwithstanding any typographical errors or any adjustments that are needed as a result of amendments, the technical staff of both the House and Senate were authorized to make all necessary corrections,” Quimbo said.

Later on, Quimbo would claim that it was the Senate Committee on Finance’s technical staff that prepared the Bicam report on the General Appropriations Bill (GAB).

Both Senate President Chiz Escudero and close ally Senate finance committee head Sen. Grace Poe denied the existence of the blank items in the Bicam report.

The debates on the blank items should not stop on who filled these up but what was placed on the spaces.

The blank items have different outcomes in the GAA that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. ultimately signed.

Subsidy to the Philippine Coconut Authority was raised by P18.6 million, Postharvest Equipment and Facilities increased by P34.7 million, the National Fisheries Program was ramped up by P2.3 billion, seed buffer stocking grew by P7.6 million and Agricultural machinery, equipment and facilities increased P278 million.

The increases were offset by P17.7 billion reduced from the supplement to agencies implementing the Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization Program; P9.7 billion from the National Programs for Rice, Corn, High Value Crops Development, Organic Agriculture, Livestock and Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture; and P450 million cut from Small-Scale Irrigation Projects.

All of the projects with blank items involved the Department of Agriculture.

In the items subjected to the budget juggling in the House-approved document, the total amount to be supplemented in the budgets of various concerned agencies stood at P104.82 billion.

The Bicameral Conference Committee changed the amount to blank, and when the President signed the enrolled copy of the budget, the value was reduced to P87.111 billion, equivalent to a deduction of P17.708 billion.

For the National Programs for Rice, Corn, High-Value Crops Development, Organic Agriculture, Livestock and Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture, the House approved a budget of P45.848 billion, but the Bicam changed the amount to blank.

The version of the budget that the President signed allocated only P36.136 billion to the program, a decrease of P9.712 billion.

In all, the blanks produced changes from the House-approved GAB to the enrolled bill of the Senate that was the basis of the signed GAA of P25 billion.

Based on the route of the budget measure, the House receives the National Expenditure Plan, which becomes the basis of the General Appropriations Bill.

After the House passes the spending bill, it sends the GAB to the Senate, which passes its version. Select members of both chambers convene to reconcile disagreeing provisions of the drafts through the bicameral conference committee.

The Bicam report becomes the final version of the budget, and the House prints an enrolled copy sent to Malacañang for the President’s signature.

The discourse had reached a bitter level due to some political figures turning the blank items issue into a political football.

Being obscured is the huge amount of late-minute pork insertions that were in addition to the projects that Congress members embedded in the NEP.