Following the alleged unlawful insertion of billions of pesos in the 2025 national budget, House Speaker Martin Romualdez on Friday backed calls for an open bicameral conference committee to ensure that the public would be privy to the crucial budget process, which is traditionally conducted behind closed doors.

“Intervene, listen, watch. We invite every citizen to witness how their budget is being crafted — live and unfiltered. This is your money. This is your future. And now, this is your Congress,” the House chief said.

This commitment comes two months ahead of the deliberations on the 2026 national budget, which is pegged at P6.793 trillion—the highest budget ever to be approved by Congress.

This is 7.4-percent higher than this year’s P6.326 trillion outlay, and will account for 22 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. 

The 2025 General Appropriations Act was widely criticized for supposedly containing padded unprogrammed and discretionary funds while subsidies for key sectors like education and healthcare suffered deep cuts.

The Department of Education, supposed to receive the lion’s share of the 2025 budget, incurred a whopping P14 billion budget slash. From the proposed P748 billion allocation, it plunged to approximately P734 billion based on the 2025 GAA.

State insurer PhilHealth, on the other hand, was set to receive over P74 billion in government subsidies but was later denied by Congress, allegedly in violation of existing laws, such as the Sin Tax Law and the Universal Healthcare Act.

Watchdogs, anti-corruption advocates, and business groups have long petitioned Congress to make the bicam meetings accessible to the public, arguing that the lack of transparency in the pivotal proceedings opens the floodgates to manipulation and illegal insertions.

Prompted by the mounting public clamor, Romualdez pledged to convince his fellow legislators in both houses of Congress to institutionalize the open bicam. This would mean the bicameral conference process would be livestreamed, opening it to public scrutiny.

“Transparency and accountability must be the cornerstones of the budget process. This is a crucial step in restoring the public trust and ensuring that the national budget truly reflects the will and welfare of the people,” Romualdez said.

He continued, “We passed key accountability measures. Now we must build on that momentum by opening the most sensitive and final stages of the legislative process to the Filipino people.”

Romualdez himself has been accused of manipulating the budget, along with some House and Senate members who sat in the bicam for the 2025 budget. 

Allies of former president Rodrigo Duterte, spearheaded by Davao Rep. Pantaleon Alvarez, charged him and other House leaders with 12 counts each of falsification of legislative documents and graft in the Ombudsman for “illegally” inserting P241 billion in “blank items” in the bicam report on the 2025 national budget. 

The “insertions” came after the report had been ratified by both the House and the Senate, in violation of Article 170 of the Revised Penal Code.

The bicam is tasked with reconciling the conflicting provisions of the House and Senate versions of the national budget bill. Amending its report after it has been ratified defeats the purpose for holding a bicam, critics asserted. 

The bicam members and Malacañang categorically denied the allegations of blank line items, questionable insertions, increases, and reallocations after Duterte allies contested the constitutionality of this year’s GAA before the Supreme Court.

The controversy plaguing the so-called missing budgets in the 2025 budget bicam report was first put to the spotlight by former president Rodrigo Duterte and ally, Davao Rep. Isidro Ungab, the erstwhile appropriations panel chair.

The allegations were also confirmed by Kabataan Rep. Raoul Manuel, a member of the Makabayan bloc, who claimed that there were 14 blank entries, 12 of which were under agriculture-related projects and programs.

Marikina Rep. Stella Quimbo, senior vice chair of the House appropriations panel, had admitted that there were blank items in the bicam but insisted that funding for the same was already identified before members of the bicam signed the report.

She contended that enrolled GAB is “complete, with no blank allocations among its more than 235,000 line items,” making the 2025 GAA “lawful, valid, and fully enforceable.”

In the petition pending before the SC, Ungab et. al alleged the blanks were “very dubious and dangerous as the budgets for the said offices and programs remain undetermined.”

Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin, who was named one of the respondents, insisted that there were no blank items in the enrolled budget bill, the version forwarded to Marcos for his signature. 

Nonetheless, he said the Palace would not be held liable as they had no hand in the bicam report, a matter, he claimed, internal to Congress. 

The 2025 GAA, originally set at P6.352 trillion, was trimmed down to P6.326 trillion after President Marcos vetoed P194-billion worth of line items deemed inconsistent with his administration’s priority programs, which critics blamed on the bicam.

Earlier, Marcos was reportedly planning to sit with the bicam panel to ensure that the capital outlay for 2026 was aligned with the administration’s priorities—a move that would violate the constitutional principle of separation of powers, given that the power of the purse belongs exclusively to Congress.