Big blanks with Chiz

The mystery surrounding the blank items in the Bicameral Conference Committee (Bicam) report late last year — which formed the basis for the 2025 General Appropriations Act — has finally been solved and it took fugitive legislator Zaldy Co to supply the answers.

Davao City Rep. Sid Ungab, who, along with former president Rodrigo Duterte, first exposed the budget’s mangling, said Co’s February letter to President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.  detailing the Bicam revisions to the budget bill provided the long-missing pieces of the puzzle.

“This is what I was saying as early as January, there were 28 blank items spanning 13 pages in the Bicameral Conference Report of the 2025 GAA,” Ungab posted on his social media page.

In the last portion of Co’s letter, he told Marcos the blanks were “due to the inadvertent omission by the Senate Finance Committee Secretariat.” 

“It is most unfair to blame the hardworking men and women of the House appropriations committee for this faux pas when every year the Senate has been in charge of finalizing the Bicameral Conference Reports,” he said.

Thus, it was the Senate contingent, led by then Senate president Chiz Escudero, that manipulated the budget through the “inadvertent” blanks.

The blank portions of the budget bill, primarily in the agriculture sector budget, emerged in the Bicam report.

The Bicam was mandated to harmonize the House and Senate versions of the P6.326-trillion national budget but it had become the conduit for generating a pork barrel in the past three years.

When President Marcos signed the 2025 GAA into law on 30 December 2024, the blanks had been filled in, resulting in adjustments that reduced some priority programs by billions of pesos while increasing others.

On 18 January, Ungab flagged the blanks during a podcast on Davao City Mayor Sebastian Duterte’s Facebook page. Former President Rodrigo Duterte joined in, calling the missing items a “blank check” that invalidated the entire budget under the Constitution.

President Marcos subsequently dismissed the allegations as “lies,” and accused Duterte of spreading misinformation.

But on 22 January, Kabataan Partylist Rep. Raoul Manuel confirmed there were blanks in the 11 December report and during the House plenary vote on ratification, contradicting the claims of a completed document. Still, Escudero denied there were blanks “in the final version” of the GAA, without mentioning the Bicam report.

Senator Grace Poe backed Escudero, insisting the report was complete when submitted as an enrolled bill.

Then Budget Secretary Amenah Pangandaman joined the fray, saying there were no blanks when the bill reached the President’s office. She denied Palace involvement in filling them in.

On 27 January, when the blanks became difficult to deny, House Appropriations Committee acting Chairperson Rep. Stella Quimbo, who replaced Co, confirmed the blanks existed in the Bicam report but described them as “typos” or placeholders for error corrections, with their funding already identified. She avoided revealing who filled them in.

Ungab and other advocates for budget integrity filed a petition for certiorari in the Supreme Court (SC) on 28 January, arguing the blanks constituted a grave abuse of discretion and violated constitutional rules on appropriations. The petition also challenged the defunding of PhilHealth and the reallocations made to the education budget, which Co blamed on the machinations of Escudero.

On 30 January, Marcos reiterated during a forum that he “couldn’t find those damn blank items” in the signed GAA, emphasizing its validity.

The SC has yet to rule on the petition while the administration avoided investigations claiming the issue was part of the political rift, but the issue has fueled calls for reforms in the Bicam process.

The long-delayed resolution of the notorious budget blanks mystery ultimately affirmed an old truth — time will tell.