NUP House members willing to disclose their amendments in proposed 2027 budget

Members of the National Unity Party (NUP) in the House of Representatives are willing to disclose the budget amendments they included in the proposed P7.2 trillion budget for 2027, Deputy Speaker Ronaldo Puno of Antipolo said Thursday.

Puno made the announcement after the NUP’s dialogue with the People’s Budget Coalition, which earlier flagged House amendments for the 2027 budget for supposed lack of documentation and stamp of approval by the concerned government agency.

“We fully support disclosure [of budget amendments]. In fact, today, I made a disclosure and explanation to the People's Budget Coalition on projects on my district,” Puno said in a press conference.

“I have informed them that any congressman in the National Unity Party is willing to provide them with such details. And we think anybody in Congress has the obligation to do this,” Puno added.

Puno said NUP is willing to show the trail from where the project proposal originated until it was included in the House-approved version.

“In fact, we went a little bit beyond that, that it must follow the bottom-up budget approach. Meaning to say, it has to begin with the barangay, go to the local government, eventually go to the Regional Development Council, then it goes to the agency. There's no reason why these things will not be documented,” Puno said.

Likewise, Puno said that the NUP will push for the inclusion of a special provision which will allow the Department of Agriculture (DA) to location of eight farm to market roads that it proposed to Congress with wrong coordinates.

Senate President Sherwin Gatchalian earlier said that the Senate will remove P8 billion worth of projects included in the proposed budget of the Department of Public Works and Highways due to lack of documentation.

Sought for comment on this action, Puno supported Gatchalian’s position.

“We believe that if it has no documentation, it has no right to be there [in the budget],” Puno said.

“We know the Senate is planning to eliminate them, [and] we will not object,” Puno added.

House appropriations panel senior vice chairperson Abet Garcia of Bataan, for his part, said that amendments introduced by lawmakers in the national budget are made based on requests from many sectors which are not easy to balance.

“The requests [for Congress to increase their budget on certain projects and items], they do not only come from government agencies. There are also requests from local government units. These requests are the ones that us members of the House try to address to balance the need to fund the needs of the people in a local and national level scale,” Garcia said.

“So, with limited resources, it's really a balancing act. And during the budget hearings, we learn about the absorptive capacity of implementing agencies, and which projects should be prioritized, to come up with a final version of the House General Appropriations Bill. And if I may say, in the end, wala pong masaya kasi limited yung budget, but we have to come up with a workable budget,” Garcia added.

(Nobody really ends up happy because of limited resources.) — BM, GMA News

Follow facebook.com/gmanewsonline for real-time news and developments in the Philippines and around the world.