Salceda: Passage of more than 50% of Marcos' priority measures can be expedited

Passage of more than half of the 18 measures that President Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. wants Congress to prioritize could be expedited, veteran lawmaker Joey Salceda of Albay said on Tuesday.

Salceda was referring to the 18 bills Marcos mentioned during his first State of the Nation Address on Monday.

"Ten of the 18 bills were already approved on 3rd reading. We can invoke the House rules which allow us to expedite committee proceedings for more than half of President Marcos' priority measures," Salceda, who chaired the House Ways and Means panel during the last Congress, said in a statement.

Salceda said these 10 include:

• National Government Rightsizing Program
• Budget Modernization Bill
• Corporate Income Tax and Incentives Reform Act
• Passive Income and Financial Intermediary Taxation Act
• E-Government Act
• Internet Transactions Act
• An Act Providing for Government Financial Institutions Unified Initiatives to Distressed Enterprises for Economic Recovery
• Medical Reserve Corps
• National Disease Prevention and Management and

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• Virology Institute of the Philippines

"In a meeting with Speaker [Martin] Romualdez, I asked the House leadership to immediately constitute the Committee on Ways and Means so that we can already take up President Marcos' priority fiscal measures," Salceda added.

Population growth

Former Senator turned Batangas lawmaker Ralph Recto, for his part, said  rightsizing the government should not be about reducing the number of employees but making sure that essential posts in the government are filled.

Recto said the hiring of essential personnel, such as teachers and nurses, was dictated by the increase in the population.

“Rightsizing would mean downsizing the personnel complement in some agencies but upsizing them in many. Population growth is the most influential human resources recruiter, one that is impossible to ignore," Recto pointed out.

"The right rightsizing project should be driven by the mission to boost government service and not merely to cut payroll expense. The idea is [to] scrap unnecessary positions and use them to create essential ones, or use the savings from abolished items to fill the shortage of critical workforce,” Recto added.

Recto said the country had a shortage of 92,000 doctors, 44,000 nurses, and 19,000 medical technologists based on government records, and that a 1,000 increase in the country’s population already triggers the hiring of one policeman and one nurse.

“Yung kakulangan natin ng engineers, technical and science people ay ang ‘technical deficit’ na nagpapabagal ng ating infrastructure at ibang science-driven modernization projects,”Recto said.

(Our shortage of engineers, technical and science personnel is the technical deficit that slows down our infrastructure and science-driven modernization projects.)

He also said that the country’s population, the 13th biggest in the world, increased by 1.4 million from 2020 to 2021 and that the government’s “personnel service,” or PS expenses, have quietly crept from P593 billion in 2012 to P1.405 trillion this year.

"Let's just say that we will be able to save as much as P20 billion in a year. This could be a small amount to compare with the P1.4 trillion personnel expense, but we can hire more medical personnel with this amount. That is why I support this kind of rightsizing,” Recto said. — DVM, GMA News