Simplifying the national budget:
* According to the DOF, this year, we are borrowing P4.1 billion a day because our daily income of P11.7 billion is not enough to cover our daily expenses of P15.8 billion.
* Last year, we failed to use (as we always do), P1.16 billion of our daily budget of P14.4 billion.
* Next year, we are asking Congress to allow us to spend P17.4 billion per day. Only Heaven knows how much more we will fail to spend and worse, how much more we will borrow.
Simplifying a question: Why do we keep borrowing while increasing a budget that we can’t fully spend?
The budget call should have taken care of vetting the agencies’ absorptive capacity. Those whose unutilized appropriations are remarkably high must have less allocations in the National Expenditure Program (NEP). Congress on the other hand can exercise their inherent “power of the purse” through amendments.
Add to that – hold heads of the concerned agencies to account for their failure to implement projects, activities and programs (PAPs) that they themselves recommended to be funded; UNLESS, some “powerful external actors” intervened and changed those PAPs.
With much help from my very competent staff, we saved P300B in all my 18 years as senator by actively scrutinizing the yearly budget measure and removing excessive, unnecessary, unreasonable, irregular and unconscionable provisions and insertions, ie double appropriations, etc.