Tag: 2024 budget

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Making Noise on the 2025 Budget Makes Sense After All

If there is one amendment in the 2025 GAA that is worth mentioning, Congress has rectified a legally flawed provision under the 2024 GAA by deleting Special Provision (d) under the Unprogrammed Appropriations which allowed the executive branch to realign “excess PhilHealth funds” to the National Treasury.

This bars the Department of Finance from gobbling up PhilHealth funds in 2025. This may have also rendered the pending SC petitions on this particular issue moot and academic.

Making noise makes sense after all.

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Editorial: Walking dead pork [Tribune]

From Daily Tribune: While the Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that the Priority Development Assistance Fund and similar discretionary lump sums in the budget that gave legislators authority to implement government projects were illegal, the pork barrel has been resurrected in different forms over the years.

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Editorial: Undying hunger for pork [Tribune]

Ping Lacson is an avowed enemy of the pork barrel system and other forms of wrongdoing.

From Daily Tribune: “It is not the obligation of congressmen and senators to distribute these subsidy programs. (The) mandate of Congress in the budget process is to authorize and legislate and not to implement,” said former Senator Ping Lacson, who was known as a budget watchdog.

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The 3rd chamber [Philippine Star]

From Ana Marie Pamintuan‘s column in The Philippine Star: Lacson, who unlike some lawmakers reads the fine print before affixing his signature to the budget measure, describes the bicameral conference as “the third chamber of Congress” where budgeting “miracles” happen.

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Editorial: AKAP’s suspicious origin [Tribune]

From Daily Tribune: “What happened with AKAP was that it was concealed and was sneakily inserted. It was included in the DSWD’s budget, but it was placed (before) the Quick Response Fund,” Lacson revealed.

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