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Congress can pass the proposed 2023 national budget of P5.268 billion before it goes on its Christmas recess in December 17, House Speaker Martin Romualdez said on Saturday.

“We have sufficient time. We will finally approve the budget before year end. It is the most important tool in accomplishing the objectives of the President’s Agenda for Prosperity and his eight-point socio-economic development plan,” Romualdez said in a statement.

“With this budget, which is the first full-year spending measure proposed by the President, we hope to sustain or even accelerate our economic growth, which should benefit all of our people,” he added.

The bicameral conference committee on Friday began discussing how to reconcile the provisions of the House and Senate versions of the General Appropriations Bill for 2023.

In an interview with dzBB on Sunday, Senator Sherwin Gatchalian, who heads the Senate Committee on Education said the Department of Education (DepEd) earmarked the biggest share of the P5.268 trillion budget, getting at least 12 percent in the budget allocation.

“The DepEd was allocated the biggest funds in the whole national budget. It got almost 12 percent of the total budget. One of the problems of DepEd is how to spend their budget that’s why we need to monitor them because if we provide them funds and it would not be used, it would be wasted,” Gatchalian said.

Gatchalian said he found out during his interpellation that DepEd needed P430 billion for the construction of classrooms.

“The whole budget (of DepEd)..is P678 billion but what is needed to make up for the backlog of the construction of classrooms is P430 billion. However, only P15 billion was allocated for it, which is not that much.”

Gatchalian said that the Deped needed confidential funds to be able to address the crimes happening in schools including child abuse, selling illegal drugs, and human trafficking.

“The justification of the DepEd when they asked for confidential and intelligence funds was to eradicate crime happening in our schools. And with the number of schools we have, we have almost 600,000 plus schools, 23 million students, a lot of information gathering has to be done to know who are committing these crimes,” Gatchalian said.

Last week, the Senate slashed DepEd’s confidential funds from P150 million to P30 million. Jaspearl Tan/DMS