Marcos says former President Duterte ''lying'' when he claims 2025 budget had discrepancies
Former President Rodrigo Duterte is lying, said President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., reacting to his predecessor's claim of alleged discrepancies, including portions which were left blank, in the recently approved 2025 national budget of P6.326 trillion.
Marcos said that as a former president of the Republic of the Philippines, Duterte should know that his allegations could not happen.
"He's lying. He's a President and he knows that you cannot pass a GAA without any with a blank. He's lying and he's lying because he knows perfectly well that that doesn't ever happen," he said.
"In the entire history of the Philippines, an item in the GAA which does not have any allocated project or fund is not allowed. So, it’s a lie,'' Marcos added.
In a statement issued on Monday, Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin criticized Duterte and other quarters allegations about Marcos having signed the 2025 GAA with certain parts of the enactment left blank to enable the administration to simply fill in the amounts.
"The peddling of such fake news is outrightly malicious and should be condemned as criminal. No page of the 2025 National Budget was left unturned before the president signed it into law," he said.
Bersamin explained that all the "4,057 pages of its two thick volumes (which were printed in fine print ? with nearly 60 lines on each page) were exhaustively reviewed by hundreds of professional staff from Congress and the Department of Budget and Management."
"It is impossible for any funding items to be left blank, as alleged by misinformed and malicious sources. The true facts and the printed figures appearing in the GAA easily debunk the malicious claims of deliberate blanks being left for filling in," he added.
Bersamin also stressed that "anyone who conducts the same rigorous examination of the 2025 National Budget, which the public can view on the DBM website, will come to the same conclusion: that there is no program, activity, or project at all with blank appropriations in that carefully vetted law."
"The former president and his cohorts should know better that the GAA could not contain blank items," he said.
Duterte and former Davao City 3rd District Rep. Isidro Ungab raised concerns over the alleged discrepancies in the bicameral conference committee report on this year's approved national budget.
Ungab, a former chair of the House Appropriations Committee, claimed that the amount of certain budget items for the unprogrammed appropriations and the Department of Agriculture were missing.
Duterte noted that the budget items should never be left blank to be filled in later as he warned that anyone involved in tampering with the budget could face criminal charges.
“If that happens, something is terribly wrong… I would say that if there are blanks that passed through, that is not valid legislation. If that’s in the law and came out with blanks, it should be filled before or after Congress… If it’s fragmented or missing, it’s not a valid budget for implementation,” Duterte said.
“It’s not just inaccurate; I think the budget as a whole is invalid,” he added. Robina Asido/DMS
