MALAYBALAY CITY (MindaNews / 20 January) – Malacañang on Monday denied claims by former President Rodrigo Duterte that the 2025 General Appropriations Act has several blank items, making it “invalid and unenforceable.”
In a statement, Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin said Duterte and other quarters “have maliciously peddled fake news about President Marcos having signed the GAA of 2025 with certain parts of the enactment purposely left blank to enable the administration to simply fill in the amounts like in a blank check.”
In a video posted Saturday on Davao City Mayor Sebastian Duterte’s YouTube show Basta Dabawenyo, the former president echoed claims made by Davao City 3rd District Rep.Isidro Ungab that the budget had “blanks”.
Bersamin said the act is “outrightly malicious and should be condemned as criminal,” stressing that the national budget has no such blank items.
“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,” he said.
“The former president and his cohorts should know better that the GAA could not contain blank items,” Bersamin said.
MindaNews accessed Monday the 2025 GAA on the Department of Budget and Management website and found that all items have corresponding allocations.
Some netizens shared online Duterte’s allegations of anomalies in the national budget.
The 2025 GAA has been described by some sectors as “the most corrupt budget” owing to the decrease in the appropriations for education and health, while allocating billions of pesos for “ayuda” (aid).
Critics believe ayuda will just be used for political patronage.
In education, this year’s approved budget for state colleges and universities in Mindanao decreased by 6.38 percent overall. The Mindanao State University System suffered the biggest cut at 43.6 percent
State colleges and universities in Mindanao got a total allocation of 29,116,666,000 or down by P1,984,399,000 from last year’s amount of P31,101,065,000.
Meanwhile, the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation or PhilHealth received zero subsidy from this year’s national budget. (MindaNews)
