THE budgets of key economic agencies were “deemed submitted” on Wednesday to the Senate in plenary, as it continued to rush deliberations on the 2023 general appropriations bill.
After Finance Committee chairman Juan Edgardo Angara defended their respective budgets, the outlays for the Department of Budget and Management (DBM), Department of Finance (DOF) and the National Economic and Development Authority (Neda) were deemed submitted in plenary.
Earlier, Angara endorsed the economic managers’ pitch for austerity measures, even while conceding the need to balance these with bigger spending for vulnerable sectors through the 2023 budgetary law.
Angara said the economic managers, led by Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Arsenio Balisacan, described the austerity measure as “very important, given the post pandemic need to ensure fiscal sustainability.”
Nonetheless, he told Sen. Risa Hontiveros as she interpellated him on the 2023 budget bill, “but on the other hand, expanding public spending in order to address the needs of vulnerable sectors is important as well as to ensure the correct amount of stimulus provided for a recovering and transforming economy.”
Thus, Angara added, “fiscal policy and in general economic managers face with the need to balance the numbers—on one hand, practicing austerity and on the other hand, practicing public spending; they have to navigate these two extremes.”
Noting Balisacan’s remarks “in recent days that in the face of high and rising inflation, there is a need to support our vulnerable sectors and families,” Hontiveros asked Angara if Balisacan meant, “there was a need for more support on top of what is available already in the proposed 2023 NEP,” or, in short, a supplemental budget.
Angara, in reply pointed to the 2023 GAB provisions for “various cash transfers and subsidy programs” which include those targeted for farmers and fisherfolk public transport drivers, disadvantaged sectors, displaced workers, totaling over P200 billion. There is also P115.6 billion for the 4Ps or the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program, “which I know you’ve been supportive of in through this years.”
She, meanwhile, wondered aloud if the Budget Secretary is being asked by “Neda or perhaps the whole economic cluster of the Cabinet to prepare a supplemental budget, for example?” She noted the windfall revenues of the Department of Finance in 2023 “from the extraordinarily high cost of food and fuel imports,” noting the earlier cited figure of P9.7 billion.
Angara noted that “according to the Neda Secretary, for now there is no need for the supplemental budget but there’s a need to improve the delivery system for the benefits to ensure that these get to the beneficiaries in a timely manner.”