THE country’s P5.024-trillion budget for 2022 inched closer to President Duterte’s signing it into law after the House of Representatives and the Senate separately ratified the bicameral conference committee report on the disagreeing provisions of the measure on Wednesday.
The ratification in the House came a few hours after the congressional bicameral conference committee approved the national budget in the morning of the same day.
The Senate, in a final vote at Wednesday’s session, unanimously approved the final reconciled Senate and House versions of the General Appropriations bill.
Sen. Juan Edgardo Angara was briefly interpellated by Minority Leader Franklin M. Drilon on the bicameral decision to restore P15 billion of the P24-billion cuts made by the Senate for the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC).
The ratified national budget for fiscal year 2022 includes a P50-billion fund for booster shots and another P50 billion for health workers’ special risk allowance (SRA).
House Committee on Appropriations Chairman Rep. Eric Go Yap revealed that the bicameral conference committee focused on tweaking the 2022 national budget to address Covid-19-related problems and hiking the budget for universities.
Yap said the 2022 national budget now includes a P50-billion fund for health workers’ SRA, which he pointed out was absent in the national expenditure program as proposed by the Department of Budget and Management and the Department of Health.
He added that another P50 billion was allocated for buying Covid-19 booster shots. However, he explained that the bulk of the funds would be categorized as unprogrammed since the country gets a lot of Covid-19 vaccine donations from other countries.
“The house contingent focused on Covid-19 and universities. These are the important things to the House of Representatives especially to House Speaker [Lord Allan Velasco],” he told reporters after the bicameral conference committee meeting.
Yap said they allocated P32 billion for state universities and colleges (SUCs) to help these prepare for the resumption of face-to-face classes.
Yap also disclosed that the bicameral conference committee hiked the budget of the NTF-ELCAC to P15 billion (which was earlier slashed in the Senate by P24 billion) while they added P3.5 billion for the purchase of more C130 aircraft.
Yap explained that they have been pushing to restore the original P29-billion budget of the NTF-ELCAC, but senators wanted to allocate the fund to other programs of the government. The P15 billion that was restored was a compromise made between the two chambers, which he noted was “good enough.”
“It was not fully restored since the Senate had different priorities. We want to restore the whole NTF-Elcac budget but the senators have a wisdom that other agencies need more funds like the SRA,” he said.
Yap said the budget allocated for C130 will allow the government to purchase six aircraft that can be used for Covid-19-related measures like delivery of vaccines.
The additional budget was sourced from government programs that had dismal performance or underutilization.
“For example, the DOTr [Department of Transportation] has underutilized [funds] so we removed it, then put it to the SRA. We are really dumbfounded that the SRA is not included in the NEP,” he said.
