Hayok sa ‘pork’ kay Velasco! Lacson: P28B slashed from gov’t agencies for lawmakers’ 2021 projects

Some P28 billion were taken out from the budgets of the Department of Education (DepEd), Department of National Defense (DND) and other government agencies to satiate the appetite for pork barrel funds of lawmakers under House Speaker Lord Allan Jay Velasco, Senator Panfilo Lacson has revealed.

In an interview on CNN Philippines’ “The Source” Monday (December 14), Lacson said the Department of Public Works and Highways’ (DPWH) budget for 2021 rose to P694 billion as a result of the funding slashed from other government agencies.

Lacson said the increase in DPWH’s budget happened during the bicameral conference committee meetings on the 2020 general appropriations bill, which were not open to the public.

“I can only assume the reason behind the increase of P28B in the budget of the DPWH is that they cannot accommodate everybody. During the bicam, this is where the congressmen and senators haggle for their pet projects. And since they totaled an increase of P83.87B and they could only extract P55.21B from within the department, they had to get the P28B differential from other agencies,” he said.

Lacson said Senator Sonny Angara, who led the Senate contingent to the bicam on the 2021 national budget, admitted to him at the plenary that the DPWH’s budget was increased to avoid the possibility of an impasse between the two chambers of Congress.

“When I interpellated him on the bicameral report he reported out on the floor, his explanation is that it is better to accommodate requests from congressmen than not having passed the budget at all because kung maabala baka magkaroon tayo ng reenacted budget,” he said.

While Lacson clarified that DPWH wasn’t the only one which benefited from the reduction in other government agency’s funding, he said the the creation of new items in its appropriation was questionable.

“[T]his is what I am questioning, because If it doesn’t involve planning by the implementing agency, then we will have a problem in the implementation because implementation is always a consequence of planning. And when an agency is not involved in the planning of a project, as a consequence of that, either it won’t be implemented at all, or the implementation will be very bad,” he said

The post Hayok sa ‘pork’ kay Velasco! Lacson: P28B slashed from gov’t agencies for lawmakers’ 2021 projects first appeared on https://politics.com.ph.

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