President Marcos —PCO photo Former President Rodrigo Duterte
MANILA, Philippines — Malacañang on Monday branded as “lies” the alleged presence of blank items in the 2025 General Appropriations Act (GAA), or whose amounts were supposedly meant to be filled out at the behest of President Marcos and his close associates.
In an interview in Taguig City, the President denied allegations by former President Rodrigo Duterte and his allies that the 2025 GAA was riddled with blanks.
Article continues after this advertisement“He’s lying. He’s a [former] president, he knows that you cannot pass a GAA with a blank,” he told reporters after the launch of the Tesla Center Philippines.
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Marcos was reacting to allegations made by Duterte about alleged irregularities in the bicameral conference committee report on the 2025 GAA, which aired in an online podcast on Saturday.
Article continues after this advertisementDavao City Rep. Isidro Ungab found the blanks in the approved report of Congress’ bicameral committee and said that it was the first time for him to see such a thing in his 15 years in the House of Representatives.
Article continues after this advertisementA former chair of the House appropriations panel, Ungab claimed that several portions of the bicam report were left blank for subsequent filling out of amounts at their behest.
Article continues after this advertisementBut since the GAA was already signed by the President on Dec. 30, there was no other recourse but to question it at the Supreme Court, he added.
DiscrepancyAmong the items purportedly left blank in the final bicameral report ratified by the Senate and the House on Dec. 11 were intended for the National Irrigation Administration (NIA) and the Philippine Coconut Authority (PCA), agencies under the Department of Agriculture.
Article continues after this advertisementUngab particularly cited line 49 on page SP 11 of the report, where the amount of P74.57 billion next to the acronym NIA was deleted and replaced with a blank.
Another item opposite the acronym PCA also had the P889.06 million deleted and replaced with a blank.
Below these items, the total of P104 billion was also deleted and replaced with a blank.
He also observed that on page SP 11 of the bicameral report, the agriculture and fisheries modernization program was allotted P146.33 billion, but in the GAA, the program was only P125.72 billion, which was a discrepancy.
There were several pages with blank items and he initially found at least 13 of these, Ungab said.
“With all these findings, we can see that the bicam report was defective, why was it signed by members? The House and the Senate ratified the defective bicameral report,” Ungab said.
People’s moneyDuterte, who was part of the podcast’s five-member panel, criticized the “incomplete” bicam report on the national budget, saying leaving blanks was “unacceptable.”
“[If it’s approved with blank items], that is not valid legislation,” Duterte said in a “Basta Dabawenyo” special episode aired live on Facebook on Jan. 18. “[If something is lacking], that is not a valid budget for implementation,” he said. “It’s not only inaccurate but I think the budget is invalid.”
The former president also compared the blank items to issuing blank checks, where the holder of the check can just write the amount before cashing it.
“[You can’t do that with] people’s money. Everything [in the budget] must be explained; clear, patent, without doubt. [This money has to be spent for this particular item]… you can’t leave anything vacant to be filled up later. That is not allowed by law,” he noted. ” I’d like to remind Congress, that is wrong.”
Duterte said the amount intended for each item in the budget was things that could not be delegated to anybody other than the lawmakers.
“The amount after each item has to be exact; you can’t just correct it after the law is passed,” he said. “Those are substantial items that can’t be classified as typographical or grammatical errors, especially if [those had] nothing to do with what Congress intended in law. Otherwise, that is falsification or forgery; you can go to jail for that.”
Fake newsBut the President took exception to his predecessor’s statements.
“[Duterte is] lying because he knows perfectly well that that doesn’t ever happen. In the entire history of the Philippines, we are not allowed to have a GAA that does not specify the name of the project and how much [funding] is allocated,” he pointed out. “So, it’s a lie.”
He urged skeptics to go over the 2025 GAA, which is available online through the website of the Department of Budget and Management (DBM).
“They don’t need to comb over every single line of the budget. They can just check online and find items that critics are referring to as ‘blank check,’ and they can prove that what I am saying is true: that that’s a lie,” he said.
Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin said Duterte and his allies were peddling “fake news.”
“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 noted.
“The former president and his cohorts should know better that the GAA could not contain blank items,” Bersamin added.
According to the executive secretary, the 4,057-page 2025 GAA, printed in two volumes, was “exhaustively reviewed” by hundreds of personnel from Congress and the DBM.
“This meticulous line-by-line scrutiny is a preenactment check performed by dedicated civil servants to ensure that the GAA contained no single discrepancy in the amounts being appropriated,” he said.
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“It is impossible for any funding items to be left blanksuperace88, as alleged by misinformed and malicious sources,” Bersamin added.
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