There are no unfilled items in this year’s budget known as the 2025 General Appropriations Act (GAA), but there appeared to be blanks in one crucial document that preceded it — the bicameral conference committee report.

How to explain the blanks in the bicam report that contained the final amendments of the legislative?

An emerging explanation from allies of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is this: the signed report went to the lawmakers’ technical staff for final polishing.

The issue

After the House and the Senate pass their own versions of the General Appropriations Bill, select lawmakers from each chamber meet at the bicameral level to iron out differences. The report they eventually sign contain those amendments.

At least two congressmen, Davao City 3rd District Representative Isidro Ungab and Kabataan Representative Raoul Manuel, confirmed that the bicameral report on the 2025 budget that they saw contained blanks. It was the version ratified by the House, yet when President Marcos signed the GAA, there was no longer any missing item. It raised the question: who filled in the blanks?

Rappler’s research also found that the blanks were all in relation to programs of the Department of Agriculture, and the adjustments involved billions of pesos.

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Initial responses

Ungab first flagged the blanks in the podcast streamed on the Facebook page of Davao City Mayor Sebastian Duterte on January 18. His father, former president Rodrigo Duterte, was on the same episode, and said Ungab’s discovery made the 2025 budget invalid.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said on January 20 that Duterte was lying, and that there were no blanks in the GAA. Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin also insisted that “no page of the 2025 national budget was left unturned before the president signed it into law.”

These are factually correct in relation to the enrolled copy signed by the President, but the responses did not directly answer the Duterte camp’s allegation that was in reference to the bicameral report.

For days, delegates from the House were mum on the issue, with acting appropriations chairperson Stella Quimbo even dodging reporters’ requests for an interview twice last week.

Senators, meanwhile, were divided: Senator Bato Dela Rosa insisted that the bicameral report he signed had blanks, others like Senate President Chiz Escudero and finance committee chairperson Grace Poe said there weren’t.

New response

Now, the House is ready to defend itself.

On Monday, January 27, Quimbo made mention of the bicameral report that was the subject of controversy, in the first statement made by a House official who participated in the bicameral deliberations.

“The bicameral report explicitly authorized the technical secretariats of both the Senate and the House of Representatives to implement corrections and adjustments as required. These do not affect the integrity nor the legality of the budget,” Quimbo said. “When the members of the bicameral committee signed the report, all appropriations had already been determined and approved—no changes were made.”

“Any suggestion of impropriety is unfounded and appears to be politically motivated rather than prompted by genuinely substantive concerns. It is unfortunate that an administrative matter is being maliciously misconstrued to create controversy where there is none,” she added.

Her explanation on Monday is similar to how Department of Budget and Management Secretary Amenah Pangandaman tried to bring clarity to the controversy.

“After it is ratified, they will go back to their technical staff and then they will rewrite it. They will clean it up because, as you can see, what they pass on the floor during ratification — not just the budget, but also other bills — is very minimal. It only includes what they have agreed upon, and everything else is not yet included,” Pangandaman said on Friday, January 24.

“They will go back to their technical working group, to their staff; they will write it properly, and then there will be an enrolled bill, an enrolled version,” Pangandaman added, drawing from her experience as legislative staff in the past.

If the explanation was that simple, why did it take that long to be released to the media?

The implication

Even former Senate president Tito Sotto is not buying it.

“Some of our legislators need to undergo parliamentary rules and procedures workshop. Ministerial corrections by technical staff are never allowed in any bill much more a law. You bring it back to plenary!” he said on X.

Despite Quimbo’s explanation, the issue may drag on in court.

Representative Ungab vowed to challenge the constitutionality of the budget in the Supreme Court. Marcos’ former executive secretary Lucas Bersamin said some groups may also do the same.

Aquino-era budget secretary Butch Abad believes these cases are unlikely to prosper, believing that the magistrates are unlikely to check whether the House or the Senate followed their internal rules of procedure, in accordance with the principle of independence of branches.

But budget experts insist that the blanks in the bicameral report could set a bad precedent, calling on Congress to make future bicameral conference committee deliberations on the budget an open-door affair.

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– Rappler.com