MANILA – President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. accused former Chief Executive Rodrigo Duterte of lying after the latter stated there are “blank amounts” in the 2025 national budget.
According to Marcos, being a former President, Duterte should know that they cannot pass a General Appropriations Act (GAA) with blank amounts.
“He’s lying. He’s a President. He knows that you cannot pass a GAA with a blank. He’s lying. And he’s lying because he knows perfectly well that that doesn’t ever happen,” Marcos said.
“Sa kasaysayan ng buong Pilipinas, hindi pinapayagan na magkaroon ng item ang GAA na hindi nakalagay kung ano yung project, at saka ano yung, yung gastos, ano yung pondo,” he added.
President Marcos also challenged the public to scrutinize the 2025 national budget themselves to determine if there are “blank amounts” as alleged by former President Duterte.
“Meron namang kopya, that’s available on the website of the DBM (Department of Budget and Management). Tingnan n’yo, huwag na ninyo busisiin isa isa. Hanapin niyo ‘yung sinasabi nila na blank check. Tingnan n’yo kung meron kahit isa. Para mapatunayan na tama ang sinasabi kung kasinungalingan ‘yan,” Marcos said.
In a separate statement, Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin said the former Chief Executive and other individuals’ move was an act of peddling “fake news” and such move should be dismissed as “criminal.”
“Some quarters, including a former president, have maliciously peddled fake news about President Marcos having signed the GAA (General Appropriations Act) of 2025 with certain parts of the enactment purposely left blank to enable the administration to simply fill in the amounts like in a blank check,” Bersamin said.
“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 added.
Bersamin pointed out that all of the 4,057 pages of the P6.326-trillion budget’s two thick volumes were exhaustively reviewed by hundreds of professional staff from Congress and the Department of Budget and Management.
“This meticulous line-by-line scrutiny is a pre-enactment check performed by dedicated civil servants to ensure that the GAA contained no single discrepancy in the amounts being appropriated,” Bersamin said.
Bersamin added that it is impossible for any funding items to be left blank, as alleged by misinformed and malicious sources.
Duterte and Isidro Ungab, the Representative for Davao City’s 3rd District, have raised concerns regarding alleged inconsistencies in the bicameral conference committee report concerning the national budget.
Ungab said there are absent budget allocations for certain items related to the Department of Agriculture, as well as unprogrammed appropriations. He also emphasized that these omissions cannot be dismissed as mere typographical, grammatical, or printing errors.
Duterte, for his part, asserted that budget items should not be left unfilled for future completion, warning that any individual who manipulates the budget could be subject to criminal charges.
In reply, Bersamin stated that the actual data and figures presented in the General Appropriations Act effectively refute the unfounded allegations of intentional omissions left for later insertion.
“Anyone who conducts the same rigorous examination of the 2025 National Budget — which the public can view on the DBM website — will come to the same conclusion: that there is no program, activity, or project at all with blank appropriations in that carefully vetted law,”’Bersamin said.
“The former president and his cohorts should know better that the GAA could not contain blank items,” he added./PN
