Drilon: House transmitted budget bill to Senate

The House of Representatives has transmitted the proposed 2011 General Appropriations Bill (GAB) to the Senate for deliberation, finance committee chairman Senator Franklin Drilon said Wednesday. Drilon said senators will take up during Wednesday's session House Bill 3101, which proposes a P1.645-trillion outlay for 2011, and then refer it to the Senate finance committee. “We will see how the House modified the budget, then we will prepare a committee report to be reported out in plenary," he said. According to him, marathon plenary sessions will be done until next week to incorporate proposed amendments by senators, and that the Senate will have morning sessions from November 24 to December 1 for the budget bill. “We proposed to have the budget approved simultaneously on second and third reading by December 1," he said, adding that a bicameral conference will be convened on December 6. “We target December 13 for the ratification of the bicameral conference committee report and submit it to the President for signing afterward," he said. Drilon said among the items in the bill that might trigger Senate debate is the proposed P21-billion appropriation for the conditional cash transfer (CCT) program. At least three senators particularly sought to cut the CCT budget by P6 billion at the minimum. Drilon, however, assured that the bill will be passed before lawmakers go on their holiday break on December 18. Session will resume on January 17 next year. The House of Representatives had approved its version of the budget on the third and final reading on November 8. The proposed 2011 budget increased by P104 billion (or 6.8 percent) from the P1.54-trillion budget for 2010. Drilon lined up some of the key allocations per sector in the 2011 budget, as follows:

• P207.3 billion for education;
• P110.6 billion for public works;
• P104.7 billion for defense;
• P88.2 billion for interior and local government;
• P37.7 billion for agriculture;
• P34.3 billion for social welfare;
• P33.3 billion for health;
• P32.2 billion for transportation and communications;
• P16.7 billion for agrarian reform; and
• P14.3 billion for the judiciary.

He said new appropriations will make up P971 billion—P806.7 billion of which will go to the departments and P164.2 billion to special purpose funds. On the other hand, he said automatic appropriations totaled P674 billion. Opposition Senator Joker Arroyo, for his part, said that the budget passed by the House of Representatives was in effect a "carbon copy" of the budget the Palace submitted to Congress. "It is almost a carbon copy. There are only a few minor changes," Arroyo said in an interview on Wednesday. The veteran senator specifically cited the lump sum appropriations, which supposedly remained in different government agencies. "The very things that they [the Aquino administration] said were wrong [in the previous administration], they have repeated," he said. Arroyo said that the deliberation on the 2011 GAB will become a "litmus test" for the Senate on whether it will have the "audacity" to reduce the P1.645 trillion outlay for next year. "The Senate is an administration Senate. (We'll see) if they can (or) if they will go against the wishes of the President," he said. — LBG/JV, GMANews.TV