Underdesigned

Last month, President Marcos Jr. announced he had gone through the thousands of pages of the 2025 General Appropriations Act (GAA) and found no blank entries. Everyone gasped.

- ALEX MAGNO

All the while, he was reading the wrong document.

Controversy swirled around blank items found in the signed final report of the bicameral conference committee. That final report becomes the enrolled bill ratified by both chambers and then signed into law as the GAA. To this day, there is no clear explanation about the sequence of events that led to the blank entries in the bicameral committee final report to the filled items in the GAA.

A petition questioning the constitutionality of the 2025 national budget has been filed with the Supreme Court because of this. The legislators involved have been summoned to explain before the magistrates.

A few days after that bridge in Isabela collapsed, President Marcos Jr. conducted an ocular inspection of the structure. With no training in engineering and without a proper technical study of the incident completed, the President declared the bridge to be "underdesigned."

This time, it was the turn of the country's community of engineers to gasp. The presidential conclusion preempts inquiries into what really caused that tragic incident.

Social media was flooded with posts from those who knew about Engr. Alberto C. Cañete, the original designer of the bridge that fell. It turns out, he is among the most respected civil engineers in the country and was past president of the Association of Structural Engineers of the Philippines.

The respected structural engineer stands by his design. If the bridge failed, it should have been because of other factors such as the quality of the actual construction of the bridge.