2025 GAA Out, 2026 Budget In

At the first Cabinet meeting for the new fiscal year, President Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. (PBBM) issued marching orders to all department secretaries to "list down" their respective priority projects contained in the National Expenditure Program (NEP) but that went missing in his newly signed budget law.

- MARICHU A. VILLANUEVA

The presidential directives were issued after the detailed presentation of the budget items for each department under the 2025 General Appropriations Act (GAA).

Department of Budget and Management (DBM) Secretary Amenah Pangandaman disclosed they took up the Congress-approved 2025 GAA as compared to the President's submission of the NEP at the Cabinet meeting held last Tuesday at Malacañang Palace. Speaking the next day at the Kapihan sa Manila Bay news forum, Pangandaman explained how each of the Executive departments will be affected by the "insertions" and re-alignments done in the 2025 GAA, including the presidential vetoes and "conditional" budget releases.

Together with PBBM, Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin and the other Cabinet economic managers, Pangandaman recalled they initially went through the fine print of the Congress-approved 2025 budget bill. According to Pangandaman, it was only after the review that PBBM signed the 2025 GAA into law on Dec. 30 last year.

PBBM vetoed a whopping P194 billion from the Congress-approved 2025 budget that consisted mainly of new budget items that were not in the President's NEP. From the original submission of P6.352 trillion, the 2025 budget law amounted to just P6.326 trillion. The bulk of vetoed items were from new items "inserted" in the 2025 GAA for the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) that got P214 billion more than proposed in the NEP. On the other hand, the Department of Transportation (DOTr) suffered the biggest cut of P92 billion.

All of the line item vetoes were traced to the amendments done at the bicameral conference committee (bicam) that consolidated the differing versions of the 2025 budget bills of the Senate and the House of Representatives.