(Eagle News) –President Rodrigo Duterte will veto unconstitutional items in the proposed P4.1-trillion national budget for 2020.
Presidential Spokesperson Salvador Panelo made the statement after Senator Panfilo Lacson said the proposal ratified by both the Senate and the House of Representatives was still not pork-free.
“(The) provisions in the budget that run counter to the Constitution will be vetoed by the President. There is no change in that policy,” Panelo said.
In a statement issued after the bicameral conference committee approved the report on the proposal, Lacson , who did not attend the signing, said he based his statement on the existence of pork on the two files contained in a USB drive which his office received last night from the House of Representatives.
He said the two files were the “Source” file and the “List” file.
“Our preliminary scrutiny of the last-minute insertions made by the House would indicate that the Source File is the list of 1,253 budget items worth P83.219B that was apparently used as the congressmen’s ‘source’ of their ‘list’ of 742 projects worth P16.345B that were inserted in the bicam report that was signed by both panels this morning,” Lacson said.
According to the senator, since there was “no preliminary explanation from the House regarding the two files, we cannot ascertain if indeed only P16.345B or the bigger amount of P83.219B was inserted at the last minute prior to the bicam signing.”
Last year, President Duterte signed the proposed 2019 national budget but vetoed P95.3 billion in it supposedly allotted for infrastructure projects.
