The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
By Tracy Cabrera
PHILIPPINE INTERNATIONAL CONVENTION CENTER, Pasay City — Following yesterday’s signing of the bicameral conference committee report on the reconciled P6.7 trillion 2026 General Appropriations Bill, the stage has been set for its ratification and submission to Malacañan in a one-day extended session today.
President Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr. is expected to sign the budget bill into law in the first week of January 2026 with human development as its “overall direction” while legislators funded education, health and agriculture with bigger allocations.
“These three sectors are important to further develop our economy,” senator Sherwin ‘Win’ Gatchalian, head of the Senate contingent to the bicam, cited prior to the signing of the bill.
Gatchalian noted that the reconciled version of the proposed 2026 budget “will be uploaded to the portals of the Senate and House of Representatives for transparency.” He added that the enrolled bill contains 4,300 pages and was proofread five times.
Other members of the Senate contingent included senators Lorna Regina ‘Loren’ Legarda-Leviste, Joseph Victor ‘JV’ Ejercito and Francis ‘Kiko’ Pangilinan.
Legarda-Leviste earlier raised the importance of integrity-driven budgeting, stressing that responsible planning and clear priorities in the national budget would lead to real benefits and improvements in the lives of Filipino families.
“Budgeting must come from a full year of honest computation, clear priorities and genuine respect for taxpayers’ money,” the lady senator pointed out to respond to public concerns on overpricing, weak project identification and misuse of public funds like in flood control initiatives.
“(We) adopted safeguards to make infrastructure spending more transparent, traceable and accountable. A key safeguard is the ‘strict requirement’ that infrastructure projects carry specific details, such as clear geographic coordinates, stationing and identifiable locations (while) for local projects, supporting resolutions from concerned local government units (LGUs),” she disclosed.
“With these requirements, every road, bridge, building, and flood control structure can be traced and audited from approval to implementation, and communities will know exactly where projects are supposed to be built,” she added.
Furthermore, the construction materials price data across the Department of Public Works and Highway (DPWH) projects have been revised in order to recalibrate the material, logistics and hauling costs to reflect actual market conditions on a project-by-project basis.
In ending, Legarda-Leviste explained that “the correction of systemic overpricing across more than 10,000 projects (will) generate substantial savings while ensuring that legitimate projects remain implementable, workers’ jobs are protected and contractor pricing is not arbitrarily distorted.”
“Selected construction and convergence programs previously implemented solely by DPWH were reassigned to agencies, such as the Department of National Defense (DND), Department of Agriculture (DA) and Department of Education (DepEd).
“Infrastructure may now be implemented through national agencies, local government units, public–private partnerships, or hybrid arrangements, subject to accreditation and safeguards, to improve delivery and accountability,” she concluded.