Diokno: Government to spend more on vital infrastructure

Budget Secretary Benjamin E. Diokno said the government is planning to review the proposed 2017 national budget as he emphasized that there would be no reenacted budget in the Duterte administration.

Diokno said the annual budget of the administration would prioritize higher public expenditures on vital infrastructure, equivalent to 5 percent-to-7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).

“The Duterte administration will not spend money for spending’s sake. The economy is deficient in all types of infrastructure—highways and bridges, ports and airports,” Diokno said.

In a recent e-mail to the Philippine Daily Inquirer, he vowed to end underspending on public goods and services, which tempered the country’s growth potential in the last two to three years.

“First of all, I will put a lot of effort in budget preparation. I know that underspending is partly due to poor budget preparation. Many programs and projects are included in the annual budget, yet, they are not ready to [be implemented]. Some departments ask for a budget that they are unable to implement; they bite more than what they can chew,” Diokno said.

Noting that underspending is due to the “ineptness or incompetence” of some department chiefs, Diokno said he would ask secretaries and undersecretaries to undergo retraining, while a program to boost project monitoring would also be strengthened.

He also said he would also do away with the practice of allowing fiscal planners to “play around with the slacks in the budget” to finance projects not authorized by Congress, like what happened in the previous administration’s controversial Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP). The Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in 2014.

“This practice has to stop. President Duterte’s 2017 to 2022 budgets will be compliant with the Supreme Court decision on the DAP,” Diokno said.

Moving forward, he said, the annual budgets to be proposed by the Duterte administration would prioritize the following: higher infrastructure spending of 5 percent-to-7 percent of GDP; investment in human resources (education, healthcare and nutrition) in order to develop a dynamic and nimble work force; agricultural modernization and rural development in order to make growth inclusive; raising rural incomes; and making food available and affordable.

Diokno, however, said the new administration would follow the Aquino administration’s move in adopting the General Appropriations Act (GAA) as a release document. First done in 2014, the move scrapped the special allotment release order system.

“This is not novel. I did these 16 years ago when I adopted the ‘what-you-see-is-what-you-get’ budget execution system. However, this was forgotten by [former President Gloria] Arroyo during her entire term and [President] Aquino during his first [few] years in office,” Diokno said.

Diokno also said that, on his watch, the DBM will “revisit” the bottom-up budgeting (BUB) scheme, another program introduced by the Aquino administration that allows local governments, as well as civil-society and community groups to pitch the priority poverty-reduction projects to be bankrolled by the annual national budget.

Also, the Duterte administration “will revisit the CCT [conditional cash-transfer] program with the intention of minimizing the leakages [giving benefits to those undeserving and not giving benefits to the deserving] and minimizing the administrative costs,” Diokno said, referring to the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps).

“We will adopt economic measures, so that a bigger part of the budget will be used for projects that will truly benefit the Filipino people,” he added.

During his first tenure as budget chief, Diokno initiated reforms that included strengthening of the public expenditure management system. He also imposed a moratorium on the creation of new state universities and colleges, and pushed for the abolition of several agencies.

And to improve strategic budget planning, he initiated a joint public-private sector consultative group called the Budget Dialogue Group.