President Ferdinand ”Bongbong” Marcos Jr. on Wednesday said politics has nothing to do with budget hearings following Vice President Sara Duterte’s claim that deliberations on her office’s funds were supposedly being politicized.
”This is a budget hearing… this is something that every single government agency has to do. It’s a hearing, there’s no politics in it. We do it every year, we do it with the same department, we do it… That process is well established, it has nothing to do with politics,” Marcos said in an interview.
”It has to do with the budget, so I don’t know how can she characterized these things, which is essentially an information gathering exercise for the House and for the Senate, so that they know what the budget will look like,” explained Marcos.
“So malayo sa politika ‘yun.”
(It’s not politics.)
To recall, Duterte and Senator Risa Hontiveros had a heated exchange after the latter questioned some of the programs of the Office of the Vice President which she said are similar to the existing programs of other line agencies of the government during a Senate Finance subcommittee hearing on the OVP’s proposed P2.037-billion budget for 2025.
In the House of Representatives, the chamber’s committee on appropriations has deferred the deliberations of the OVP’s proposed budget for next year amid Duterte’s repeated refusal to answer how her office uses its budget.
The House panel set the budget deliberations on September 10.
In her latest statement, Duterte also maintained that there was no misuse of confidential funds of the OVP in 2022.
This came after House Deputy Minority Leader France Castro said Duterte’s alleged failure to comply with the rules for 2022’s P73 million confidential funds was a ground for impeachment. —VAL, GMA Integrated News
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