Whether they end up in the majority or minority bloc, Sen. Vicente Sotto III said, he and Sen. Panfilo Lacson will make sure that there will be no repeat of a “national budget” that was “mangled” last year in the Senate.

The two lawmakers said they had been looking into irregularities in the ₱6.326-trillion national budget for 2025. According to Sotto, they will disclose some of their initial findings after President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. delivers his annual State of the Nation Address in Congress on July 28.

Sotto and Lacson are returning to the Senate after a three-year hiatus, having both reached the maximum term of 12 years in office in 2022. They both made it to the “Magic 12” as administration candidates in the May midterm elections. 

With the 20th Congress opening on July 28, talk is rife that Sen. Francis Escudero has the numbers to support his hold on the Senate leadership. Sotto, himself a former Senate president, has been mulling taking a stab at regaining his old position if he gains majority support from his colleagues. 

But Sotto recently said he is not averse to serving as minority leader. Speaking to CoverStory.ph last Wednesday, he reiterated that he was ready to join the minority should he fail to secure the Senate leadership.

“The important thing for us is to straighten out what happened in the Senate,” Sotto said in an interview. “The reputation of the Senate has been tarnished, the 2025 budget was mangled in the Senate, and we want to straighten it out. So, whether we are in the majority or minority, we can do the same thing—we can try to make things right.” 

And should they be in the minority, the priority is to ensure that quorums in sessions are followed, and that the 2026 national budget will not go through the same process as last year’s. “We will be the real fiscalizers,” Sotto said. “We will scrutinize the budget and make sure [the irregularities] will never happen again.” 

National Expenditure Program

Sotto said that during the midterm election campaign, they had been hearing about the mishandling of the 2025 national budget. He said this was why they started digging after the campaign. 

Asked to elaborate, he said: “The National Expenditure Program (NEP) of the President was merely tweaked in the House of Representatives. But when it came to the Senate, it was mangled.”

For one, he said, programmed appropriations were turned into unprogrammed items and vice versa. For another, he mentioned Lacson’s recent disclosures on certain flood control allocations.

Lacson has disclosed inequitable and distorted flood control allocations, citing as examples the ₱1.9-billion appropriation granted to a small barangay in a small town, and the ₱10-billion appropriation for another small town.

As senator, Lacson is well-known for scrutinizing the national budget, annually exposing pork barrel funds and insertions in the General Appropriations Act (GAA). He has also been known to reject any share of pork barrel funds since he was first elected to the Senate in 2001.

To CoverStory, Lacson said they were still looking into the 2025 budget. “Work in progress still,” he said on Viber, adding that they “haven’t dealt with the 2024 GAA to see a better appreciation of how abuse has progressed.”

“I’ve been absent for three years, so we are practically relying solely on the budget books instead of the actual flow of deliberations in the finance committee level as well as in plenary,” he said.

One of the controversial issues that marked the 2024 GAA was the insertion of a provision that allowed the Department of Finance (DOF) to get ₱89.9 billion in subsidies from the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. 

Finance Secretary Ralph Recto had defended the DOF directive to transfer idle, unused, and excess funds of government-owned and -controlled corporations to the national treasury, saying this was based on the 2024 GAA that was approved by Congress.

Anticorruption watchdogs and former government officials condemned the action as unconstitutional and raised it to the Supreme Court, which has since held oral arguments on the controversy.

Presidential veto

Sotto pointed out that President Marcos himself vetoed ₱192 billion in the 2025 national budget, and that there were still some items put on hold.

When the President approved the ₱6.3-trillion GAA of 2025 on Dec. 31, 2024, he vetoed ₱194 billion in items that, he said, did not respond directly to the people’s needs.

Of the ₱194 billion in budget line items that Mr. Marcos decided to veto, a total of ₱26.065 billion worth of projects were under the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), and ₱168.240 billion were under “unprogrammed allocations.”

“To the Filipino people, we listened to you,” Mr. Marcos said in his veto message. “We thank you for scrutinizing our national budget and for objecting to the difference between the versions submitted by Congress from the proposed funding submitted by the President.” 

Lacson noted that President Marcos said “he could not recognize the NEP as submitted to Congress.” 

The NEP is the government spending plan that the president presents to Congress after his or her State of the Nation Address. For this year, President Marcos intends to submit the NEP to Congress in August.

Lacson said many items in the approved budget “don’t even have programs of work so that agencies could not implement [them].”

“Our initial examination of the GAA 2025 confirmed Marcos’ remarks when we juxtaposed the GAA with the NEP, House, and Senate versions,” he added.

‘No amendments’

Sotto said that he has served for 24 years in the Senate and that senators always resolved any problems in the budget. For example, he said, then President Rodrigo Duterte vetoed budget insertions from ₱75 billion to ₱95 billion because “we did not allow [these].” 

But in the case of the 2025 national budget, he said, the situation was worse because “no amendments [were] made.”

The Supreme Court has received a number of petitions asking that the 2025 GAA be deemed unconstitutional. The petitioners are questioning the higher allocation to the DPWH rather than the Department of Education, as well as the last-minute insertion of assistance programs allowing lawmakers to refer their constituents to the Department of Social Welfare and Development to secure financial aid, among others.