Deputy presidential spokesperson Abigail Valte said the Palace would like to thank House members, particularly Speaker Feliciano Belmonte Jr., House Majority Leader Neptali Gonzalez II and Cavite Rep. Joseph Emilio Abaya, House appropriations committee chairman.

The 2011 General Appropriations Act has been “formulated to turn our vision for social reform into a tangible reality for our fellow citizens,” she added.

The House will now transmit the proposed national budget to the Senate.

Under the 2011 budget, the Education department would have the lion’s share with P207.3 billion, followed by the Department of Public Works and Highways with P110.6 billion, and the Department of National Defense, with a budget of P104.7 billion;

The Departments of the Interior and Local Government (P88.2 billion), Agriculture (P37.7 billion), Social Welfare and Development (P34.3 billion), Health (P33.3 billion), Transportation and Communications (P32.3 billion), Agrarian Reform (P16.7 billion), Justice (P14.3 billion).

Earlier, Belmonte told reporters that he expected the House and the Senate to finally agree on and approve the budget before going on Christmas break middle of next month.

“So that the President can sign it before the end of the year,” he said. “We don’t want a reenacted budget.”

Gonzales presented a motion for approval of the proposed budget after Mr. Aquino had certified it as urgent.

Those who voted against the proposal, most of whom belong to the group of Minority Leader Edcel Lagman, included five party-list representatives who are part of the majority coalition.

Lagman said Mr. Aquino’s certification of the budget as urgent is “deficient because it does not satisfy the constitutional requirement of meeting a public calamity or emergency.”

The House has barred pork barrel insertions in the proposed national budget.

“The days of the old congressional initiatives (euphemism for budgetary insertions) are now over,” Abaya said.

“The old playground of debt servicing (for these initiatives) is no longer there.”

The House has decided to respect Mr. Aquino’s spending priorities, he added.

Abaya said Mr. Aquino has not included debt service funds in the proposed budget because of the “questionable” reduction of these appropriations in the 2010 spending program.

“These were the source of congressional initiatives before,” he said.

Last year, when they were considering the 2010 budget, senators and House members reduced debt payments by P65 billion and diverted the huge reduction to their pork barrel.

Abaya said while budgetary insertions were disallowed, the appropriations committee realigned P5 billion to P6 billion in agency funds.

“These were internal realignments within agencies,” he said.

“No department or office lost funds. No appropriations were taken from one agency and added to another.”

The appropriations committee has allotted P2.5 billion for the palay-buying program of the National Food Authority, taking the money from the P5 billion for private-public partnership projects under the Department of Agriculture, Abaya said.

Angara: Senators want to reduce DSWD budget

Senators want to reduce the P21- billion budget of the Department of Social Welfare and Development and reduce the Conditional Cash Transfer program.

Sen. Edgardo Angara said yesterday he will push for the reduction of the P21-billion DSWD budget to P15 billion.

A majority of senators will support his move, he added.

Angara said the “dominant opinion” in the Senate was that the CCT program was becoming a dole-out for the poor.

“Personally I think that P15 billion is enough,” he said. “A 50 percent increase in the CCT for 2011 from 2010.”

Angara said the accounting on the disbursement of the funds has become a problem because monitoring the current one million families being served by the program was already hard to accomplish.

Considering that the program has been proven to be effective in Latin American nations, it would be more prudent to increase the CCT by only 50 percent, he added.

“It doesn’t have to be such a huge amount,” he said.