Plato: The measure of a man is what he does with power.
curecovidph and @nagkaisa Coalition have both been asking why the payment of benefits of COVID-19 health frontliners is severely delayed. Even DOH OIC Vergeire said they needed billions to settle the obligations.
Second, why is there a 150B+ allocation for local infrastructure projects in the budget of DPWH despite the implementation of the Madanas-Garcia Ruling?
The amount is over and on top of the 820B NTA of LGUs. Didn’t the national gov’t say the fiscal space is already tight?
Many questions were raised about specific allocations especially programs that suffered cuts and those that received avalanches in funding.
Those are good ones, but it’s about time to frame our critique of the budget in the broader context of the economy and state politics.
These are the trade-offs we found in our analysis of the 2023 NEP.
It would have been reasonable to ask why these choices were made in favor of many others.
Given our current economic situation and the needs of various sectors, why was the budget structured this way?