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Senate wants entire budget process posted on gov’t website

Senate wants entire budget process posted on gov’t website

Provided by INQUIRER.net.

Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian.
Speaking at the Kapihan sa Senado forum on Monday, August 4, 2025, Senator Sherwin Gatchalian said the Senate is pushing to require the full budget process to be published on the government’s website. Noy Morcoso/INQUIRER.net



MANILA, Philippines — Citing the public clamor for transparency, the Senate will now require the publication of the entire budget process on the government’s website, starting from the budget requests of agencies.

Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian, the new chairman of the chamber’s committee on finance, described this as the beginning of “a golden age of transparency and accountability.”

"There is now a strong clamor for transparency, so our direction also is…we will undergo or experience a golden age of transparency and accountability," Gatchalian said in Filipino at the Kapihan sa Senado on Monday.

At present, he said, only the National Expenditure Program (NEP) and the General Appropriations Act (GAA) are uploaded to the website of the Department of Budget and Management (DBM).



The NEP is Malacañang's budget proposal, while the GAA is the approved budget of Congress and signed into law by the president.

Malacañang is proposing a P6.793-trillion budget for 2026.

READ: Marcos approves P6.793-T budget proposal for 2026

"If you're a member of the public and you want to analyze the budget, you'll only see step one and the last step—but you won’t see the step-by-step process because the document uploads are incomplete," Gatchalian said.

“So we will require the DBM to go one step further,” he added.

In their proposal, the senator said that the entire budget process—including budget preparations, the NEP, the General Appropriations Bill (GAB), the Senate committee report, the Senate third reading version, the bicameral committee report, the reconciled version, and the GAA—would be posted on the DBM’s website and made accessible to the public.

'This is what I mean by a golden age of transparency — because now the public can follow each step of the process, from the NEP to the GAB, to the Senate’s third reading, to the bicam, all the way until it’s signed by the president," Gatchalian added.

He said he would file a resolution to institutionalize his proposed budget reforms./mcm/abc

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