THE government will appeal the Supreme Court ruling declaring that unprogrammed appropriations in the 2024, 2025 and 2026 budgets unconstitutional, Malacañang said on Wednesday.
Presidential Communications Office Undersecretary Claire Castro said the high court’s ruling released on Tuesday is not final.
”We respectfully request the Supreme Court to reexamine their decision. The Office of the Solicitor General has also been directed to file a motion for reconsideration,” Castro said.
Castro added that the high court’s ruling “kept the mechanism on paper, but setting conditions beyond those laid down by Congress since 2015 will not only make its use extremely difficult.”
”It has rendered this mechanism useless and no longer usable for government programs,” she said.
Castro noted that since 2015, Congress has allowed the release of funds when collections exceed the target from even just one specified nontax revenue source, in accordance with other conditions of the law.
”The Marcos administration merely followed this policy,” Castro said.
Meanwhile, Sen. Panfilo Lacson and Senate President Pro Tempore Vicente Sotto III vowed to scrutinize the proposed 2027 national budget closely, saying the high court’s ruling should serve as a warning against unconstitutional changes to the government’s spending plan.
Lacson said the decision came at a critical time as the Senate reviews the House-approved P7.2-trillion budget for 2027.
”One good thing about the Supreme Court ruling is its timing. It couldn’t have come at a better time when the House version of the 2027 General Appropriations Bill is undergoing scrutiny by the Senate,” Lacson said in a statement, emphasizing he was not yet a senator when Congress passed the 2024 and 2025 General Appropriations Acts (GAAs).
Lacson said the Senate may restore “hundreds of billions” of pesos in funding cuts and realignments.
Among the items under scrutiny are allocations for foreign-assisted projects and flood control works.
Lacson said the Supreme Court ruling placed the 2024 and 2025 budgets among the worst spending laws in the country’s history, comparing the decision with the high court’s earlier ruling against the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) under the 2013 budget.
”The 2024 and 2025 GAAs will go down in history as the worst budgets ever passed by Congress after the Disbursement Acceleration Program under the 2013 GAA was also declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court,” he said.
On the possible effects of the latest ruling, Lacson said funds covered by the unconstitutional provisions that remain unspent might no longer be disbursed, while expenditures already made would not necessarily be invalidated.
The DAP became controversial in 2013 after the administration of then-president Benigno Aquino III realigned government savings to finance projects outside their original budget allocations. In 2014, the Supreme Court declared key aspects of the program unconstitutional.
The controversy figured in the political fallout from the impeachment trial of the late Chief Justice Renato Corona, when senators were reportedly offered P50 million worth of projects each. Lacson said he declined the offer.
In a 121-page decision on Tuesday, the Supreme Court struck down certain provisions of the 2024 and 2025 national budgets, as well as key unprogrammed appropriations in the 2026 budget.
The high court ruled that Congress committed grave abuse of discretion when it increased the executive branch’s proposed unprogrammed appropriations for 2024 from P281.9 billion under the National Expenditure Program to P731.4 billion in the enacted budget.
The court said Congress could not increase the president’s total recommended appropriations in the Budget of Expenditures and Sources of Financing, which covers both programmed and unprogrammed appropriations.
Sotto, meanwhile, vowed to block questionable changes to the proposed 2027 budget and maintain transparency measures adopted during the Senate’s review of the 2026 spending plan.
Sotto said livestreaming budget deliberations would allow the public to monitor how government funds are allocated.
”What we did with the 2026 budget, if you recall, is we made it transparent, and we did not allow anything that we were told could not be allowed. That is why I even recommended livestreaming, which we implemented,” Sotto said.
He said the Senate would follow the same approach for the 2027 budget, even though he now serves as Senate president pro tempore.
”We’re going to make sure that it will practically be the same as the way we patterned the 2026 budget — livestreamed, clean, clear, and the people will know where the money is going,” he said.
Sotto said he had heard allegations of changes to the proposed budget, warning that adjustments falling under the provisions rejected by the Supreme Court would not be allowed.
“Again, if these fall into the category of what the Supreme Court said, we will not allow it in the Senate,” he said.
He expressed confidence that Senate Finance Committee Chairman JV Ejercito would ensure transparency and orderly deliberations.
