Malacañang condemned the spread of malicious and false claims about the 2025 General Appropriations Act (GAA), labeling them as baseless and damaging.
Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin denounced allegations from the camp of a former president that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. signed the budget with blank portions, implying a scheme similar to a “blank check” for future allocations.
“The peddling of such fake news is outrightly malicious and should be condemned as criminal. No page of the 2025 National Budget was left unturned before the president signed it into law,” Bersamin said in a statement.
He clarified that Congress and the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) Thoroughly reviewed all 4,057 pages of the two-volume budget.
“This meticulous line-by-line scrutiny is a pre-enactment check performed by dedicated civil servants to ensure that the GAA contained no discrepancies in the amounts being appropriated,” the Palace official added.
Bersamin emphasized that no portion of the budget was left blank and invited public scrutiny.
The complete 2025 budget will be available on the DBM website on January 2, 2025.
“The true facts and the printed figures appearing in the GAA easily debunk the malicious claims of deliberate blanks being left for filling in,” he said.
“Anyone who conducts the same rigorous examination of the 2025 National Budget — which the public can view on the DBM website — will come to the same conclusion: that there are no programs, activities, or projects with blank appropriations in that carefully vetted law.”IMT
