Some quarters, including a former president, have maliciously peddled fake news about President Marcos having signed the GAA of 2025 with certain parts of the enactment purposely left blank to enable the administration to simply fill in the amounts like in a blank check.
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.
All 4,057 pages of its two thick volumes (which were printed in fine print — with nearly sixty lines on each page) were exhaustively reviewed by hundreds of professional staff from Congress and the Department of Budget and Management.
This meticulous line-by-line scrutiny is a pre-enactment check performed by dedicated civil servants to ensure that the GAA contained no single discrepancy in the amounts being appropriated.
It is impossible for any funding items to be left blank, as alleged by misinformed and malicious sources.
The true facts and the printed figures appearing in the GAA easily debunk the malicious claims of deliberate blanks being left for filling in.
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 is no program, activity, or project at all with blank appropriations in that carefully vetted law.
The former president and his cohorts should know better that the GAA could not contain blank items.
– Executive Secretary Lucas P. Bersamin