Senator Panfilo "Ping" Lacson on Sunday, July 25 denied he criticized the Duterte administration for underspending the funds under the "Bayanihan" laws which Congress rushed to pass to augment the government's COVID-19 response programs.
Lacson made a clarification after he and Senate President Vicente Sotto III got called out by the President when Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III reported to President Duterte in a televised Cabinet briefing last Saturday night that only around P660 billion, or one percent, of the money for COVID-19 response under Bayanihan 2 remained unused.
Duterte had asked Dominguez to then respond to the remarks of Sotto and Lacson whom he said claimed the funds were not used for their intended purpose which is to help alleviate the plight of sectors heavily affected by the pandemic.
"The President got his information all mixed up. I am not the Senator who claimed there was underspending under the Bayanihan fund," Lacson said in a statement.
"I’m quite sure because I don’t have the data on the matter, and I don’t speak without basis. Some other legislators did," he said.
The former Philippine National Police (PNP) chief further explained that the speech he gave before the Rotary Club last Friday dealt with the pre-pandemic budget underspending from 2017 to 2019 on the "annual average of P331-billion against our yearly gross borrowings of almost P1- trillion during the same period."
"(It has)nothing to do with Bayanihan," Lacson stressed.
"With that said, I cannot emphasize enough the need for the proper spending of our limited resources, regardless of whether these are from the Bayanihan or not," he said.
The senator, who is running together with Sotto in the upcoming May 2022 national elections, lamented that the country's national debt has ballooned to P11.07-trillion as of end-May.
"Each one of us, even those newly-born, is in debt by P100,000. We must make sure taxpayers' money will be used judiciously," he said.
"And at the risk of sounding like a broken record, there is no room to mix business and health, especially during a time of extreme emergency like the pandemic," the lawmaker said.