Malacañang slammed "malicious" claims alleging President Marcos for purposely leaving certain parts of the 2025 national budget blank to simply fill in the amounts like in a blank check.
Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin said in a statement on Monday, Jan. 20 that peddling of such fake news is "outrightly malicious and should be condemned as criminal."
He emphasized that it is impossible for any portion of the budget to have been left blank.
"Some quarters, including a former president, have maliciously peddled fake news about President Marcos having signed the GAA (General Appropriations Act) 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," Bersamin said.
The Executive Secretary stressed that "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 (DBM)," Bersamin further said.
The Palace official underscored that the meticulous line-by-line scrutiny of the budget prior to its enactment was performed by dedicated civil servants, ensuring that the GAA contained no single discrepancy in the amounts being appropriated.
He also emphasized that it is impossible for any portion of the budget to have been left blank.
He added that the true facts and the printed figures appearing in the 2025 national budget "easily debunk the malicious claims of deliberate blanks being left for filling in."
Bersamin also said that 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," Bersamin said.