A Senate finance subcommittee panel swiftly approved on Monday, Sept. 29, the Office of the Vice President’s (OVP) proposed 2026 budget of P902.895 million for plenary deliberation, completing the process in less than an hour.
This followed Senate Majority Leader Juan Miguel “Migz” Zubiri’s invocation of parliamentary courtesy.
“‘Pagbisita po ng OVP at President, we give them parliamentary courtesy and usually their budgets, and in this case the budget of the Vice President, is already a lean and mean budget,” Zubiri said.
“Maybe we can afford them the courtesy that we can approve the budget of course after the manifestations. On the part of the leadership of the Senate, we’d like to extend that courtesy to the Office of the Vice President,” he added.
The situation was different from the scenario last year, wherein Vice President Sara Duterte had a heated exchange with Senator Risa Hontiveros over the distribution of ‘Isang Kaibigan’ books, a children’s book authored by Duterte that was allotted P10 million.
Meanwhile, in her presentation, Vice President Sara Duterte stated that in 2024, the OVP exceeded the obligation rate of 85 percent, with a budget utilization rate of 85.55 percent. A total of P1.783 billion was obligated, with a disbursement rate of 86.03 percent, or P1.53 billion.
“With these the OVP remains on track in maintaining an obligation rate above 85 percent by year-end as has been achieved in prior years,” she said.
In 2025, the OVP got a reduced budget of P733 million from its proposal of P2.037 billion. The House of Representatives slashed P1.3 billion from the OVP’s proposed 2025 budget in its version of the 2025 General Appropriations Bill (GAB). The Senate retained this.
Despite this, Duterte stated that the OVP continued to implement its flagship programs, designed to provide the Filipino people with access to basic social services. As for its accomplishments, for the first semester out of its target of 1,047,935 beneficiaries, it attained 595,757 or 57 percent.
For 2026, Senator Sherwin Gatchalian said that the increase of the OVP budget is only 1.3 percent, which he called a bare basic budget.
In a press conference, Duterte said that she no longer asked for a bigger budget since “alam naman namin na hindi ibibigay ‘yun.” (Dhel Nazario)
