🔴LIVE NOW:Top Supreme Court Judge Umaksyon na BBM Remulla Romualdez Luistro Diokno Ridon VP Sara Tri

The Marcos administration will ask the Supreme Court (SC) to reconsider its ruling declaring as unconstitutional the national budgets for 2024 and 2025 due to a large increase in unprogrammed appropriations.We respectfully urge the Supreme Court to reassess its decision. The Office of the Solicitor General has been directed to file a motion for reconsideration,” Palace press officer Claire Castro said yesterday.Castro said while the high court did not declare unprogrammed appropriations (UA) as unconstitutional, the conditions it set made it difficult for the government to use the funds.We respectfully disagree with some parts of the ruling of the high court. In our view, it maintained the mechanism on paper, but the setting of conditions that went beyond the conditions set by Congress since 2015 did not just make (the use of the funds) very difficult, it made the mechanism useless for the programs of the government,” Castro said at a media briefing.he SC struck down as unconstitutional the 2024 national budget because of Congress’ increase of UAs by P449.5 billion, which led to a hike in the President’s total recommended outlay.Last year’s national budget has also been declared unconstitutional because of the P17.99-billion hike in the special road fund made by the legislature, which raised Marcos’ total recommended appropriations.The high court also ruled as unconstitutional some UA provisions in the 2026 national budget.According to the ruling, pegging certain fiscal conditions to any new or excess revenue, without regard to whether the whole revenue target was exceeded, departs from the unprogrammed appropriations’ original feature as a deficit neutral mechanism and undermines fiscal discipline and the coherent fiscal program contemplated in the Constitution.The Supreme Court also described the provisions as “overly broad, lacked prioritization standards and partly functioned as prohibited lump sum appropriations.”