Marcos dismisses Duterte's claims of 'blanks' in 2025 budget: 'He's lying'

Malacañang dismissed claims that President Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. signed the P6.3 trillion national budget for 2025 with certain parts left blank so the administration could simply "fill in the amounts" like in a blank check.

This came after former president Rodrigo Duterte and Davao City 3rd District Rep. Isidro Ungab alleged that there were discrepancies in the bicameral conference committee report on the 2025 national budget.

Marcos has also denounced the claims, saying in an ambush interview on Jan. 20 that Duterte is "lying."

"He's a president. He knows that you cannot pass a GAA (General Appropriations Act) with a blank. He's lying [because] he knows perfectly well that that doesn't ever happen," the president said.

In a statement earlier in the day, Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin said 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," Bersamin said. "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."

The secretary noted that this "meticulous line-by-line scrutiny" was a "pre-enactment check performed by dedicated civil servants to ensure that the GAA contained no single discrepancy in the amounts being appropriated."

According to him, it is "impossible" for any funding items to be left blank, as alleged by "misinformed and malicious sources."

"The former president and his cohorts should know better that the GAA could not contain blank items," Bersamin added.