Brace for impact

Much has been said already about the 2025 budget, touted as the crookedest of all, but one glaring implication I’d like to stress is that it would set our country back, by at least a decade and possibly generations.

And we should brace for impact, not the sudden, forceful, instant-death kind of crash but an ugly, slow burn of sorts – a death by a thousand cuts.

First of all, this year’s budget will severely and negatively impact our future, given the cuts in the education budget.

As we all know, Congress, during the bicameral conference, slashed the budgets of core education agencies while raising the budget for the Department of Public Works and Highways.

Core education agencies account for P965.26 billion – Department of Education (P782.17 billion), State Universities and Colleges (P127.23 billion), Commission on Higher Education (P34.88 billion) and Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (P20.98 billion) (Philstar.com, Jan. 3, 2025).

However, to make it appear that the education sector still gets the biggest budget as mandated by the Constitution, the government added other agencies to the education sector, such as the Local Government Academy (P529.24 million), the Philippine National Police Academy (P1.37 billion), the Philippine Public Safety College (P994.3 million), the National Defense College of the Philippines (P334.64 million), the Philippine Military Academy (P1.76 billion), etc.

This is a good cop-bad cop move. Congress is the bad cop, while the government pretends to be the good cop. At the end of the day, however, Filipinos are still at the losing end.

As many have pointed out, the Marcos administration is taking us for fools.

Article XIV, Section 5 of the Constitution requires the highest budgetary priority for education, but clearly, this is not what’s happening and this will impact on our children’s future.

As it is now, the Filipino youth lag behind their peers in the region. We are poor in reading, math, science and spelling. Our teachers need more support for research and continuing education.

Our state universities are raising funds through all sorts of means, including the commercialization of properties that should