For Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian, the proposed 2026 budget of the Office of the Vice President (OVP) should be retained.
OVP’s proposed P902.8 million budget breezed through the Senate finance subcommittee chaired by Gatchalian and was approved for plenary consideration in less than an hour.
The House of Representatives previously voted to slash the OVP’s budget by P156 million, bringing its budget to its 2025 level of around P700 million.
‘Well, if you were to ask me, and this is what I think, the OVP budget should be retained and not trimmed,’ Gatchalian said in an interview in Filipino.
The senator noted that the OVP was only asking for a modest increase anyway.
At the start of the Marcos administration, the vice president’s office received a budget of up to P2.3 billion in 2023.
Once allies during the 2022 presidential elections, the Marcos administration and Duterte clan have since been embroiled in a bitter feud marked by the vice president’s resignation from the cabinet as education secretary in June last year.
The gap became more intense after Marcos administration allowed the International Criminal Court to arrest former President Rodrigo Duterte, who faces crimes against humanity charges due to his war against illegal drugs, which killed thousands, according to official government data.