MANILA, Philippines — Former President Rodrigo Duterte and Davao City 3rd District Representative Isidro Ungab are fake news peddlers, Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin said Monday. 

“Some quarters, including a former president, have maliciously peddled fake news about President Marcos having signed the GAA of 2025 with certain parts of the enactment purposely left blank to enable the administration to simply fill in the amounts like in a blank check,” Bersamin said in a statement. 

“The peddling of such fake news is outrightly malicious and should be condemned as criminal,” he said. 

According to Malacañang, no page of the 2025 GAA was left unturned before the Marcos signed it into law on December 30, 2024. 

“This meticulous line-by-line scrutiny is a pre-enactment check performed by dedicated civil servants to ensure that the GAA contained no single discrepancy in the amounts being appropriated,” he said. 

The national budget, consisting of 4,057 pages of the two volumes, was printed in fine print with nearly 60 lines per page, was thoroughly reviewed by hundreds of professional staff from Congress and the Department of Budget and Management, he said.

The official dismissed allegations that the budget was left blank, asserting that it is impossible to do so and accusing Duterte and Ungab of being “misinformed and malicious sources.”

The claims came a day after Duterte and Ungab raised red flags over the alleged discrepancies in the bicameral conference committee report on the recently enacted 2025 General Appropriations Act. 

According to Duterte and Ungab, there were blank portions in the 2025 national budget and called the budget “invalid.” 

“I noticed that there were many blanks, and these amounts reach billions of pesos,” said Ungab in an interview

“In the Bicam report, the budget for the agricultural and fisheries modernization program was listed at P146,335,937,000. However, in the General Appropriations Act (GAA), it was reduced to P126,798,221,000. This discrepancy is alarming,” said Ungab. 

Among the details he presented were some billions unaccounted for in allocations for the National Irrigation Administration (NIA) and the Philippine Coconut Authority (PCA).

Bersamin likewise said that the actual facts and the printed figures in the GAA clearly refute the malicious claims of intentional blanks being left for later filling.

“Anyone who conducts the same rigorous examination of the 2025 National Budget — which the public can view on the DBM website — will come to the same conclusion: that there is no program, activity, or project at all with blank appropriations in that carefully vetted law,” Bersamin said. 

“The former president and his cohorts should know better that the GAA could not contain blank items,” he said.