No state university or college should get a budget cut. The amount in the proposed budget should be retained, and will be benchmarked as the floor, meaning it can still be increased.

Calls for academic freeze will not be met with a funding brake. The correct response is not to defund any, but to increase the funds of as many as possible.

PGH, a unit of UP, for example, deserves an increase, and this pambansang ospital shall get it. Its equipment lack is a pre-existing affliction which must be cured, pandemic or not. And so do the state colleges training our future doctors.

In so far as the Senate is concerned, the unanimous consensus is that SUCs are no-cut zones, insofar as their NEP budget is concerned. They have been vaccinated against budget cuts.(###)