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Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph Recto welcomed the administration’s request for standby authority to buy as much as P45.4 billion worth of vaccine booster shots, should the same be needed next year. Recto said the amount is part of the P151.6 billion in unprogrammed funds in...

Four in 10 personnel positions – or 5,826 – in the Commission on Audit (COA) are vacant, a manpower lack that will be aggravated when 1,000 personnel who are in the 61-65 age group retire. “That’s the equivalent of 10 Army battalions,” said Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph...

The institutionalization of “pasa-buy” in government purchases has transformed two agencies into “mega parking lots of funds” which, despite years-long delays in delivering the goods and projects they were contracted to buy, still raked in hundreds of millions in commissions....

Big cities like Manila have the “boots on the ground and the muscle memory” to conduct large scale distribution of aid, whether in cash or in kind, “complex operations which understaffed national agencies may find hard to do on their own,” Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph Recto...

The order suspends the collection of the tax. The permanent solution, however, will be in the form of a law purging all ambivalence in that provision of the Tax Code. Still, it is a welcome move and I thank the good Secretary of Finance for this order, which would help ease the...

First, government should listen to scientists, the ones who matter. Join them in making the prescription. Just be mindful that if lockdown is the cure, then like any medicine, an overdose can be lethal. It is all about the right dosage and duration. It should go with ayuda, which...

The unpopular private motor vehicle inspection scheme has been “roused from the dead,” and Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph Recto is asking government to explain to the public “what variant it has set loose.”  “It has been put into a coma upon orders of Malacañang. Now it...

It is not only reclaiming land in the West Philippine Sea; by its actions, it is also renaming it as the Waste Philippine Sea. By turning reefs into toilets, two man-made things are now visible from space: the Great Wall of China on land, and the Great Wastes of China at sea....