. @DBMgovph sent out a statement last night to show that from P4.4 billion, budget releases from the P140-B additional funding under Bayanihan II have now reached P78 billion. But the whole spending picture needs context.

https://www.bworldonline.com/budget-department-releases-p78-billion-to-boost-philippines-pandemic-response/

First, what was accelerated was the spending of the P140 billion additional funds. These are on top of the regular P4.1-trillion budget, part of which dedicated to the Executive department under Bayanihan 2 can be reallocated, realigned to COVID-19 response.

How much has been realigned or reallocated in total has not been released. Unlike during Bayanihan 1 when there's a monthly report on this, @DBMgovph has not given us a clear picture of how much really has been reallocated. Again, the P140-B is on top of this.

What's also said last night was that gov't has released P1.75 billion from savings under the 2020 outlay. This is another component of Bayanihan 2 which allows President Duterte to realign savings to pandemic purposes. This is, for all intents and purposes, really small amount.

In order to arrive to a clearer fiscal push to fight pandemic, the best gauge was what DBM used to release-- the total amount of funds reallocated and realigned plus allocations using the P140-B additional funds. In that way, we can see how much spending had really been made.

P78-B from P140-B seems to be a huge improvement. And it is. But the amount itself even the P140-B as a whole is too small. We have to consider what happened before: many were asking for bigger spending and criticizing Bayanihan 2 in favor of a bigger ARISE bill that was shelved.

So did spending accelerate from about a week ago? It's hard to say. Gov't did release a chunk of P140-B already, but if that also meant fewer items had been reallocated from savings or existing programs under P4.1-T outlay, then essentially you're just offsetting those losses.

The worry is here is we get stuck on evaluating gov't stimulus spending using the P140-B alone. To say that spending improved because that's been exhausted. That's a wrong conclusion. That only P1.75 billion, for instance, was reallocated from savings tells you a lot.

Plus, you put that in many other contexts. Another storm is brewing. Palace said aid was coming but when we asked @DBMgovph where would they get the funds, we didn't get an answer. Why we ask? All of the calamity funds for this year had been released already in early months.

NDRRMC told us LGUs have quick response funds that can be replenished, plus P890-M "worth of standby funds and food packs." The question is how much of that is cash and how much are in kind? Mind you, this kind of answer has been there since typhoon Ambo. We're at Rolly now.

Is it a problem of lack of cash, authority or slow spending? It's quite unlikely that it's a problem of cash at this point given large borrowings we incurred. Lack of authority to breach the P4.1-T might be more probable especially because of the self-imposed fiscal constraint.

For months, gov't had avoided tapping into its infrastructure outlays to boost COVID-19 response because it has relied on capital spending for recovery. But infra spending is down 18.4% in Aug and if Sept spending slump is of any indication, the number is unlikely to rebound.

There's a definitely a spending problem. Agencies were not quick to deploy funds worsened by lockdowns early in the year. Since June we have reopened, save for a brief 15-day lockdown of MM in August, yet spending remained down.