Marcos Administration Quietly Shelves Key Priority Bills

Since Ferdinand Marcos Jr. assumed the presidency, he has dropped a number of bills that he once considered his administration’s priority. Rappler’s research shows that out of 102 pet bills of the administration since 2022, 41 have been enacted. From the remaining number, 10 are no longer in the priority list of the Legislative-Executive Development Advisory Council (LEDAC). All of the 10 said bills have been excluded from the LEDAC list since the start of the 20th Congress. Mandatory ROTC The possible reintroduction of mandatory military training for students was a highlight of President Marcos’ inaugural SONA in 2022. Even Vice President Sara Duterte, when she was still part of the administration, vouched for it. One major point of division is whether or not to impose the program on senior high school students or college students. The mandatory ROTC discourse began to grab the national spotlight during the presidency of the Vice President’s father Rodrigo Duterte, who backed the bill and whose allies in the House approved the said proposal. But in the 19th Congress, no proposal of that kind hurdled the House, and the bill can no longer be found in Marcos’ priorities at the start of the 20th Congress. Play Video Military pension reform The current pension reform for the military was once described by Marcos’ former finance chief Benjamin Diokno as the world’s “most generous,” and was at risk of fiscal collapse. The national government fully funds the pensions of military and uniformed personnel, and in 2022, MUP pension spending already outpaced maintenance and other operating expenses and capital outlays. Marcos’ first marching order to Gilbert Teodoro when he was appointed defense chief was to fix the military’s pension system, and after an impasse between congressional leaders and Marcos’ economic team, the House passed a reform measure in September 2023. That was the end of it, as the measure languished in the Senate. The administration abandoned its ambitious goal at the start of the 20th Congress, with then-finance secretary Ralph Recto saying that reform would be more costly for the government. Leyte Ecological Industrial Zone Act This parochial measure by Leyte 1st District Representative Martin Romualdez seeks to convert the Leyte Industrial Development Estate into an ecological industrial zone and create the Leyte Ecological Industrial Zone Authority (LEIZA). The goal, Romualdez and his other allies said, was to make the estate a “self-sustaining industrial, commercial, investment center and freeport” that will produce jobs and encourage foreign investments. The proposal passed the House in December 2022, only six months into the speakership of Romualdez, but separate counterpart bills filed by senators Imee Marcos and Bong Revilla were mostly untouched in the upper chamber. As the rift between Martin and Imee widens, the bill found no major advocate in the Senate. At the start of the 20th Congress, Romualdez resigned from the speakership, and the bill lost its strongest backer. Creation of the Eastern Visayas Development Authority Another casualty of Romualdez’s diminished clout in the administration of his cousin President Marcos is a bill seeking the establishment of the Eastern Visayas Development Authority. Such a government agency would “address the need for a coordinated and integrated approach in the formulation and implementation of the plans, programs, and projects geared towards economic growth and development in the region,” according to Romualdez and other lawmakers. While the bill quickly cleared the House in the 19th Congress, it languished in the Senate. Today, the bill is pending in the House government enterprises committee. Creation of a center for disease prevention In his first SONA, Marcos drew applause for promising to establish a center for disease control prevention and a vaccine institute. While the President has signed into law a measure institutionalizing the Virology and Vaccine Institute of the Philippines, the National Disease Prevention Management Authority became a forgotten dream. Creation of a medical reserve corps The Medical Reserve Corps Act was also an original priority measure of the President when he first addressed the legislative in 2022, but the bill — once seen as urgent in the wake of a devastating pandemic — has been consigned to the back burner in the 20th Congress. National Defense Act Despite Marcos identifying the National Defense Act as a priority early in his presidency, the bill never really gained traction in the House, even as its authors included Romualdez and Ilocos Norte 1st District Representative Sandro Marcos, the President’s son. Other bills Three other bills have been removed from the LEDAC list when a new Congress convened in 2025, namely: Amendments to the Cooperative Code New Government Auditing Code Amendments to the Agrarian Reform Law President Marcos delivers his fifth SONA on Monday, July 27. – Rappler.com