Malacanang on Monday fired back at former President Rodrigo Duterte for his allegations of supposed irregularities in the 2025 National Budget, calling his claims outrightly malicious and criminal.

The former President earlier claimed in a press conference that the 2025 General Appropriations Act was signed with several items left blank which he says is akin to handing over a blank check to the government. According to Duterte, the spending plan is “invalid and unenforceable.”

Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin however denied Duterte’s claims, saying that the former Philippine leader should know better that it is “impossible for any funding items to be left blank.“ 

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“The peddling of such fake news is outrightly malicious and should be condemned as criminal,” Bersamin said in a statement sent to Palace reporters. “No page of the 2025 National Budget was left unturned before the president signed it into law.”

“All 4,057 pages of its two thick volumes (which were printed in fine print — with nearly sixty lines on each page) were exhaustively reviewed by hundreds of professional staff from Congress and the Department of Budget and Management.

Bersamin said such “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.”

“It is impossible for any funding items to be left blank, as alleged by misinformed and malicious sources,” he said.

Bersamin said a simple check of the 2025 National Budget, which can be viewed on the DBM website, would show that “there is no program, activity, or project at all with blank appropriations in that carefully vetted law.”

“The true facts and the printed figures appearing in the GAA easily debunk the malicious claims of deliberate blanks being left for filling in,” he said.

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