The President, on the strength of Executive Order 15, grants P500 combat-duty pay to AFP military personnel actually involved in operations against the various armed enemies of the State precisely because their line of work or assignment expose them to risk in their lives. This seems to be rationale of P-Noy, in signing EO 15 effectively discarding as useless an earlier EO 658.
Apparently, the initial source of fund of this new scheme will come from the savings of the AFP but subsequent funding will have to be incorporated in the General Appropriations Act. There is sufficient reason to doubt whether in fact, the funds could be accounted for even if it is said the roster of names will have to be submitted to the Department of Budget & Management.
The pattern appears to make Malacanang a clearinghouse. The grant of this immediate allowance must have been occasioned by the 75th anniversary of the AFP. Truly, the State must have subsidized heavily on national defense and security budget leaving possibly more important societal concerns with less from the whole budget pie. Is something strange here?
P-Noy seems to forget that the “power of the purse” is proper to Congress and therefore, this pattern of signing executive orders appears deliberate and in effect, “short-circuit” the whole democratic process. Why is the State always in a hurry for immediate results such as in the controversial ‘conditional cash transfers’ being implemented by the DSWD?
Nothing indicates that either one of these schemes of ‘dole-out’ is developmental. In fact, it opens doors for possible corruption by those who are in charge of the payroll list and who would possibly ‘mangle’ with the cash outs. The State has just become a huge money basin where P-Noy’s subalterns can dip their fingers into and maybe run away with them in the future – depends on some vulnerability threshold.
Well, this grant of additional combat-pay allowance for the individual soldier will have almost negligible marginal impact on their economic status. It will not make the soldiers even better off. This is the entire problem with myopic solutions to seemingly myopic problems. And it seems that P-Noy already tends to ‘micro-manage’ the affairs of the State.
Problem is, every course of action from Malacanang seems to create more problems than solutions. Not a single act has been perfected due to the perceived incompetence of the men under the President. Not unlikely, the Filipino people are seeing more of the same.
P-Noy must be getting the wrong advice from the wrong people who try to prop him, albeit obliquely. Every act of P-Noy is always become a news event and the butt of controversy. This is probably the problem with a recycled cabinet.