By Mario Casayuran Sen. Panfilo M. Lacson vowed on Tuesday to locate and isolate the P55 billion pork barrel items of lawmakers when the House of Representatives has transmitted to the Senate its version of the proposed 2019 P32.757 trillion Government Appropriations Act (GAA) or national budget. Senator Panfilo Lacson (Candice Reyes / MANILA BULLETIN FILE PHOTO) Lacson said he and his staff would wait for the House version of the national budget and find where lawmakers have transferred their pork barrel from the National Expenditure Program (NEP) or presidential budget to the 2019 GAA. After congressmen nearly came to blows on Monday when lawmakers allied with former President and now House Speaker Gloria Macapagal Arroyo did not slash the P55 billion set aside during the term of Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez but merely realigned them. With this development, Lacson said he and his staff would put the House-approved GAA under the microscope when it comes to the Senate and hope that his colleagues would help him delete these questionable appropriations. In the past, Sen. Loren Legarda, chairwoman of the Senate finance committee, and her House counterpart, Rep. Karlo Nograles, have continued that the current and past GAAs contained pork barrel items. The P55.55 billion ’’pork barrel’’ items are reportedly embedded in the budgets of the Department of Transportation (DOTr) and the Department of Education (DepEd). Before the 2013 ruling of the Supreme Court declaring as unconstitutional pork barrel funds, each senator was given P200 million pork barrel each while each congressman was given P120 million pork barrel in soft or hard projects. What the Supreme Court ruled as pork barrel are those described as ‘’post legislation,’’ meaning after the passage by Congress of the budget. Congressmen now tagged appropriations for their ‘’pork barrel’’ funds as ‘’pre-legislation.’’ What Lacson wants is that projects must be identified and discussed at the barangay level at the local government unit (LGU) level through the local development council before they go up to the provincial government and later to the regional council, then it is consolidated as NEP. But what happens is that projects for the local government level are dictated from the top, he said. Lacson said the Asian Development Bank and the University of the Philippines (UP) pointed out that 20 percent of the government’s budget are wasted because of corruption. He cited his success in identifying in 2016 P8.32 billion worth of pork barrel items at the budget of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) led to the channeling of this amount to the ‘’free tuition’’ program. Lacson also cited his success in identifying P86 billion in pork barrel because there was no plan for the road right of way (RROW) of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH).