A legislative measure that never left the halls of Congress could not have been vetoed by a president who had yet to take his oath, Malacañang argued as it pushed back on Senator Alan Peter Cayetano’s account of how his signature cash-aid plan collapsed.
The senator has claimed that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. refused to back his push to hand out P10,000 to Filipino families still reeling from the pandemic, a rejection he said came once Marcos secured the presidency in 2022. Presidential Communications Office Undersecretary and Palace Press Officer Claire Castro rejected that version of events, saying the proposal simply never reached a point where the President could weigh in on it.
“Lumalabas na laging siya ang walang sala…. Naninisi siya ng iba… ‘Wag niyang ipahid sa ibang tao. Akuin niya mismo ang kaniyang kakulangan,” Castro said, telling Cayetano to shoulder his own failure rather than pass it to others.
According to Castro, the roots of the idea trace back to Cayetano’s time in the House of Representatives, where he first advanced it in 2021. It gained little support then and was left out of the 2022 national spending plan, a budget finalized under the Duterte administration and enacted before Marcos assumed office on June 30, 2022. That timeline, the Palace maintains, makes a presidential rejection impossible.
Castro also revisited how the earlier effort unraveled, noting that Cayetano himself had pointed to then-Quezon City congressman Alfred Vargas when the House version failed to move in 2021. She recalled, too, that the senator characterized the plan as nothing more than a legislative proposal in a statement he issued on the very day Marcos was sworn in.
The Manila Bulletin reported that the Palace questioned the practicality of the roughly P200-billion measure, suggesting it may have lacked the votes to survive Congress in the first place. Castro’s message to the senator was that persuasion, not accusation, was what the bill needed. “Dapat siguro aralin niya pang mabuti iyan para ma-encourage niya iyong kapuwa niya mga mambabatas para sumang-ayon sa kaniya at maipasa ito, at hindi siya naninisi ng Pangulo,” she said.
Records of the proposal’s fate in the upper chamber tell a similar story. After winning a Senate seat in 2022, Cayetano filed Senate Bill No. 62, the “Sampung Libong Pagasa Law,” which sought to grant P10,000 per family or P1,500 per member, whichever proved larger. The Philippine Daily Inquirer reported that the bill sat at the committee level for the entirety of the 19th Congress, expiring unpassed when the term closed in 2025.
