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Government workers belonging to the Confederation for Unity, Recognition, and Advancement of Government Employees (COURAGE) and Kawani laban sa Kontraktwalisasyon stage a protest in front of the National Housing Authority (NHA) gate, at the Elliptical Circle in Quezon City, on June 24, 2022. Jonathan Cellona, ABS-CBN News/File
MANILA — The Department of Budget and Management on Tuesday denied that the proposal to rightsize government would result in a mass layoff.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in his first State of the Nation Address on Monday urged lawmakers to prioritize passing a law on the National Government Rightsizing Program (NGRP).
"[Rightsizing] is not actually a mass layoff of government workers, it is actually [making] it more efficient to serve the people," Secretary Amenah Pangandaman said in a post-SONA economic briefing.
"The rightsizing bill will help our bureaucracy have an agile, efficient, responsive, and technology-driven workforce," she added.
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Marcos described the NGRP as "a reform mechanism that seeks to enhance the government’s institutional capacity to perform its mandate and to provide better services, while ensuring optimal and efficient use of resources."
"The government will be in a much better shape and do much more with less; we will have some efficiency gain," Finance Secretary Benjamin Diokno said during the economic briefing.
The proposed rightsizing will determine which among the 187 government agencies and government-owned and controlled corporations (GOCCs), with some 2 million personnel, may be streamlined through merging, restructuring or abolition, Pangandaman said in a previous statement.
According to data gathered by the ABS-CBN Investigative and Research Group, there were 1,755,242 career and non-career government officials and employees as of August 2021, based on the latest Inventory of Government Human Resources Report from the Civil Service Commission.
Around 4 percent or 71,635 of the nearly 1.7 million officials were working in 126 GOCCs, it added.
Government workers group COURAGE earlier said scrimping on the government's budget should not come at the expense of job security.
"Ayusin n'yo muna ang tax efficiency collection, ayusin muna ang allocation of resources," added Rox Ferrer, a member of Kawani Laban sa Kontraktwalisasyon (KALAKON).
(Fix the tax efficiency collection first, fix the allocation of resources.)
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