Sen. Joel Villanueva on DBM’s proposal for rightsizing government agencies

We support moves from the national government to improve its efficiency and institutional capacity to deliver public service. But before we start discussing the issue of rightsizing of the government bureaucracy, we need to discuss two pressing questions:

First, why is it that roughly 1 out of 10 (or 178,128 out of 1,899,925) authorized positions in the national government remain unfilled? We want to know how these unfilled positions will be filled up. There should also be a comprehensive study of the staffing pattern of government agencies to determine whether some existing plantilla positions are already obsolete, redundant or unnecessary. We have been calling the attention of the Executive on this issue since 2016, but unfortunately, this remains unaddressed.

Second, why is there a significant number of government workers under Job Order (JO) or Contract of Service (COS) positions in the government, when there are a lot of unfilled positions? Based on data from the Civil Service Commission as of August 2021, there are 100,895 JO and COS positions in the national government and more than 40,000 additional JO/COS positions are in GOCCs and SUCs.

By addressing these two issues first, DBM can identify which agencies can be rightsized and this could mean an efficient way of delivering public services in the most economical way.

In any case, the government should be prepared with its employment generation program, in the event that it determines, after a comprehensive study, that there is really a need to let go of some people. In fact, we filed a bill institutionalizing the National Employment Recovery Strategy to become the National Employment Action Plan (NEAP) to ensure that the government will have a concrete and achievable job generation strategy in the coming years.

The Senate is always ready to work with the Executive department in finding solutions about these issues.