In his first act as the country’s chief executive, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. ordered a reorganization of his office, scrapping the Presidential Anti-Corruption Commission and the Presidential Communications and Operations Office and consolidating communications and media operations into the Office of the Press Secretary. This highlighted a major thrust of the new regime, summed up in a statement Mr. Marcos made after his inauguration on June 30 that “rightsizing” the bureaucracy was a top priority of his administration. Last week, members of the President’s economic team fleshed out what the President meant.
What is important to note in their explanation is that the planned “rightsizing” of the bureaucracy will not necessarily cause the layoffs of thousands of government workers because priority sectors such as education and public health services may even be “upsized,” according to Budget Secretary Amenah Pangandaman. She explained that compared to downsizing, which automatically means reducing the number of personnel, rightsizing may also mean reinforcing the requirements of an agency. For instance, she said the Department of Budget and Management can recommend to the President a bigger budget and increased manpower to bolster the mandate of important government offices such as the departments of education and of health. She said these priority sectors can absorb jobs to be shed from agencies to be downsized by retooling and retraining the government employees to be displaced. She also clarified that the proposal excludes teaching and education-related positions, medical and allied jobs in the health sector, as well as the military and other uniformed personnel.
Trimming or reorganizing the bureaucracy is nothing new. Every administration after the people power uprising in 1986 did it. President Corazon Aquino established the Presidential Commission on Government Reorganization. The succeeding Ramos administration focused its reorganization on inefficient state-owned firms, highlighted by the privatization of the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System. President Estrada had Executive Order No. 165, titled “Re-engineering the Bureaucracy for Better Governance.” This was followed by President Macapagal Arroyo’s government rationalization program through EO 366. President Benigno Aquino III set up the Governance Commission of the government-owned and controlled corporations through Republic Act No. 10149 to again study state-run firms that could be reorganized, merged, streamlined, abolished, or privatized. President Duterte had House Bill No. 5707, or An Act Rightsizing the National Government to Improve Public Service Delivery, filed in 2017 but did not make it during the 17th and 18th Congress.
An advantage for the Marcos administration now is the expected support from lawmakers, with the majority in both houses of Congress being its allies. During the previous administration, then Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno had noted that involving lawmakers to reorganize the government took much time. His successor in the new administration, Pangandaman, also lamented that lawmakers were always reluctant to the idea of reorganizing the bureaucracy. One of the plan’s supporters, Sen. Sonny Angara, said proposals to streamline the government bureaucracy have been in the pipeline for many years and are “probably overdue.” Sen. Chiz Escudero added that rightsizing the bureaucracy is the “right path” to save funds and make service delivery more efficient. But it was Marikina 2nd district Rep. Stella Luz Quimbo who gave a very important suggestion: Make e-governance the “key driver” for rightsizing efforts, saying “now is the time for government to go digital [since] many inefficiencies in governance can be addressed by a digital pivot.”
Diokno, now finance secretary, said the rightsizing plan being crafted by Mr. Marcos’ economic team will be pitched to the incoming Congress before the President’s State of the Nation address on July 25. It is hoped that, as experts have suggested, it will be a comprehensive plan that will ensure seamless operations of agencies within and across sectors. It should also include cutting bureaucratic red tape that has characterized government services for decades.
In a paper titled “When Size Matters: A Study on the Rightsizing Act of the Duterte Administration” published in August 2020, author Nelin Estocado-Dulpina of the University of the Philippines National College of Public Administration and Governance, suggested, among others, that any rightsizing must ensure that government employees’ association or unions are represented and made to participate in the discussions, personnel development interventions such as skills upgrading are regularly conducted by the Civil Service Commission, and a culture of “genuine public service” is fostered to inculcate a sense of accountability among public servants, from the bosses to the rank-and-file employees. Doing all these will hopefully make the bureaucracy the “lean and efficient” government machinery that Mr. Marcos is hoping to achieve, without any grumbling from the affected public servants.
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