THE House Appropriations committee on Thursday continued to question the Commission on Higher Education's (CHEd) about the underutilization of its funds since 2019.

During the briefing on CHEd's budget for 2025, Senior Deputy Minority Leader and Northern Samar 1st District Rep. Paul Daza asked the commission why the unused appropriations lapsed over the past years.

CHEd Executive Director Cinderella Filipina Jaro said that in 2019, the unused allotments amounted to P4.13 billion. It was P2.2 billion in 2020, P1 billion in 2021 and P820 million in 2022. Daza told CHEd Chairman J. Prospero de Vera III that from 2019 to 2022, the commission had a total of P8 billion in unutilized funds.

"If you had better utilization, you could have better used that to help institutions, you could have helped students graduate because our attrition rate is at 30-40 percent. You could have added to the living allowance subsidy P8 billion in four years. There is so much CHEd could have done with these funds," Daza said.

De Vera explained that the 2019 fund diversion was caused by the termination of the Philippine-California Research Institutes (PCARI) project, a government-funded five year research project that taps the expertise of University of California campuses.

"The money could not be used for other purposes anymore as PCARI is a long-term project involving high-level research of universities and we had problems because the grants that they gave to the university, they cannot get the next tranche if they are not fully used and many of this, starting 2018-2019, was for the purchase of scientific equipment that cannot be used on time," he said.

Daza said that CHEd could have realigned the funds to other programs and projects in the same category or, if moving it to a different category, should have asked for consent from the Department of Budget and Management (DBM).

"There are so many needy students. [Dapat] nilagay ninyo sa (you should have included this in the) tertiary education subsidy, sa (in) living allowance, give it to the SUCs for the priority programs, dapat maubos (it should have been utilized fully), " Daza said.

De Vera said that getting approval from the DBM "takes time" and they have already made requests to the Budget department to move funds that were disapproved over the years.

"We are doing our best to use it and we have slowly increased our obligation and disbursement since 2019," he said.

CHEd is asking for P31.68 billion under the National Expenditure Program, an increase of 2.19 percent from the P30.987 billion it requested in 2024.