As fuel prices are expected to surge further amid the crisis in the Middle East due to the US-Israel war in Iran, the Department of the Interior and Local Government has ordered its attached agencies to enforce cost cutting measures.
DILG Secretary Jonvic Remulla said that unnecessary activities, such as seminars, should be reduced or removed. He changed the conduct of the Seal of Good Local Government awards from annual to once every three years.
The Philippine National Police, on the other hand, is eyeing the integration of electric vehicles into its fleet, as PNP chief Gen. Jose Melencio Nartatez Jr. views the Middle East conflict as a wakeup call to revisit the policy on procuring patrol vehicles.
The way our government and its employees use resources that are funded by taxpayers, particularly vehicles and fuel, has always been pretty cavalier, bordering on wasteful. It took a war in the Middle East to make us realize that we should be more efficient and discerning when it comes to the use of government resources at all times, not only when a fuel crisis is impending.
If we can make the efficient use of fuel and energy a national policy for government offices, staff, and facilities, taxpayers could save billions of pesos. Unnecessary trips, vehicles left idling for hours, thermostats set at ridiculously low temperatures, lights that are left on, leaky faucets, and other wasteful habits are commonplace in many government buildings and agencies, and for years, it has become normalized as nothing has been done about it.
Now that a war and a looming fuel crisis has forced us to think about the various ways that we can be more efficient with the use of resources, it gives us an opportunity to conduct an audit and review our wasteful habits and tendencies that were developed during the good times, and hopefully make corrections, not just for the short term, but more importantly, for good.
We have excused government wastefulness and inefficiency as a normal part of the system for far too long. If this war in the Middle East can help public officials and employees value the resources that our taxes pay for better, at least we can say that there is one good thing that came from it.*
