By Joey Sarte Salceda
A national emergency declaration is like a cold shower. The daily battles of politics, the routine friction between agencies, the competing priorities that consume so much of any administration’s energy, all of these accumulates like grime. An emergency declaration washes it away and creates a clean, shared perspective. Suddenly, everyone is looking at the same problem. The signing of Executive Order No. 110 by President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. on March 24, declaring a State of National Energy Emergency and activating the UPLIFT framework, did exactly that. It gave the entire government, and the country, a common frame of reference and a common sense of urgency.
As someone who has had the privilege of working on national crises before, I humbly offer these observations to the government in the hope that they may be of some use. In 2005 and 2006, as economic adviser to President Arroyo, I helped craft the Roadmap to Fiscal Rehabilitation that became the base strategy for the fiscal reforms that pulled the Philippines back from the brink of sovereign default. In early 2007, I served briefly as Presidential Chief of Staff during one of the most turbulent periods in recent memory. The administration was navigating the aftermath of the failed charter change, serial impeachment attempts, preparations for a bitterly contested midterm election, and the persistent threat of military adventurism. And in January 2008, when the global financial crisis was still being debated in polite academic circles, President Arroyo asked me to draw up a pre-crisis economic package immediately after she returned from Davos, well before the IMF or the NBER had moved. We were told we were being alarmists, but we acted early, and the Philippines did not post a single quarter of negative growth during the 2008-2009 global contraction. No comparable economy in Southeast Asia can say the same.
Let me share with you my practical insights on managing the national energy emergency, as follows:
1. Shared sacrifice must be structured so that those already hurting bear the least pain.
This crisis will require sacrifice from everyone. But as I wrote in the Roadmap to Fiscal Rehabilitation, the strategy document behind the 2005-2006 fiscal reforms: stick a thousand needles into yourself first before pricking the poor. Government must demonstrate that it is cutting its own costs and tightening its own belt before asking ordinary Filipinos to absorb pain. The Confucian principle applies: “The noble person makes demands on himself; the small person makes demands on others.”
Equally important: the government cannot realistically promise everyone the full amount of help they need, but it can commit to reaching those who are trying to get through. That requires honest, consistent communication from the very top, setting the common national direction, being clear about what may be expected of each sector, and being careful never to overpromise.
2. People who lose jobs or livelihoods need a clear, simple place to go for help.
Macro-interventions matter, but they must be felt at the human level. The DSWD’s AICS, DOLE’s emergency employment programs, and the DTI’s MSME support mechanisms all exist, but in a crisis they need to be consolidated and made unmistakably easy to find. Ideally, there should be a single number, a single portal, and a single walk-in point per municipality where any Filipino who needs help can go regardless of which agency’s mandate the problem falls under. The President has already directed the DSWD to expedite AICS releases. The next step would be to ensure visibility and simplicity at the point of contact.
3. The VAT windfall from oil needs an early fiscal decision.
When oil prices spike, VAT revenues from fuel rise because VAT is ad valorem. But this windfall will likely be offset by consumption contraction elsewhere in the economy. It would be helpful for the government to decide early whether it will treat the petroleum VAT increment as a distinct, earmarked source of crisis financing, or treat VAT as a single pool. This is more than an accounting question. If the government can credibly say that every additional peso of VAT from higher oil prices is going directly to fuel subsidies and food security, it builds trust. DEPDev Secretary Balisacan has rightly flagged the trade-offs of suspending VAT on fuel entirely. The sooner this decision is made, with eyes open, the better.
4. GOCCs can be mobilized to support affected sectors without adding to the national government debt.
GOCC borrowing counts toward consolidated public sector debt but not toward NG debt. In a crisis where fiscal space is tight and the credit rating must be protected. This distinction matters. The question is which GOCCs can borrow to support the sectors most hurt.
For food security, the NFA could borrow to expand its procurement from farmers, providing them both a price floor and an income buffer while building up buffer stocks. The NIA, which provides direct support to farmers through irrigation and farm-level infrastructure, could accelerate investments ahead of a potential El Nino. The PFDA could extend support to fisherfolk communities reeling from fuel price increases. For transport, the LRTA and PNR could expand subsidized commuter services to cushion the impact on urban workers. The PNOC, already authorized under EO 110 to procure fuel, is an obvious vehicle for strategic reserves. The PPA could ease logistics costs through reduced port charges. The economic team would benefit from mapping which GOCCs have borrowing headroom and moving on quickly.
5. Compounding risks must be anticipated. El Nino could turn the second half of 2026 into a dual crisis.
PAGASA reports a greater-than-50-percent probability that El Nino may likely develop between July and September 2026. If the energy crisis persists and El Nino hits simultaneously, the result would be drought in agricultural regions, reduced hydropower, and higher food prices on top of already elevated fuel and transport costs. The comparable years PAGASA has flagged are 2009-2010 and 2014-2015.
It may be prudent to begin contingency planning now rather than waiting for June. The DA could accelerate seed, fertilizer, and crop insurance deployment to major producing provinces before the next planting cycle, and water storage and irrigation capacity could be assessed while there is still time to reinforce it.
6. Real-time impact assessment is essential, and it may need to be done outside the regular reporting cycle.
The agencies report on their regular schedules: weekly price monitoring, monthly inflation, quarterly GDP. These rhythms are built for normal governance, not for crisis speed. The President and the UPLIFT Committee will need near-real-time information on which provinces are seeing the sharpest fuel price increases, where transport services are breaking down, and which supply chains are under stress.
The good news is that the Philippines now has a mature data science ecosystem that can be mobilized for exactly this purpose. Firms like Thinking Machines and similar outfits have demonstrated the capacity to build real-time monitoring dashboards, geo-spatial analytics, and predictive models at speed. A partnership between the UPLIFT Secretariat at DEPDev and the country’s best data science teams could produce the kind of granular, real-time intelligence that the formal reporting system was never designed to deliver. This would be a worthwhile investment.
7. A bypass mechanism is needed for cross-agency coordination.
The agencies are competent within their mandates. But a fuel price crisis is simultaneously an energy problem, a transport problem, a food supply problem, and a social protection problem. No single agency can solve it alone, and agencies are not naturally structured to cut across each other.
Past administrations addressed this through dedicated cross-cutting bodies. Under the Ramos administration, the NSC staff and figures like Lito Osmena played this role. Under the Duterte administration, the DOF’s Strategy, Economics, and Results Group under Secretary Sonny Dominguez served a similar coordinating function. The OSAPIEA under this administration was well-suited for this purpose, but it was dissolved in February under EO 108, weeks before the emergency was declared. The UPLIFT Committee now fills this coordinating role in principle, but the President cannot chair daily operational meetings nor do day-to-day bypass operations needed. It would be very helpful if some reliable officials are empowered to act on his behalf, with authority across agencies, to handle the day-to-day bypass operations that prevent a crisis response from being strangled by ordinary compartmentalization. This used to be the function of the Malacanang Chief of Staff.
8. Someone should be specifically tasked with identifying opportunities.
Crisis management is not only about defense. Every crisis reshuffles the deck. Someone on the economic team should be keeping an eye on short-term opportunities that can offset short-term pain, and long-term opportunities that can reshape the economy for the better.
During the 2008 crisis, we invested heavily in TESDA and skills training because displaced workers needed new capabilities and the cost of idleness exceeded the cost of training. The result supported the services and BPO expansion of the following decade. EO 110 already calls for accelerating the renewable energy transition and promoting electric vehicles in mass transport. These are structural reforms that the crisis now makes politically possible. It would be valuable to assign someone to pursue them as a core function of the crisis response rather than as an afterthought.
9. Many solutions will come from outside government. It would help to make it easy for people to contribute.
The government does not have a monopoly on good ideas or implementation capacity. In every crisis I have been part of, some of the most effective interventions came from the private sector, civil society, and ordinary citizens who simply saw a problem and acted. But they need a counterpart in government who will listen and who can clear obstacles quickly.
EO 110 encourages private sector and civil society participation. The UPLIFT Committee could go further by designating a specific, public point of contact for organizations and individuals who want to contribute. This is their country. They should be able to help.
10. All crises are temporary, but the policies and reforms that emerge from crisis can be permanent.
The energy emergency will end. Oil prices will stabilize. The Strait of Hormuz situation will resolve. But what the government builds in the next six to twelve months can endure — fuel excise stabilization mechanisms, renewable energy targets, GOCC financing strategies, cross-agency coordination structures. If designed well and institutionalized properly, these will leave the Philippines more resilient than before.
There is also a deeper point. In normal times, the political consensus for difficult reforms is almost impossible to build. Everyone has a reason to delay, to study further, to wait for a better moment. A crisis dissolves those barriers. It creates the shared sense of urgency and the political will that reforms require. The fuel excise stabilization measures now being considered in Congress, the renewable energy acceleration embedded in EO 110, the demand-side strategies for reducing petroleum dependence — none of these would have moved as quickly in ordinary times. The opportunity is to lock in these reforms so that they survive the end of the emergency and become permanent features of a more resilient Philippine economy. A crisis builds consensus that normal politics cannot.
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About the author: Aside from having been Albay Provincial Governor and Congressman, Joey Salceda, a noted economist, was Presidential Chief of Staff (2007); Economic Adviser to the President during the 2005-2006 Fiscal Crisis and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Presently, he chairs the Institute for Risk and Strategic Studies (Salceda Research)