Health Minister Calls for Improved Budget Blocking Governance

Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin has called for improvements to the budget blocking mechanism, revealing that the Ministry of Health’s budget realisation for 2025 only reached 42.9 per cent, the lowest in its history. Speaking during a working meeting with House of Representatives Commission IX in Jakarta on Monday, Budi attributed the low realisation to a freeze of Rp 12.3 trillion in allocated funds, which rendered the money unusable. “The Health Ministry’s achievement in 2025 is indeed the lowest in history, 42.9 per cent. Why? Because the allocated budget was blocked, Rp 12.3 trillion, so it could not be used. The budget was given but we could not use it, we could not disburse it,” Budi said. He noted that if the blocked amount were excluded from the calculation, the actual realisation would have been 93 per cent, which is better than the 2022 figure. The largest blockages affected advanced health programmes, primary healthcare, the Directorate General of Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices, and disease prevention and control programmes. Budi requested that the Ministry of Finance improve the governance of budget blocking so that blocked funds are no longer counted as allocated budget. He suggested that if the government intends to withdraw funds, it should do so by June or September at the latest, to provide clarity for both the ministry and parliament. “If they want to withdraw it, that’s fine. But please do it by June or September, so that our colleagues in Commission IX also understand, because we cannot always routinely update whether there is a block or not,” he explained.