An Act Reorganizing the Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources, and Energy (MENRE), Thereby Splitting It into Two (2) Ministries, the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (Menr), and the Ministry of Energy (Moe), Defining Their Powers and Functions, Appropriating Funds Thereof, and for Other Purposes

This separates the Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources and Energy into 2 ministries — a Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources and a Ministry of Energy — and builds out the internal structure of both.

Inside the environment ministry it creates 7 bureaus by name: Forest Management, Lands Management, Mines and Geo-Sciences, Environmental Management, Biodiversity Management, Ecosystems Research and Development, and Protected Areas and Wildlife. Beneath them sit division offices for policy and planning, legal affairs, information and communications, financial services and management services, and then field offices — Provincial and Community Environment and Natural Resources Officers, with the ministry proper holding authority over them.

The energy ministry is mandated to prepare and integrate the region's energy plans and carries its own organizational structure, Office of the Minister and Deputy Minister.

What distinguishes this bill from every other reorganisation measure in the registry is that it writes qualifications into the statute for each level of office. A Minister or Deputy Minister must be a natural-born citizen, a resident of the region, of good moral character, and of proven competence in economics, public administration, the natural, physical or engineering sciences, management or law. The Director General — expressly "the highest career official of the Ministry" — needs a master's degree and 5 years of supervisory or managerial experience. Bureau Directors, Provincial Environment and Natural Resources Officers and Community Officers each have their own requirements, and a PENR Officer must in addition have lived for at least 2 years in the province they serve.

As with its companion bill, the funding of the 2 ministries goes into the annual appropriations act in a separate budget item for each.

The explanatory note opens on the Qur'an — the signs in the heavens and the earth at 45:3-5, and the injunction at 2:60 against committing abuse on the earth and spreading corruption — and builds the case for stewardship from there.

The structural argument is that environment and energy pull in different directions inside 1 ministry. Protecting watersheds, forests and protected areas is a conservation mandate; planning and expanding power supply is a development one, and in a region where hydroelectric generation on Lake Lanao is the central energy question, those 2 mandates meet inside the same office. Separating them gives each its own minister and its own budget line.

The qualification provisions are what make this bill worth reading even though it has not moved. Writing into a statute that a Minister must have proven competence in economics, science, management, public administration or law — and that the Director General is the ministry's highest *career* official with a master's degree and 5 years of supervisory experience — narrows the field for a political appointment and protects a professional post from becoming one. No other reorganisation bill in the registry does this. Whether a Parliament would enact limits on its own government's appointment discretion is exactly the question the bill's 4 years at Committee Stage leaves open.

The 2-year residency requirement for a Provincial Environment and Natural Resources Officer is a smaller provision with the same instinct. The officer who decides on a logging permit or a quarry in a province should have lived there long enough to know what the decision means, and the alternative — a posting from Cotabato City — is the ordinary practice the clause is written against.

The separation itself has a strong case that the bill states only obliquely. Lake Lanao is simultaneously the region's most significant protected water body and the source of the Agus hydroelectric complex; a single ministry holding both the conservation mandate and the energy mandate has to resolve that conflict internally, invisibly, and without anyone able to see which consideration won. Two ministries with 2 ministers make the disagreement a matter of record. Notably, the 2 rival Lake Lanao authority bills in this registry take the opposite approach, trying to solve the same problem by creating a body for the lake rather than splitting the ministry above it — and none of the 3 has passed.

The bureau list is essentially the national environment department's structure transposed onto the region, which is efficient drafting and also a choice: the region inherits a set of functional divisions designed for a national agency, including a Mines and Geo-Sciences Bureau, in a territory where the question of who may authorise mining is among the most contested in its own indigenous peoples act.

MP Ampatuan filed 2 reorganisation bills together in September 2022 with the same 6 co-authors: this one and its companion. Bill No. 47 splits the education ministry into 4 agencies; Bill No. 48 splits the environment ministry into two. Read alongside MP Mawallil's 3 bills breaking up the agriculture ministry, filed in the same month, the First Regular Session opened with 5 measures from 2 members proposing to restructure 3 of the region's largest ministries into nine. None of the 5 has moved past Committee Stage.