T&T’s 2025 Budget—A Cautious Step Toward Discipline and Dignity
The 2025–2026 Budget is not a feel-good document. It is sober, restrained, and devoid of the flourish that often accompanies political promises. It marks, instead, a point of reckoning for Trinidad and Tobago: a recognition that fiscal discipline is not a choice but a necessity
Finance Minister Davendranath Tancoo’s first national budget, framed around the theme “economic fairness through accountable fiscal policies,” reflects both the opportunity and the burden of governance after years of structural decline. The figures are straightforward but sobering. Real GDP growth has slipped from 3.7 percent in 2014 to 2.5 percent in 2024, while the overall GDP has fallen from $187 billion to $154.9 billion during that same period. Public debt has more than doubled, from $69.7 billion to $140.7 billion, resulting in a debt service charge that now consumes 10 percent of government revenue.
These are not numbers pulled from thin air; they are the inherited consequences of decades of policy drift, overdependence on hydrocarbons, and short-term political management. The Opposition has every right to scrutinize the present administration’s choices; that is its democratic duty, but it must also confront the reality that the seeds of today’s imbalance were planted by them long before this budget was conceived.
Still, the Tancoo Budget deserves credit for restraint and realism. The $475 million Employment Fund and the $310 million allocated for job creation represent an attempt to rebuild an economy hollowed out by inefficiency. However, the choice to shut down CEPEP and URP is what really gets to the political core of the issue.
For decades, these programs, introduced in the 1960s as temporary “crash work” schemes, became political instruments, sustaining thousands in underemployment while promoting dependency and corruption. By attempting to replace them with "full-time, better-paid jobs," the government is essentially stating that accountability and dignity are synonymous. This is a difficult but necessary stance. It will win little applause in the short term, especially in communities long reliant on such programs, but in the longer term it may deliver something this country has not had in years: honest work that restores pride, not just paychecks.
One cannot, however, discuss economic policy without acknowledging its social consequences. Trinidad and Tobago’s high levels of crime, inequality, and civic tension are inseparable from our patterns of economic exclusion. Resentment grows when growth slows, when 70,000 jobs are lost in a decade, and when the moral economy is thought to favour those with connections.
When the former prime minister and other high-ranking officials received substantial pay raises while labour unions fought for much smaller increases, that resentment grew. These are not simply missteps in public administration; they are moral errors that erode public trust and give substance to the perception that the powerful operate under different rules than the rest. The resulting anger is not abstract; it lives in our streets, in our workplaces, and in the simmering hostilities of daily life.
In this climate, the present administration faces more than fiscal repair; it faces the task of moral rebuilding. It must communicate with precision and humility, resist the lure of propaganda, and demonstrate how sacrifice will produce fairness.
As PNM’s Colm Imbert himself conceded, his party made “too many stupid mistakes.” That candour, rare as it is, underscores why Trinidad and Tobago cannot afford another wasted decade of fiscal improvisation and political vanity.
The government’s mission must now be to sustain coherence, to link policy, performance, and principle, and to reconnect the state with the people’s lived experience.This budget, cautious though it is, provides a foundation. What the country needs next is leadership strong enough to make accountability more than a slogan, to make it a habit of governance.
Sarge
