PELAEZ V.

AUDITOR GENERAL
FACTS:
- In 1964, the President of the Philippines issued executive orders to create 33 municipalities

pursuant to Section 68 of the Revised Administrative Code which provides in part:

The President may by executive order define the boundary of any municipality and
may change the seat of government within any subdivision to such place therein as the
public welfare may require
- Public funds thereby stood to be disbursed in the implementation of said executive orders.
- Suing as a private citizen and taxpayer, Vice President Emmanuel Pelaez filed a petition for
prohibition with preliminary injunction against the Auditor General. It seeks to restrain from the
respondent or any person acting in his behalf, from passing in audit any expenditure of public
funds in implementation of the executive orders aforementioned

- He claims that the EOs are unconstitutional on the ground that Section 68 of the RAC had been
impliedly repealed by Section 3 of RA 2370 which provides that barrios may not be created
or their boundaries altered nor their names changed except by Act of Congress. If the
President, under this new law, cannot even create a barrio, how can he create a municipality
which is composed of several barrios, since barrios are units of municipalities?

ISSUE: Whether or not Congress has delegated the power to create barrios to the President by
virtue of Sec. 68 of the RAC.
HELD: NO.
- The creation of municipalities by the President constitutes an undue delegation of power.

While the power to fix common boundaries of adjoining municipalities to avoid or settle conflicts
of jurisdiction may be administrative in nature, the authority to create municipal corporations
is essentially legislative in nature.
- The questioned statute didnt meet the requirements for a valid delegation of power to fix
details in enforcing a law. It neither enunciates a policy to be implemented by the President nor
gives a sufficiently precise standard to avoid the violation. The phrase as the public welfare
may require is so overboard that it rests in the President a virtually unfettered discretion that
is tantamount to a delegation of legislative power. For the president to create municipalities
will be for him to exercise the power of control over local government units denied to him by the
Constitution.