DPWH admits 2025 budget hike not from House small committee
The Department of Public Works and Highways said the controversial P289 billion “insertions” in the 2025 budget came from the bicameral conference committee and not from the House of Representatives “small committee.”
This came after Marikina Rep. Miro Quimbo asked DPWH Secretary Vince Dizon and other officials to confirm the matter during the agency’s budget briefing yesterday.
Quimbo said the House actually reduced the DPWH budget by P73.7 billion, from P898 billion in the National Expenditure Program (NEP) to P825 billion when it transmitted the General Appropriations Bill (GAB) to the Senate.
“If it was reduced here at the House, how could we have done the insertion? Reduced by P73.7 billion by the House — so how can you have an insertion?” Quimbo said.
However, he said the DPWH budget ballooned to P1.13 trillion, an increase of nearly P289 billion, after the bicameral meeting.
DPWH pfficials confirmed Quimbo’s account.
Public Works Usec. Ador Canlas and Director Alex Bote said the department had no knowledge of the changes after the Senate plenary deliberations, only discovering them when the final General Appropriations Act was released.
“That’s on the record,” Bote said.
Quimbo also pressed for reforms in the 2026 budget process, urging the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) to adopt a full disclosure policy:
“Let’s stop the finger-pointing and confusion. If a Congressman or Senator proposes a project, put their name on it. Like in the US, earmarks are transparent. Lawmakers must own and defend their insertions before the public,” he said.
Dizon backed the proposal, saying it aligns with the administration’s push for greater accountability and transparency.
Former Speaker Martin Romualdez earlier vowed to implement reforms to ensure the budget’s passage and execution will be “fully open to public scrutiny” this year:
The reforms include removing the “small committee” as well as opening the House-Senate bicameral conference on the budget to the public and the media.
As this developed, Dizon confirmed the agency has no single nationwide master plan to guide flood control projects and admitted that contractors could rarely show proper blueprints during inspections despite handling multi-million-peso projects.
“Even a small house needs a plan before it can be built, so surely these flood control projects worth hundreds of millions should also have proper plans, yet none could be presented. This is part of our ongoing investigation into why such projects were allowed and how they managed to slip through despite their large number,” he told senators in a separate Blue Ribbon hearing.
He said the last completed flood control master plan covered Metro Manila and was finalized in 2013, while new plans funded by the World Bank and the Japan International Cooperation Agency are still under development.
The JICA-World Bank plan is expected to be finished in 2026, while a separate Asian Development Bank study is ongoing for 18 major river basins nationwide.
Senator Risa Hontiveros, for her part, raised alarm over what she described as systemic flaws and corruption in the government’s flood control projects.
Hontiveros revealed that Quezon City reported 331 flood control projects between 2022 and 2025 worth P17 billion, but only two were coordinated with the local government’s master plan.
“There are projects that, instead of reducing floods, ended up worsening them in roads, streets, homes, offices, and even schools. There are also so-called ghost projects that the local government still cannot find or locate up to now,” she said.
“This could mean not just double but even triple the cost for the public from these floodgates of corruption, since money is spent on the projects, people still suffer damages from flooding despite the supposed flood control measures, and the losses keep piling up,” Hontiveros added.
Dizon admitted he has received hundreds of reports of anomalous flood control projects in the country worth billions of pesos.
He also expressed concerns about “ghost and very substandard” flood control projects scattered nationwide, saying that some projects were never built, while others were falsely certified as completed.
He said the DPWH plans to repair and reinforce damaged flood control projects without additional costs, utilizing the warranties included in the contracts with contractors.
“Our new legal team will initiate procedures to recover the warranties. Most of the warranties for the flood control projects, if not all, are five years under their contracts so we can still pursue them,” Dizon said.
In some cases, he said the DPWH will replace polyvinyl chloride (PVC) sheet piles with steel sheet piles to ensure greater strength and long-term reliability, as seen in the repair works in Barangay Paknaan, Mandaue City.
Editor’s Note: This is an updated article. Originally posted with the headline: “P289-b ‘insertions’ happened in the bicam—DPWH”
