Ping: DPWH ’25 budget has ‘duplicate’ projects
Senate President Pro Tempore Panfilo “Ping” Lacson has sounded the alarm over several “duplicate” projects of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) in its 2025 budget, warning that these were designed to “confuse and corrupt.”
Lacson, during his interpellation of the proposed DPWH budget for 2026, said the duplicate projects were under the Convergence and Special Support Program (CSSP). He noted that these were “significantly bloated every year” from 2023 to 2025.
According to Senate finance committee chair Sherwin Gatchalian who sponsored the DPWH budget, the increases were “mostly congressional.”
The department’s proposed budget for 2026 is under close scrutiny amid an ongoing investigation into billions of pesos worth of allocations for government flood control projects that ended up being lost to corruption over the past years.
Ballooning figure
Lacson said the DPWH’s CSSP budget in 2024 showed it had an allotment of P174.088 billion in the National Expenditure Program (NEP) for 2024, but the figure ballooned to P410.91 billion in the 2024 General Appropriations Act (GAA).
The NEP is the budget proposal submitted by Malacañang to Congress while the reconciled version of the budget proposals coming from the House and Senate is the General Appropriations Bill (GAB). It becomes the GAA once it is signed into law by the President.
For 2025, the CSSP budget grew from P221.499 billion in the NEP to P504.226 billion in the GAA. For 2026, the CSSP had P167.79 billion in the NEP and P234.236 billion in the House version of the budget bill.
Lacson said he found that many projects under the Sustainable Infra Projects Alleviating Gaps (Sipag) had the same names as those under the Basic Infrastructure programs (BIP) but with different amounts.
“We have to take a closer look at them because we may be giving double appropriations—different programs but the same projects,” he added.
Double appropriations
He illustrated that among the projects that had “duplicate” allocations in the 2025 budget were the construction of Barangay San Jose-Barangay Bandi Road Package 2 in Barangay San Jose-Barangay Bandi in Donsol, Sorsogon, with P39.433 million under Sipag and P150 million under BIP; road rehabilitation, Phases 1 and 2 in Umingan, Pangasinan (P125 million and P200 million, respectively) under Sipag, and Phase 3 of “construction/rehabilitation” of roads in Umingan (P17 million) under BIP.
Other duplicate projects were the construction of a road at Barangay Guisican, Phase II, in Labo, Camarines Norte (P30 million) under Sipag and Phase 1 of a similarly named project (P100 million) under BIP; and the rehabilitation of road, Phase 1 from Barangay Naspi to Barangay Abucay in Pilar, Sorsogon (P100 million) under Sipag, and construction of Naspi-Abucay Road in Pilar, Sorsogon, Phase 2 (P50 million) under BIP.
“I hope this can be rectified. I can go on and on because we saw so many projects. I hope [DPWH] Secretary [Vince] Dizon will look at the project titles, especially those that are exactly the same or divided into phases but placed under different programs,” Lacson said. INQ
Gatchalian pointed out that in the case of projects with the same titles and without technical descriptions, the district engineer may have the discretion of how and where to implement the projects.
Late last year, President Marcos vetoed P194 billion worth of projects in the 2025 GAA that were “not consistent with our programmed priorities,” reducing the national budget to P6.326 trillion.
Vetoed were a P26.065 billion allocation for the DPWH and another P168.240 billion worth of projects allocated under the controversial unprogrammed appropriations.
