President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. approved 3,770 public works projects worth P214.4 billion from unprogrammed funds in 2023 and 2024, with majority going to ‘favored regions’ now being flagged for anomalous and ghost flood control projects.
This according to ACT Teachers Representative Antonio Tinio, who said these findings directly contradicted Malacañang’s claims that the President had no role in infrastructure corruption issues.
‘To be able to fund nearly 4,000 projects from unprogrammed appropriations, the president would have had to approve them,’ he said during the plenary deliberations for the Department of Public Works and Highways’ proposed P881.3-billion budget for 2026.
He challenged Malacañang to explain the basis for the releases and to ‘stop washing its hands off the corruption allegations.’
Citing official data from the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) during the plenary deliberations for the Department of Public Highways’ (DPWH) 2026 budget, Tinio disclosed that the DPWH received P61.4 billion in unprogrammed funds in 2023 for 1,889 projects, and P153 billion in 2024 for 1,811 projects.
In 2023, the top regions that got the largest share in unprogrammed funds were: Central Luzon, with 283 projects worth P11.7 billion in total; Bicol with 138 projects worth P7.6 billion, and Central Visayas with 170 projects worth P7.2 billion. In 2024, Mimaropa got the lion’s share of unprogrammed funds with P29.4 billion for 201 projects, followed by Central Luzon again with P25 billion for 285 projects. Majority of the projects approved for these regions, Tinio added, were flood control projects.
‘These are interesting top three regions, as these are the ‘usual suspect’ regions now being mentioned in the flood control scandal now,’ Tinio noted, alluding to Bulacan and Oriental Mindoro provinces, which are now under scrutiny after officials discovered numerous ghost flood control projects there.
Several past and current lawmakers, particularly Senators Francis Escudero, Joel Villanueva, Ramon ‘Bong’ Revilla, Jinggoy Estrada, and Nancy Binay; and former House Speaker Martin Romualdez and former Ako Bicol Rep. Elizaldy Co, are accused of receiving billions in kickbacks from projects in Bulacan.
Co, meanwhile, was founder of Sunwest Inc., the firm that implemented an anomalous P289.5 million flood control project in Oriental Mindoro. He is now facing graft, malversation and falsification charges over the project.
Tinio, however, emphasized that the President could not separate himself from the issue as unprogrammed funds-or standby authorizations that can only be tapped when new revenue or loans materialize-were within the discretion of the executive.
He cited Section 35, Chapter 5, Book 6 of Executive Order No. 292, which states that expenditures from lump sum appropriations ‘shall be made in accordance with a special budget to be approved by the President.’
This is not the first time that Tinio or other lawmakers have criticized the ballooning amount of unprogrammed appropriations under the Marcos administration, especially since these are lump-sum allocations that have no line items in the General Appropriations Act (GAA).
This, Tinio stressed, has made them essentially invisible to public scrutiny-as demonstrated by the fact that no flood control project funded by unprogrammed funds were included in Malacañang’s Sumbong sa Pangulo transparency website for flood control projects.
To be able to fund infrastructure projects in this budget line, the DPWH regional and district engineering offices would have to submit requests for funding, which would be vetted by the agency’s planning services office.
The DPWH then submits a special budget request for release of funds to the DBM, which is the delegated authority by the Office of the President.
The DPWH’s sponsoring lawmaker and Surigao del Sur Rep. Romeo Momo Sr. said that the DPWH would soon release its own transparency server that would include these projects and possibly include the proponents of the project. /cb