It’s about time the government realigned the billions worth of flood control projects under the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) to other sectors that need it most.
This was the statement of Senate Minority Leader Alan Peter Cayetano in response to the presidential announcement that there will be zero flood control projects under the 2026 national budget.
“It’s high time that we make the hard decisions and put our money where our mouth is. We have to be radical with the 2026 national budget,” Cayetano said on Wednesday.
A day before, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said that the supposed allocation of flood control projects under the National Expenditure Program (NEP) will be reappropriated to other departments such as health and education.
Weeks earlier on the plenary floor, Cayetano proposed making radical budgetary decisions, including addressing the 165,000 classroom shortage through the public works budget.
“The DPWH budget is P1 trillion. Do you want to end the lack of classrooms in a year? If per classroom costs P1 million, that accounts to only P165 billion — almost half or two-thirds of the DPWH budget,” Cayetano said on July 30, 2025.
The Minority Leader also raised the idea in November 2024 during a hearing with the Senate Committee on Higher, Technical, and Vocational Education, which he chaired in the 19th Congress.
“For the last two years, more or less one trillion ‘yung budget ng DPWH, P350 billion doon ay anti-flood, pero ganoon pa rin ang flood natin,” Cayetano said on November 19, 2024, slamming the agency’s failed anti-flood projects.
“Can you imagine if we remove P100 billion from DPWH, double the budget of SUCs (state universities and colleges), baka ma-flood tayo ng research at estudyante rather than bahang baha,” he added.
This is on top of Cayetano’s criticism of DPWH’s problematic leadership and use of funds, with the agency tagged with a number of issues such as inaction with double appropriations in its yearly budgets and the waste of public funds through the Engineering and Administrative Overhead (EAO) fund.
In 2022, Cayetano called out the DPWH’s 2023 budget, when the agency began spending a third of its total budget on flood control and maintenance instead of building new infrastructure. | – Balikas.net
