Freeze pork deals

Since most of the flood control projects in the national budget are bogus, why not impose a moratorium on them?

Former Public Works and Highways Secretary Babes Singson suggested withholding government funding from all projects related to flood control while an extensive review is conducted.

He said the President may have his veto power, but he can only apply it to some obvious items. In the review of the 2025 national budget, there wasn’t enough time to go through all the projects.

“That’s why I am calling for a moratorium on flood control projects — review them first,” Singson stressed.

“In the National Expenditure Program, the Department of Public Works and Highways had a roughly P800 billion to P900 billion budget for 2024 or 2025. Congress then deliberated, both in the House and the Senate, and they issued the General Appropriations Act,” Singson said.

The problem started when the final DPWH budget grew to almost P1.1 trillion. “That means an additional P200 billion was inserted,” he noted.

In the original budget submitted by the DPWH, approximately P250 billion worth of projects were replaced with ones the DPWH was unfamiliar with.

The budget was thus manipulated through insertions and substitutions by both the House and the Senate, reaching almost P450 billion, most of which was allocated to “flood control projects.”

When it came to implementing the projects, the DPWH was shocked to find that projects it did not propose were being implemented at the district level without the head office’s knowledge.

“Even the President was surprised. These were manipulated at the district level,” according to Singson, who recently retired as Metro Pacific Tollways Corp. president and chief executive officer.

Singson revealed he was asked to head the DPWH again, the post he held during the term of the late President Noynoy Aquino. He said he declined but offered to help in an investigation of the anomalous projects by a private sector group.

The private group will not have prosecutorial powers. It will be “more of an audit body, recommendatory in nature, to see where these inserted projects are and whether they make sense,” he said.

During his stint at the DPWH, Singson said the hard and fast rule was “the right project at the correct cost.”

When congressmen approached him with requests, they were told: “Here are the only projects DPWH can implement. If you insert anything else, even if it’s in the budget, I will not implement it.”

Based on Singson’s account, it is the secretary’s responsibility to address the corruption that had become pervasive under the current term.

The wasted projects that ran into hundreds of billions of pesos over the past three years were “shameless,” Singson averred.

He particularly cited how flood control contracts are divided to grant DPWH conspirators the authority to approve projects.

“These anomalies came from insertions. During my time, district engineers could only approve up to P50 million. That limit was later raised to P150 million. So if you chop up a P1 billion project into slices of P97 million each, it never reaches the regional or central office for review,” Singson pointed out.

This scheme was the reason several flood control projects were found to cost an identical P78 million each.

Blame it on climate change, a global crisis that the country is at the center of, which ingenious Filipino politicians have turned into a lucrative opportunity to get even richer.