Batangas 1st District Rep. Leandro Legarda Leviste has accused the Department of Public Works and Highways of withholding its internal database of project proponents in the National Expenditure Program (NEP), alleging the agency is concealing budget insertions amounting to P721.83 billion for 2025 and P496.97 billion for 2026.

Leviste urged the DPWH to release the database to prove its claimed commitment to transparency, asserting that the NEP contains projects attributed to DPWH planning engineers but allegedly proposed by politicians and contractors.

“The DPWH has a database of the proponents in the NEP, which they should release if they are truly for transparency,” Leviste said. “I cannot in good conscience watch the DPWH claim to be for transparency without pointing this out.”

According to Leviste, the DPWH may be reluctant to disclose the files because the list of project proponents includes not only senators and congressmen but also Cabinet secretaries, undersecretaries and other senior officials.

He said documents obtained from the office of former DPWH undersecretary Catalina Cabral identified the proponents behind the NEP entries. 

Leviste said that during his 18 November meeting with the Independent Commission for Infrastructure, the panel said the DPWH did not provide the list and that Cabral’s office had been “cordoned off” during the commission’s first visit in September.

On 26 November, Leviste met with the Field Investigation Office of the Ombudsman, which has begun a fact-finding probe into allegations that Construction Workers Solidarity Party-list Rep. Tirso Edwin L. Gardiola and his construction firms secured billions of pesos in contracts from 2022 to 2025 and received kickbacks.

Leviste thanked both the ICI and the Ombudsman for acting on calls to investigate Gardiola, but noted that the Ombudsman has yet to receive the DPWH’s files listing the project proponents.

“I appreciate the hard work of the teams at the ICI and Ombudsman, but worry the investigations will be unable to uncover much of the wrongdoing in the budget unless the DPWH gives unfettered access to its files,” he said.

Leviste also pressed the DPWH to release the list of “non-allocable” or “leadership fund” projects in the 2026 budget. 

He said the agency’s P401.35-billion allocable budget covers 254 congressional districts, while an additional amount classified as “non-allocable” — where proponents are not publicly identified — reached about P320 billion in 2025 and P95 billion in 2026.

Leviste said a full disclosure on where the “non-allocable” funds were distributed will determine whether or not the DPWH has stopped the alleged practice of selling budgets to contractors.