As floodwaters rise, so do doubts

As floodwaters rise, so do doubts | Daily Tribune

Tinio described the “modus” plainly: Agencies submit inflated figures to the National Expenditure Program; those figures get quietly whittled down before the General Appropriations Act is passed; thus, room is made for congressional insertions — the pork-barrel sleight of hand that survived the Priority Development Assistance Fund’s abolition by simply changing its wardrobe.

Budget officials answered with the bureaucratic equivalent of a shrug: The figures reflect “evaluated requirements,” and what Congress does next is Congress’s business. That answer is technically true but completely inadequate. It describes a system, not a safeguard.

More damning is the geography of neglect. Only 113 of 197 DPWH district engineering offices have flood control projects in the proposed budget — and the Davao Region, which suffers from flooding, too, has none.

That is not an evaluation gap. It is exactly the kind of vacuum that gets filled later, off the public record, when districts start “discovering” projects during bicameral negotiations. Tinio is right to flag it now, before the insertions happen rather than after, when the outrage arrives too late to matter.

Then there is the P24-billion “leadership fund” that Malacañang insists never existed — except that Manuel Bonoan, the former DPWH secretary now in detention, told the Sandiganbayan under oath that sitting senators accessed exactly such a fund in 2024.

Palace Press Officer Clarissa A. Castro’s denial rests on a technicality: The fund isn’t named in the budget bill. But the entire scandal that put Bonoan in detention was never about funds being named correctly. It was about funds being disbursed to ghost and substandard projects under legitimate-sounding line items.

A fund’s absence from a budget document proves nothing except that whoever put it in knew how to hide it.

So what can ordinary Filipinos actually do, beyond watching their streets flood and their taxes vanish into the same pipeline twice in one news cycle?

Start with the DPWH’s own flood control map, published after the flood control projects scandal broke — an unglamorous but genuinely useful tool that lets any citizen check whether a project near them exists, what it cost and who built it. Use it. Take a screenshot. Compare it against what actually got built, or didn’t.

Push Commission on Audit findings into the political conversation before elections, not after.

Demand that the DBM publish district-by-district allocation lists before the bicameral conference, not after, so any last-minute insertion would be visible in real time rather than buried in a signed law. Transparency before enactment is worth more than risking a spike in your blood pressure from the outrage after.

None of this guarantees accountability. The Philippines has spent decades demonstrating that visibility alone doesn’t stop theft. Former Sen. Revilla is on trial for malversation and graft charges but is on temporary release after securing bail in July, and Bonoan testified from detention, not from disgrace.

A public that tracks the money before it disappears is harder to rob quietly than one that only asks questions once the floodwaters recede.

For sure, the rains will come back next year regardless.

Whether the proposed P107 billion meant to hold them back reaches actual drainage systems or flows into another senator’s pocket will depend on whether Filipinos keep up their vigilance after this week’s headlines fade — because the DPWH districts with zero projects and funds are exactly where the next scandal is already being constructed.