Senate budget deliberations on the Department of Public Works and Highways' (DPWH) proposed 2027 allocation turned up 7,107 infrastructure projects worth ₱251 billion containing data anomalies, according to a September 26, 2026 report by The Philippine Star's Neil Jayson Servallos. The finding lands a year into a nationwide reckoning over flood-control corruption at the same agency, and arrives packaged with an awkward footnote: the official currently running DPWH may no longer have the legal authority to do so.
Senate President Sherwin Gatchalian's office identified eight distinct categories of problems in the DPWH project list: duplicated projects, misplaced or missing station numbers, missing geographic coordinates, lump-sum appropriations without itemized detail, overlapping projects, unspecified scope of work, conflicting classifications of the type of work involved, and — perhaps most tellingly — projects already funded in the 2026 budget reappearing for funding again in 2027. Each category represents a different way public works money can be requested, and potentially released, without a verifiable trail back to an actual, singular piece of infrastructure.
The scrutiny wasn't limited to the paperwork. Acting Public Works Secretary Vince Dizon, appointed in September 2025, found himself facing a more personal question of legal standing. Under the Administrative Code of 1987, an acting Cabinet appointment is generally good for one year — a term Sen. Imee Marcos pointed out had already lapsed. "Today is what, Sept. 25, 2026? Overdue na po kayo ng ilang araw, 24 days," she told Dizon during the hearing, using the Tagalog phrase for "you're already late." Dizon's response was notably unresistant: "I will be more than happy to accept that," he said, when asked whether he would step down if the law required it — an answer that concedes the point rather than defends the appointment, and leaves unresolved who has actually had the authority to sign off on the very projects senators are now picking apart.
DPWH has been instructed to conduct data cleanup at the regional and district level before the Senate finalizes its committee report on the 2027 General Appropriations Bill. More than 11,000 projects are set to be posted on a public transparency portal — a nod to the ₱445-billion project portal DPWH opened just days earlier, on September 20, in the wake of the Taguig reclamation stop-work controversy. Whether a portal listing helps if the underlying project data is duplicated, uncoordinated, or lump-summed remains an open question the hearing did not resolve.
Neither DPWH nor Malacañang has yet issued a substantive response to the specific anomaly count beyond Dizon's exchange with Marcos. What is missing from the record so far: any accounting of how many of the 7,107 flagged projects, if any, have already received funding releases, and any timeline for when — or whether — Dizon's appointment status will be formally resolved.
Context
The finding comes as DPWH remains the central agency in the Philippines' flood-control kickback scandal, which has produced plunder charges against former House Speaker Martin Romualdez and a Sandiganbayan suspension of a sitting party-list representative over DPWH contracts awarded to a firm he held a stake in. The Department of Budget and Management reported DPWH had already released 99.5% of its 2026 budget as of mid-September — among the fastest of any agency — a release rate that now sits uneasily next to a 2027 project list the Senate says it cannot yet verify.