The practice of diverting funds from education, health, poverty alleviation and other programs to graft-ridden public works projects, including flood control, also benefited congresspersons, senators, the Vice President and the President, who have seen their budgets surging over the past several years. 

This is the observation stated by the Ateneo School of Government (ASoG) in a position paper it issued on Sept. 22, a day after huge rallies against corruption were held nationwide to call attention to, among other things, the need for President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to penalize all those involved in graft. 

Offering its “talents to help find solutions to governance problems,” the school provided sets of data “to contribute to finding greater clarity and deepening the level of discourse on the issue.”

The Jesuit-run university’s school of government said taxpayers were coughing up daily ₱290,083 to sustain each of the 318 members of the House of Representatives; ₱1,590,202 for each of the 24 members of the Senate; ₱2,008,762 for the Vice President; and ₱43,412,260 for the President, based alone on the annual budgets of Congress, the Office of the Vice President (OVP) and the Office of the President (OP).

The taxpayers’ burden of supporting these officials becomes heavy every year as the budget of the OP rose 461% to ₱15.8 billion over the past 10 years. The budgets of the House surged 280% to ₱33.7 billion; the Senate, 275 % to ₱13.9 billion; and the OVP, 47% to ₱733. 2 million. (See Table 1.)

Table 1. Annual budgets of the Offices of the President and Vice President, Senate and House of Representatives

Sources: 2025 GAB Bicameral Report; 2016 GAA

“Why was there an exponential increase in the budget of these agencies? How much of these are under oversight scrutiny, and how much are confidential funds?” said ASoG, which focuses on developing competent and ethical leaders for the country and is headed by Dean Jennifer Oreta.

“We therefore pose this challenge—if the administration is serious in weeding out corruption, we demand that it carry out an institutional scrutiny up to the highest echelon of power.”

Diversion of funds

It was the diversion of funds from key social and economic programs that helped fund government infrastructure projects, especially flood management, and that have become a big source of corruption for lawmakers, personnel of the DPWH, and other officials, as revealed in the hearings in the House and Senate.

Table 2. 2025 budget diversion to Congress and Malacañang

Table 3. Budget diverted to DPWH and other agencies

Source: 2025 GAB Bicameral Report

According to ASoG, the deepening crisis of corruption is systematically eroding the integrity of public institutions and corroding the moral fabric of public service.

It said: “The scandal involving ghost projects, misallocation of funds, collusion between contractors and government officials, conflicts of interest, and monopolies of contractors involving billions of pesos, makes one’s head spin. 

“We are horrified by the blatant disregard for the rule of law. We are stunned by the complicity of leaders in flagrant corrupt practices. The magnitude of resources siphoned through these practices is not only alarming but profoundly disturbing.”

ASoG found that the flood control budget progressively rose from ₱42.28 billion, or 1.62% of the General Appropriations Act (GAA), in 2022 to ₱244.58 billion, or 4.24% of the GAA, in 2024.

The flood control budget further rose to ₱254.3 billion in 2025, based on the National Expenditure Program (NEP) and the GAA. But this amount may be understated, said ASoG. (The NEP is the annual national budget proposal that Malacañang submits to Congress; the GAA is the national budget that Congress approves.)

Table 4. Flood-gate scandal

Sources: GAA and DPWH  

¹ Percentage of flood control budget to GAA is computed using open-source data  

² DPWH data

³ On the 2025 flood control budget: The 2025 NEP and GAA show ₱254.3 billion allocation for flood control. If one goes through the insertions, there are other flood-control-like projects totaling ₱242 billion spread out in the GAA, which can bring the total up to ₱496.3 billion. In his media statements, President Marcos uses the amount ₱350 billion; this appears to be a subset of the bigger total.

Bigger than DOH budget

The Flood Management Program (FMP) has the biggest allocation in the DPWH budget at 32.1% of the DPWH operations budget in 2025, or almost double that of 2022, according to a report by the Congressional Policy and Budget Research Department.

“The FMP budget is higher than the budget of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (₱230.1 billion), the Department of Health (₱223.2 billion), the Department of Transportation (₱180.9 billion) and the Department of Agriculture (₱129.0 billion),” ASoG said.   

Table 5. Budget cuts in DSWD, PhilHealth, DOH, and DepEd

Table 6. Budget cuts in DA and NIA budgets

Source: 2025 GAB Bicameral Report

Corruption in the DPWH has spanned decades, and fixing the system requires strong political will from the political leaders, it said.  

ASoG also said “the DPWH budget, which for the first time hit one trillion pesos in the 2025 GAA, has so far surpassed the budget for education, in violation of the constitutional mandate.” The 1987 Constitution requires that education receives the highest budget allocation.

“We therefore ask: Are flood control projects (which constitute 22% of the DPWH budget) more important than addressing the 160,000-classroom backlog and the dilapidated condition of 70% of existing classrooms?” it said, adding: “The flood-gate scandal, however, is just the tip of the iceberg. Deeper and more serious concerns need to be surfaced in the debate.”   

Urban bias, debt 

ASoG pointed out that urban infrastructures prioritized at the expense of rural development underscores the bias for urban-based development.  

It said: “Budget cuts and movement away from strategic transport, infrastructure, agriculture-based investments, to graft-prone projects like flood control, multipurpose buildings, and hyper-micro local projects, like local roads, footbridges and deep wells, interrogate the supposed rural development priority of the administration.  

“Moreover, the inability to properly manage the budget will continue the overreliance on borrowing, and will keep the trend of the national debt growing faster than the GDP growth.” 

To finance the surge in DPWH projects, the national government has resorted to ever higher borrowings. 

ASoG said that for 2025, 40% of the national budget is funded by borrowings: “As of the end of April 2025, the national debt had grown to ₱16.75 trillion, up from ₱12.79 trillion in 2022; and debt as a percentage of GDP is 63.1% as of the end of the 2nd quarter 2025, which is above the threshold.

“The accumulation of debt, combined with high interest rates, will continue to increase the cost of servicing. It was ₱1.6 trillion in 2023, grew by 26% in 2024, and may continue to grow in 2025. Debt servicing will continue to eat up a significant portion of budget expenditure.”

‘Padrino’-based poverty reduction

ASoG said the administration’s poverty reduction program is among the casualties of the broken budget system—an indication of its priority direction.

Rules-based programs like the 4Ps or the Conditional Cash Transfer Program, the flagship of the country’s anti-poverty efforts, together with PhilHealth, have suffered severe cuts in their budgets, according to ASoG.  

It said: “In 2025, the 4Ps budget was reduced by ₱50 billion, part of the ₱94 billion taken from the DSWD budget. PhilHealth’s subsidy of ₱74.4 billion was reduced to zero. In their place, generous funding was provided to cash doleouts, like AKAP, AICS, MAIFP and TUPAD. 

Table 7. Budget diversion to AKAP and other programs

“These programs have no system for identifying beneficiaries and conditions for qualifying as a beneficiary. In 2025, the budget for these programs totaled ₱130 billion. 

“Greater role and discretion are given to politicians in the selection of projects, beneficiaries and amounts of assistance and visibility in the distribution of the same. Social services are headed toward becoming a matter of utang na loob, not a matter of right.” 

The repeated violation of laws and jurisprudence on budget matters has weakened the rule of law and the system of checks and balances that are cornerstones of our system of representative democracy, ASoG said.  

Demands

As an institution committed to ethics and integrity in governance, it said it is joining the public in making the following demands: 

• Legislators must continue the conduct of hearings in aid of legislation, and correct the flaws and loopholes of our existing laws; we must end the grandstanding and public hearings in-aid-of-reelection practice.  

• The newly created Independent Commission on Infrastructure (ICI) should remain faithful to its mandate and sworn duty, and carry out the investigation truthfully.  

• The DPWH, Department of Budget and Management, Department of the Interior and Local Government, and concerned local government units must fully support the ICI investigation. 

The Senate and the House must also submit to the ICI the bicameral conference committee reports of 2023, 2024 and 2025 that were signed by the bicam conferees and ratified by the plenary of both chambers. These reports are public documents and therefore must also be made accessible to the public.  

• The ICI should include the following in the conduct of its investigation: Senate and House chairs and vice chairs of the finance and appropriation committees, including the technical staff; former Senate president Chiz Escudero and former speaker Martin Romualdez; the Executive Secretary and members of the Development Budget Coordinating Committee, to answer why huge budget cuts and diversions happened in 2023, 2024 and 2025 without any interventions and protestations from the executive; and the Commission on Audit for its failure to ensure responsible use of public funds. 

• Conduct transparent, inclusive, and honest hearings and investigations, giving the public due access to the records related to government funds and the national budget. 

“Public office is a public trust. Today, the trust is broken,” ASoG said. “We support the current efforts of the administration to address the issue and regain the trust of the public.”  

CoverStory phoned the Ateneo School of Government on Tuesday in the interest of transparency to ask about the signatories to the position paper. The school declined to provide the names.