A YEAR has passed since President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. stood before Congress to expose the flood control scandal, and in his 5th State of the Nation Address (SONA) last July 27, he opened it by reminding the nation of exactly that — “Isang taon na ang nakalipas mula noong huli akong tumayo rito upang ilantad ang katiwalian na nadiskubre namin sa mga flood control project.” He said he is “not the president of my family” and “not the president of my friends,” and vowed to pursue investigations wherever the evidence leads, even when politically difficult. “This pains me, but we have to do what is right,” the president asserted, placing accountability — not personal loyalty — at the center of his administration’s anti-corruption campaign.
Following his 2025 SONA’s “Mahiya naman kayo” declaration, and the ensuing controversy surrounding anomalies in flood control projects, the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), under Secretary Vince Dizon, suspended numerous flood control undertakings, initiated reviews and promised sweeping reforms. The administration deserves credit for recognizing that public infrastructure should never become a vehicle for private enrichment.
Unfinished DPWH reforms
To his credit, Secretary Dizon has not been idle. In November 2025, he ordered a sweeping revision of the DPWH’s construction materials price data (CMPD), cutting the standard government price of asphalt hot mix by roughly 50 percent after finding that materials long used in flood control and road projects — asphalt, gravel, cement, steel — were priced as much as 75 percent above prevailing market rates. Dizon opined that the inflated pricing was itself a corruption mechanism, one the president had ordered dismantled.
When the updated CMPD was applied nationwide, one asphalt overlay project in Central Visayas saw its programmed cost trimmed by barely 3 percent — from P25.545 million to P24.76 million — even though its actual construction cost was only P16.03 million. That left an excess of P8.74 million sitting in a single line item of a single project (PDI, Dec. 14, 2025). Multiply that gap across the thousands of asphalt overlay projects now being re-bid nationwide, and the arithmetic of a new scandal starts to assemble itself in plain sight.
Watching the wrong door
Dizon’s suspension of flood control-related awards and the nationwide halt on road concreting projects were, by most accounts, the correct response to a scandal that has already sent contractors and former lawmakers to jail and frozen billions in assets (GMA News, July 2026). But a secretary who trains all his scrutiny on one category of project risks leaves the back door open on another. Asphalt overlay work — smaller in scale, less politically charged, easier to wave through as routine maintenance — is exactly the kind of project that thrives in the shadow of a bigger scandal.
One area that deserves the same degree of scrutiny is the DPWH’s asphalt overlay projects. Insiders confided to me that these projects, budgeted in 2025, are now being bid out by some district engineering offices.
A review of these 2025 procurement documents shows recurring patterns that, while not proof of wrongdoing, are sufficient to warrant closer examination. There are projects within the same district office involving the same road, nearly identical technical specifications, identical contract durations, and even exactly the same Approved Budget for the Contract, differing primarily in kilometer stations. Similar standardized descriptions appear repeatedly across numerous districts. Standardization is not unusual in public works, but repetitive budgeting and project segmentation are precisely the kinds of patterns that auditors should examine. There may well be legitimate engineering reasons for treating them as separate contracts. But that is exactly why these projects deserve transparent explanation and technical validation.
Public confidence is strengthened when government demonstrates not only that projects comply with procurement rules, but also that they make engineering and economic sense.
Dizon should not rest on his laurels
Secretary Dizon has earned public support for moving decisively against questionable flood control projects. That momentum should not stop there. Asphalt overlay projects, road rehabilitation contracts, bridge maintenance and every other major infrastructure program should be subjected to the same data-driven scrutiny. Modern auditing no longer relies solely on site inspections. Procurement analytics can identify duplicate budget patterns, repeated technical specifications, unusual contractor concentration and adjacent projects that may warrant closer review long before allegations arise.
Dizon should know that a good policy can be easily diluted at the implementing-office level, where the actual bidding happens. His initial reforms have shown that political will can change institutional behavior. But the fight against corruption cannot become program-specific. If vigilance ends with flood control, corruption may simply migrate to another line item in the budget.
The challenge before the DPWH is no longer merely to clean up last year’s scandals. It is to ensure that future scandals never happen. That requires looking beyond flood control projects and examining every peso spent on public infrastructure with the same rigor. Corruption rarely announces where it will go next. Allegedly, it has returned to the DPWH.
The asphalt overlay projects now on the table are the test of whether the DPWH learned that lesson, or whether it simply moved the racket from the riversides to the road surfaces.
allinsight.manilatimes@gmail.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/All.Insight.Manila.Times
Viber: (0915)4201085