THE Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) has significantly reduced the number of infrastructure projects it is implementing by eliminating duplicate and overlapping ones, prioritizing larger projects and aligning workloads within the capacity of its field offices, Secretary Vince Dizon said on Thursday.
Dizon said he told the lawmakers during the House budget deliberation that the department typically implements more than 20,000 projects a year, but the number rose to more than 25,000 in 2024 and 2025, when the agency's budget approached P1 trillion.
“This year, we really worked hard to bring down the number of projects to 17,861 and just 11,395 projects for 2027,” he said.
The first step was to identify and eliminate duplicate and overlapping projects and shift its focus toward “big-ticket” projects.
The reduction was also driven by changes under the agency's budget program, including the removal of projects costing less than P5 million under the congressional-mandated program, Dizon said.
Another factor was the need to ensure that DPWH's district engineering offices and regional offices were not assigned more projects than they could effectively manage.
“When I entered DPWH, one of the first things I asked our implementing offices was, what is the ideal number of projects that should be implemented by our implementation offices, our district engineers and regional directors?” he said.
Finding that some offices had been handling workloads far beyond their ideal capacity, he stressed that each district engineering office would now have a limit to the number of projects it can implement because of its “absorptive capacity.”
“If the ideal number that a district engineering office should implement is, say, 100 projects, some were already implementing three or four times that number,” he said.
Dizon emphasized that the three measures — eliminating duplicate and overlapping projects, focusing on larger projects and reducing workloads to manageable levels — accounted for the “dramatic change” in the number of DPWH projects.
The House of Representatives has started deliberating the agency’s proposed P644 billion budget, including the P107.4 billion intended for flood control projects.
Funding for flood mitigation was scrapped in the 2026 General Appropriations Act following the multibillion-peso corruption scandal in 2025, which led to the filing of criminal charges against several former and incumbent lawmakers and DPWH executives.
