MANILA, Philippines —The Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) has significantly reduced the number of infrastructure projects it is implementing by eliminating duplicates and overlaps, prioritizing larger projects and aligning project workloads within the capacity of its field offices, Secretary Vince Dizon said on Thursday.
Dizon said he told the lawmakers during the budget deliberations at the House of Representatives that the department implemented 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 this year and just 11, 395 projects for 2027,” the DPWH chief said.
He said the first step was to identify and eliminate duplicate and overlapping projects and shift its focus toward “big-ticket” projects while reducing the number of smaller 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, he stressed.
He said the move “drastically reduced” the number of projects being implemented by the department.
Another factor, he said, 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?” the top agency official 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 projects being implemented by the DPWH.
Said to be the second largest in the 2027 National Expenditure Program, the House of Representatives 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 in 2025 which led to the filing of criminal charges against several former and incumbent lawmakers and DPWH executives.
