Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG)
Barangay, istasyon ng pulis, kuwartel ng bumbero — ang departamento ng araw-araw na kaayusan.
The Department of the Interior and Local Government is how the national government supervises the country's local governments. Through it flows the President's supervision over provinces, cities, municipalities, and barangays, along with the capability-building and assistance programmes that try to make four layers of government act like one. It is also the department under which the Philippine National Police sits, together with the Bureau of Fire Protection and the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology.
That combination makes the budget unusual: part of it is police operating money, part is support that reaches local treasuries and barangay halls, and part keeps fire stations and city jails running. It is the line a reader meets when the trash is collected, the fire truck arrives, or the barangay captain is trained — and, in darker weeks, when the police are in the news.
Proposed for FY2027
₱332.51B
Line items
8,128
Agencies
11
How it got here
The portfolio is among the oldest in the government — interior affairs dates to the first republic — but the modern department is a product of RA 6975 in 1990, which created today's DILG and the Philippine National Police, folding the Philippine Constabulary and the Integrated National Police into a single force under civilian departmental control. The same law created the fire and jail bureaus. Since then the department has been the national government's main lever over local officials: not by running them, which local autonomy forbids, but by assessing, training, funding, and occasionally intervening.
By operating unit
23 operating unit rows in total. Showing 23 on page 1, charting the largest 15. Switch to the table for every row on this page.
Department total ₱332,507,655,000. Rows within a page are ranked by amount; the source returns them in that order and we do not re-sort them.
What the money buys
The police line is the biggest chunk: fuel and vehicle maintenance for patrol cars, communications, equipment, and the pay of a force spread across every province. Local government support flows as financial assistance and capacity programmes, some tied to performance incentives, some routed toward barangays. Fire protection pays for stations, trucks, and firefighters; jail management keeps city and municipal jails operating under conditions of chronic congestion that reports have described for decades without curing.
The barangay layer matters more than it sounds. Department programmes reach the smallest governments in the country, which is where most Filipinos encounter the state most often — and where small amounts of money move visibly.
Reading this year's proposal
Compare three things. How much goes to police operating costs versus equipment, since both are perennial demands. How much local government assistance is tied to specific programmes versus left for local units to spend. And whether the fire and jail lines get the kind of attention their chronic overcrowding and aging stations suggest they need — the jail line in particular is a small number that carries a large weight, worth following to implementation and not just to the proposal.