Department of Justice (DOJ)
Sino ang abogado ng estado? Kanino ang mga kulungan? Iisang departamento: ang Katarungan.
When the state prosecutes someone, the lawyers in the courtroom work for the Department of Justice. The department is the government's counsel and its jailer: the public prosecutors who take cases to court, the National Bureau of Investigation that builds them, the Bureau of Corrections that holds the convicted, the immigration bureau that decides who enters and stays, and the witness programme that protects the people who testify.
The budget is a pipeline. Cases move from investigation to prosecution to prison, and the line items mirror the journey: investigators here, prosecutors there, correctional facilities further down. The department's hardest problems are the pipeline's too: cases that age before trial, prisons built for a fraction of the population they hold, and a corrections system whose congestion has been reported for generations.
Proposed for FY2027
₱46.44B
Line items
2,627
Agencies
11
How it got here
The government's lawyer has been on the state's payroll longer than most of its clients: the office descends from the Attorney General's establishment of the early American colonial period, and Book IV of the Administrative Code of 1987 carries its present mandate — prosecution, corrections, immigration, and investigation under one department. The witness protection programme has its own statute, Republic Act No. 6981 of 1991, created because convictions depend on witnesses who would not survive testifying without the state's cover. The department's recent history is dominated by its most visible burden: the prison system's congestion, and the episodes of opacity that surface whenever scrutiny reaches inside it.
By program
8 program rows in total. Showing 8 on page 1. Switch to the table for every row on this page.
Department total ₱46,435,011,000. 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 prosecution service is the department's public face: the fiscals and prosecutors who handle cases from city courts through the regional trial courts, funded largely as people — items, training, and the case support that keeps dockets moving. The National Bureau of Investigation provides the detective work: forensic laboratories, agents, and the cyber and organized-crime units that ordinary policing cannot sustain.
The corrections line is the heaviest: the Bureau of Corrections' prisons and penal farms, their maintenance and modernization, and the decongestion programme that has spent years transferring inmates to other facilities and building dormitories for them. Immigration funds the border's paperwork — screening, detention, and the machinery of removal. The witness protection programme is the smallest line with the largest leverage: a protected witness can be the difference between a case and a dismissal.
Reading this year's proposal
Follow one case through the proposal, from arrest to sentence, and the budget reads as a single system. Does the investigation side have the laboratory and personnel capacity to build cases that survive trial? Are prosecutors' items funded at a rate that matches the cases police deliver to them? And at the end of the pipeline, does the corrections line fund real decongestion — construction and transfers — or only the maintenance of overcrowding? Justice delayed in the early stages becomes injustice compounded at the end, and the proposal is where that argument gets its money or does not.