Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH)

The Department of Public Works and Highways builds and maintains the country's national roads, bridges, and flood-control systems. When a reader crosses a flyover, drives a national highway, or wonders why their street floods after one afternoon of rain, they are encountering this department's work — or its absence. It is consistently among the largest departments in the national budget, because concrete is expensive and the backlog is old.

Its work is split across a handful of program families: national road networks, bridges, flood management and drainage, and other public structures. Most of the money flows out through contracts with private construction firms, which is where the department's public story has lately become as much about procurement as about engineering.

How it got here

The department descends from the Bureau of Public Works of the American colonial period and was repeatedly reorganized before taking its modern form under Executive Order No. 124 in 1987. Its regional offices map onto the country's political geography, which makes it simultaneously an engineering agency and a nationwide patronage network — a duality that decades of audit findings and hearing after hearing keep returning to. In recent years its flood-control programme has moved from a technical line item to the centre of national politics, after completed projects began failing spectacularly during the 2025 monsoon season.

What the money buys

The bulk of the appropriation buys construction and maintenance contracts: paving and widening national roads, replacing aged bridges, dredging rivers, and building flood-mitigation structures. A smaller but contested share pays for the planning, right-of-way acquisition, and design studies that decide where the concrete goes.

The flood-control programme is the one to watch. It ballooned after the 2022 storms and the 2025 floods, and it is now the most heavily scrutinized line in the entire budget: the Commission on Audit and independent investigators have flagged hundreds of projects that were fully paid but appear never to have been built. The tools linked at the bottom of this page let you check individual projects against satellite imagery yourself.

Reading this year's proposal

Read this department's proposal with the flood-control line in mind: after a year of ghost-project hearings, the question is not only how much is requested but whether the verification machinery exists to confirm the work. The enacted law now authorizes satellite-based validation of flood-control projects — a provision worth tracking to the implementing stage. The region-by-region breakdown you can switch to below is also worth a look, because the geography of past awards is exactly what auditors flagged.