Flood-Control Fiasco: A Policy Reckoning for Accountability in the Philippines’ Climate Risk Governance
Flooded villages in Calumpit, Bulacan province, north of Manila, in July 2025, after a river overflowed due to heavy rains brought about by Typhoon Emong. Photo: AFP
By: Weena Gera, Convenor, Urban Studies Program, UP CIDS
The unraveling of irregularities in flood control projects has once again laid bare the entrenched corruption in Philippine public works and infrastructure. The release of the 2025 World Risk Report, naming the country as the world’s most disaster-prone yet again, highlighted the criticality of the issue. Its warnings on flood risks and the intensifying vulnerabilities from climate change and rapid urbanization were grimly underscored by the landfall of severe tropical storm Opong on the very day of the report’s release—September 24, 2025—the 15th storm of the year, leaving intense flooding, devastation, and loss of lives in its wake. The convergence of scandal, disaster, and public indignation—symbolized by the “Trillion Peso March” just days earlier (September 21)—signals a reckoning: calamities are not just natural and climate change phenomena, but moral indictments of state failure.
The ongoing Senate Blue Ribbon Committee inquiries have exposed an elaborate kickback distribution system—anchored in mutual benefit agreements between favored private contractors and a hierarchy of government entities—in plundering public funds from flood infrastructure projects. Political payoffs are normalized as the cost of doing business. In return, favored contractors operate under the protection of district engineers, lawmakers, and executive officials, while ghost projects, substandard works, and hazardous infrastructures proliferate. Testimonies, however, have also revealed a nefarious orchestration of selective truth-telling—designed less to expose systemic theft than to shield political patrons and recalibrate alliances. The spectacle of blame-shifting amid mounting evidence raises the deeper question: can accountability hold in a state where infrastructures of impunity are as deeply embedded as the infrastructures of corruption they protect?
The scandal revolves around two notorious public works contractors: the Discayas, whose companies cornered over ₱31 billion in flood-control projects during Marcos Jr.’s first three years (PCIJ 2025[1]), and the Cos, who secured ₱15.7 billion while holding the legislative purse strings through the House Appropriations Committee (PCIJ 2025[2]). The Discayas were also noted to have hugely profited under the Duterte administration from zero revenues in 2015, to having about P99 million in 2016, on to having multiplied their income to about P16 billion in 2021 from project deals with the government (Manalastas 2025[3]). Yet, we are soon reminded that these shoddy contractors are mainly a symptom of a far-larger scale of theft entrenched in our state apparatus.
Investigations trace how these private interests fused with state power, and a two-pronged infrastructure of plunder is evident— inflation of flood control budgets under the pretext of disaster resilience and nontransparent insertions and reallocations in the bicameral conference committee; and a rigged infrastructure bidding and procurement system anchored in coercive patronage, and enforced by a hierarchy of ‘basura (i.e. waste- claimed to refer to the illicit payouts) collectors’ reaching the highest levels of government. The public works budget itself has become a proxy pork barrel, replacing the outlawed Priority Development Assistance Fund, as our climate adaptation and resilience strategy has turned into a mechanism for corruption.
1. Budget inflation: Under the Duterte regime, budget appropriations for flood control projects increased from P79 billion in 2016 to over P200 billion annually by 2021 (Villanueva 2025[4]). Meanwhile, under Marcos, Jr., the government funded 9,855 flood-control projects worth over P545 billion from July 2022 to May 2025 (PCIJ 2025[5]).
Budget insertions: Legislators, in abuse of their mandate to review and amend the National Expenditure Program for high priority projects, divert substantial funds to flood control projects under the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) across their legislative districts. Herein lies the accountability of both members of the House and the Senate, (especially legislators, in a clear conflict of interest, themselves owning or are linked to contracting firms (another PCIJ report[6] counted 18 members of the 20th Congress to have ownership or connected to companies which have secured government public works contracts); or those who have illegally received campaign finance and donations from public works contractors who would then be given most favored status to get awarded billions-worth of government contracts).
Executive officials illegally receiving campaign donations from government contractors, as well as appropriations officials starting with top officials of the Department of Budget and Management (DBM), the Department of Finance, and ultimately the President himself will have to answer for (see the analyses of Punongbayan 2025[7] and PCIJ 2025[8]);
2. Rigged system of infrastructure bidding controlled by a network tied to high-ranking officials pressuring contractors toward illicit payments to gain favored status in a hierarchy of required commissions and ‘kickbacks’ involving district engineers up to top DPWH officials and legislators, with the latter getting a share ranging from 25-30 percent. Beyond lawmakers and DPWH officials, accountability extends to procurement boards, auditors, public banks, and regulatory agencies whose complicity or negligence facilitated the laundering of anomalous funds.
The stakes are higher than ever. In an era of intensifying climate risks, every peso lost to corruption erodes the country’s capacity to adapt, prepare, and protect its citizens. The failure of flood control projects is not merely fiscal waste—it is fatal. It transforms climate adaptation into climate injustice. Policy responses must therefore confront corruption as a climate governance issue. Integrating accountability and anti-corruption governance institutions in our climate and infrastructure planning is dire, if we are to make any advances for structural reform.
Accountability begins with embedding science and transparency in budgetary processes: credible hazard and risk mapping by institutions like Project NOAH (National Operational Assessment of Hazards – notably defunded by former president Duterte) and the UP Resilience Institute must inform appropriations and project selection, subject to independent vetting by technical panel and public consultation. The Philippines is one of the eight founding governments of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) framework since 2011 – a global initiative that promotes transparency, inclusivity, public participation and accountability in governance. With the DBM at the helm of Philippine OGP, institutionalizing open and participatory budgeting is one pivotal advance it can make to building citizen trust in times of crisis. Moreover, transparency in bicameral deliberation sessions can institutionalize checks against arbitrary insertions. UP Professor Cielo Magno has been calling for institutionalizing an “open bicam”[9] by embedding this mechanism in the rules of both houses of Congress to facilitate deeper accountability among legislators. Open, transparent and scientific budgetary process can then be supported by digitalized procurement and contracting systems, independent monitoring—including citizen oversight and engineering audits—ensuring that resilience infrastructure is real and viable, not ghostly.
Certainly reforms cannot stop at technocratic fixes. However, the creation of ad hoc investigative commissions, while symbolically responsive, features the vulnerability of executive-created bodies to political capture. With its creation by virtue of Executive fiat, the Independent Commission for Infrastructure’s independence from the President becomes suspect. True accountability reform requires strengthening constitutional bodies like the Commission on Audit, the Ombudsman, the judiciary, and the coercive powers of the state to prosecute plunder—starting with legislators and officials at the highest levels.
History warns us of recurring cycles: the Napoles pork barrel scam implicated senators but left impunity intact. Today, the scale is greater, the money bigger, and the stakes existential. Whether the Philippines can break this cycle—transforming infrastructures of plunder into infrastructures of accountability—will define not just governance outcomes, but the survival of communities in an age of climate crisis.
[1] https://pcij.org/2025/08/31/5-reveals-from-the-flood-control-data/
[2] https://pcij.org/2025/04/26/bicol-political-clans-aiding-typhoon-victims-back-projects-blamed-for-flooding/
[3] https://journalnews.com.ph/discaya-firms-income-astound-lawmaker/#gsc.tab=0
[4] https://www.rappler.com/voices/thought-leaders/vantage-point-dangerous-gambit-discayas-state-witnesses/
[5] https://pcij.org/flood-control/
[6] https://pcij.org/2025/08/31/5-reveals-from-the-flood-control-data/
[7] https://www.rappler.com/voices/thought-leaders/in-this-economy-murder-budget-express/?fbclid=IwY2xjawNGSBNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHuPM8a2qFk-ZREupdcr8TkfE4jOr6zA_05E2CxTUrb4aVTr_ARQ0iWBgNXWk_aem_dojNJKxA-dBKb95JzLBwxg
[8] https://pcij.org/2025/09/18/marcos-and-duterte-contractors/
[9] https://www.google.com/search?q=Cielo+Magno+calls+for+institutionalizing+transparency+in+bicam+sessions&oq=Cielo+Magno+calls+for+institutionalizing+transparency+in+bicam+sessions