Flood Control and the Politics of Corruption

By: Guillermo Sumbiling

The revelations about excessive spending in flood control projects are not new—they are merely the latest flare of a fire that has been burning for decades. For years, flood control has been treated as a “golden project” by politicians: easy to justify, difficult to audit, and conveniently useful for dispensing political favors at both the national and local levels.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s decision to finally say “enough” and pull the plug on bloated flood control spending deserves recognition. Yet it also exposes a disturbing truth: the abuse of taxpayer funds in the name of “disaster mitigation” has long been carried out under the eyes of institutions tasked with protecting public interest—the DPWH, the Department of Budget and Management, the Commission on Audit, and local governments themselves.

This is not the first warning. In January 2018, the Department of Finance announced a USD 500 million funding for Metro Manila flood control—equivalent to roughly ₱25–27 billion at today’s exchange rates. That amount alone rivals or even exceeds the annual budgets of some entire government departments.

By July 2024, Senator Chiz Escudero was already calling for an investigation into the ballooning costs of flood control. Senator Joel Villanueva, in the same period, revealed that government was spending an astonishing ₱1.079 billion every single day on flood control projects. To put this into perspective, that amounts to nearly ₱394 billion a year—
• twice the annual budget of the Department of Agriculture (₱191 billion),
• over twelve times the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (₱32 billion), and
• almost double the Department of Social Welfare and Development (₱219 billion).

And yet, despite these astronomical sums, Metro Manila and other major cities continue to sink under the same floodwaters whenever heavy rains pour.

The question is damning: if senators, COA auditors, and other guardians of the treasury already knew about the anomaly years ago, why is it only now—when the President took the cudgels—that serious action is being pursued?

Flood control projects, by their nature, are multi-year, multi-billion undertakings. They are politically attractive, but their results are often invisible to ordinary citizens. Unlike a bridge or a school building, the absence of floods is harder to measure, making it the perfect cover for corruption.

This is why the problem is so deeply entrenched. It is not simply about “bad contractors” or “flawed projects.” It is about a system that involves those elected to safeguard public funds—who instead look away or, worse, benefit from the cycle.

The President’s stance is an opportunity, but it must not stop at rhetoric. We need a transparent accounting of all past flood control expenditures, independent auditing beyond the usual COA reports, and a strict reorientation of infrastructure priorities toward projects that deliver tangible, measurable relief to communities.

For too long, flood control has been weaponized as a well of corruption. Breaking this cycle will demand more than a presidential rebuke. It will require Congress, DPWH, COA, and local leaders to stop treating taxpayers’ money as political bounty and start treating it as what it truly is: the lifeblood of the Filipino people.