The new pork, by district: ₱1.2 trillion in DPWH ‘allocables’ (2023–2025)

From 2023 to 2025, the national government earmarked close to ₱1.2 trillion in what budget documents call “allocables” — district public-works money that good-government groups consider the latest form of the pork barrel. The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ), which obtained and reviewed a Department of Public Works and Highways summary, laid out the figures district by district.

Allocables work differently from the Priority Development Assistance Fund the Supreme Court voided in 2013. The PDAF let lawmakers pick projects after the budget passed. Allocables are baked into the spending plan before Congress debates it: the DPWH fixes each district’s share in advance and writes it into the National Expenditure Program, which then becomes the General Appropriations Act. For 2025 alone, the allocable pot came to ₱356 billion.

The largest single share over the three years went to the President’s son, Ilocos Norte 1st District Rep. Ferdinand Alexander “Sandro” Marcos, at ₱15.79 billion. Next was Leyte 1st District Rep. Ferdinand Martin Romualdez, the House Speaker, at ₱14.43 billion. Appearing high on the list is not an allegation of wrongdoing: allocables are lawful appropriations approved by Congress, and the figures simply show where the money was directed.

The system took its current shape under the 19th Congress — Romualdez as Speaker, Rep. Elizaldy “Zaldy” Co as chairman of the House appropriations committee, who assembled the 2023, 2024 and 2025 budgets before stepping down in January 2025. It is the same budget machinery now under examination in the Senate’s flood-control corruption hearings.

That inquiry has concentrated on how money moves once it is inside the budget. The allocable data points the other way — to how district shares are set before the first peso is spent. It raises a straightforward question: whether the Senate ought to widen its lens from individual projects to the allocable mechanism itself, beginning with the districts that drew the most.

The biggest allocable-getters nationwide (2023–2025)

Data: Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, “Allocables are the new pork” (29 November 2025).