MANILA, Philippines — A seemingly simple ₱180-million allocation for evacuation centers in every Philippine region has become one of the early flashpoints in the proposed 2027 national budget, after Sen. Panfilo “Ping” Lacson questioned why every region was given exactly the same amount despite vastly different disaster risks and local needs.
Malacañang has now promised close scrutiny of the spending, saying the Marcos administration will monitor the projects to ensure billions of pesos intended for disaster shelters do not end up funding facilities that exist only on paper.
Palace Press Officer and Presidential Communications Office Undersecretary Claire Castro said the government has mechanisms to determine whether publicly funded projects are actually completed.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., she said, does not want a repeat of so-called “ghost projects” — government projects that receive funding but are never completed or, in some cases, never built at all.
But the controversy goes beyond whether the evacuation centers will actually be constructed.
At the heart of Lacson’s questions is a much more basic issue:
Why does every region need exactly ₱180 million?
₱180 Million for Every Region — But Where Will the Centers Go?
Lacson said his office discovered while examining the proposed 2027 National Expenditure Program (NEP) that each of the country’s 17 regions had been allotted a uniform ₱180 million for evacuation centers.
The proposed allocations total approximately ₱3.06 billion nationwide.
According to Lacson, the budget documents he reviewed did not specify which cities or municipalities would receive the projects.
He questioned whether studies had been conducted to determine which regions were most urgently in need of additional evacuation facilities, arguing that disaster vulnerability and existing infrastructure vary considerably across the country.
The senator said the absence of project-specific locations and the unusually uniform regional allocation deserve closer examination during congressional budget hearings.
The numbers, however, have an important explanation.
Reports on the proposed program indicate that the ₱180 million earmarked for each region would finance two Ligtas Pinoy Centers, valued at approximately ₱90 million each.
That means the current proposal could finance 34 evacuation centers nationwide.
DBM Says Missing Locations Do Not Mean Projects Are Unplanned
The Department of Budget and Management has pushed back against suggestions that the absence of named locations automatically makes the allocation questionable.
The agency said site selection is governed by the Ligtas Pinoy Centers Act, rather than being left entirely to the discretion of budget officials or the Department of Public Works and Highways.
Republic Act No. 12076, signed by President Marcos on December 6, 2024, mandates the establishment of safe and fully operational evacuation centers for cities and municipalities nationwide.
Under the law, disaster authorities are required to prioritize locations based on actual risk and need.
Among the factors considered are disaster exposure, topography, availability of suitable land, hazard assessments and the needs of affected communities.
The Department of Public Works and Highways serves as the implementing agency for the construction projects.
Government guidelines also require proposed sites to be located in areas considered least susceptible to hazards or outside danger zones based on updated hazard maps and assessments from agencies including PAGASA, PHIVOLCS and the Mines and Geosciences Bureau.
In other words, according to the administration, the ₱180-million regional allocations may appear uniform on paper, but the actual locations are supposed to undergo a separate technical selection process.
Western Visayas Was Already Preparing Its Priority List
There is also evidence that the site-selection process had begun even before the controversy erupted.
In Western Visayas, the Office of Civil Defense presented local governments with a standardized prioritization framework for Ligtas Pinoy Centers in July 2026.
Under Section 8 of the law, the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council is required to prepare a prioritized list of local government units.
That list becomes the basis for DPWH’s annual planning and budgeting for evacuation-center projects.
This is particularly significant for disaster-prone areas in Western Visayas, where communities routinely face typhoons, flooding, landslides and other climate-related hazards.
It also strengthens the government’s argument that the eventual project locations are meant to be determined by vulnerability assessments rather than political preference.
But it does not completely answer Lacson’s other question:
Why should regions with different populations, disaster exposure and existing infrastructure automatically receive identical allocations?
That issue is likely to surface again when lawmakers scrutinize the budget.
Lacson Warns of a Possible Pre-Election Spending Pattern
Lacson has also widened his scrutiny beyond evacuation centers.
The senator said his staff found numerous allocations for social assistance or “ayuda” in the proposed 2027 budget and warned lawmakers to examine whether government spending is becoming increasingly politically oriented as the 2028 national elections draw closer.
He stressed that social assistance itself is not the problem.
His concern is whether short-term assistance is receiving disproportionate funding compared with programs designed to produce longer-term economic and development benefits.
Lacson said the combination of large social-assistance allocations and broadly defined infrastructure spending deserves particularly close examination because 2027 will be the final full calendar year before the 2028 presidential and national elections.
Malacañang, however, has rejected suggestions that the evacuation-center money should automatically be viewed as election spending and has emphasized that safeguards exist to prevent misuse.
The Bigger ₱7.2-Trillion Budget Battle
The evacuation-center controversy involves only a fraction of the government’s proposed ₱7.2-trillion national budget for 2027.
The DBM formally submitted the spending plan to Congress as the Marcos administration’s final full-year national budget before 2028.
The government says the proposal prioritizes education, healthcare, jobs, infrastructure, food security, social protection and disaster resilience while attempting to maintain fiscal discipline.
Congress will still have the power to scrutinize, amend and ultimately approve the spending measure before it can become the 2027 General Appropriations Act.
And that means the ₱3.06-billion evacuation-center allocation is far from settled.
For a country regularly battered by typhoons, earthquakes, volcanic activity and flooding, permanent evacuation centers are hardly difficult to justify.
The more difficult questions are where they should be built, which communities need them most, how much each facility should cost — and whether every peso can be traced from the national budget all the way to an actual building protecting families when the next disaster strikes.
Those questions may ultimately determine whether the ₱3.06-billion program becomes a major investment in disaster preparedness — or one of the most closely watched items in the entire 2027 budget.
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