THE Sept. 26, 2025, Senate Blue Ribbon hearing didn’t just add to the massive flood control corruption scandal; it blew a wider hole under Malacañang. Across successive hearings, testimonies have converged on a damning pattern: public works funds allegedly sliced up for years by contractors, legislators, fixers and officials who treated kickbacks not as crimes, but as standard operating procedure. The amounts are staggering, the scheme familiar, but the names implicated are climbing ever higher and higher. And that’s where the doctrine of command responsibility and accountability comes crashing through the presidential gates.
Former Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) undersecretary Roberto Bernardo testified that Department of Education official Trygve Olaivar demanded a 15-percent “commission” from P2.85 billion worth of projects, implicating Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin (the “Little President”) in the controversy, an allegation Bersamin denies, of course. Bernardo further tied the network to Sen. Francis Escudero and businessman Maynard Ngu, Marcos’ special envoy to China, allegedly as the “bagman.” Both Escudero and Ngu have issued categorical denials. Senators like Joel Villanueva and Jinggoy Estrada, as well as former senators Bong Revilla and Nancy Binay, are also implicated, and of course issued denials.
Overlay these with earlier sworn accounts from contractors and district engineers who described ghost projects, substandard works and kickback rates of 20 to 25 percent flowing to legislators, DPWH insiders and beyond, and the scandal hardens into a systemic portrait. These were not whispered insinuations; they were televised accounts under oath that have triggered investigations, massive street protests last Sept. 21 and a cascade of denials. What they expose is not just corruption but an indictment of oversight at the very top.
The pattern
If the public still wondered whether the “ghost project” playbook was real, the hearings have delivered the contours: bloat the bill of quantities, degrade the materials, certify completion on paper, move the money. Two engineers testified that projects were intentionally made substandard or overpriced to enable large kickbacks; some works, they said, never existed at all. The Marcos administration itself has acknowledged the gravity of the issue by ordering probes into flood control projects worth roughly P545 billion. When an executive admits it needs to review thousands of projects, you’re not chasing a few rotten apples; you’re mapping an orchard.
The alleged political beneficiaries are not minor figures. Whistleblowers and aides have, at various points, named former House speaker Martin Romualdez (the President’s cousin) and Rep. Zaldy Co as central actors, allegations they flatly deny. Indeed, the emerging pattern of access tracks precisely through the political arteries closest to the Palace.
At this juncture, the Filipino people are pressed on with the well-worn question of who orchestrated the budget flows and who signed off on the appropriations and releases that allowed dubious projects to flourish like mushrooms after a storm.
This is also where the legal and political lines converge. Yes, every implicated name is presumed innocent until proven guilty, but let’s not pretend the machinery that allowed all this to happen is innocent by default. The administrative chain is not innocent of design. National budgets don’t materialize out of thin air. They are crafted, debated, amended and approved in Congress; signed into law by the president; and executed through a chain of agencies and offices. Each step reflects choices, not accidents. Which brings us to the unavoidable question: When the system itself is complicit by design, whose command responsibility truly bears the weight of transparency and accountability?
Command responsibility
Moreover, the President’s allies highlight the creation of the Independent Commission for Infrastructure, chaired by former appeals court Justice Andres Reyes Jr., alongside other prominent members and a special adviser. That initiative is welcome, provided its mandate is broad, its independence genuine and its findings public, with prosecutorial action to follow. But even with commissions and audits, democratic accountability rests on a simpler, unavoidable standard: Did you (Marcos as president) select, empower and retain the very people now accused and named in the ongoing Senate probe?
Accountability begins with following the money and the paper trail: Who asked for it? Who approved it? Who signed off? Who pocketed the gains? If diversions of public funds happened in a systematic fashion, this points not to isolated bad actors but to a deeper executive failure of oversight and controls.
And this lands squarely on the President. When your executive secretary is named (he denies it), your special envoy is named (he denies it), your cousin and former speaker is named (he denies it), your closest political relatives and allies are implicated (they, too, deny), and your administration is itself auditing thousands of questionable projects, you cannot outsource accountability to a press release or hide behind or wash your hands and pass the burden to a commission. You built the political machinery that enabled this, and therefore, you own the responsibility and accountability. This is command responsibility 101.
The executive’s lane: DBM, DPWH and the budget plumbing
The hearings have also highlighted the mechanics: how money moves. Note that funds travel from congressional insertions to DPWH programming, to bids and awards, to project implementation and certification. At each junction, someone is supposed to say “no” when the numbers don’t add up or the reprogramming stinks. That’s not theoretical; that’s Department of Budget and Management (DBM) basics and DPWH stewardship.
So yes, accountability necessarily ascends to the executive level. The president sets the tone, selects the Cabinet and can fire or sideline officials who fail integrity checks. The DBM secretary is accountable for the integrity of releases and reprogramming; the DPWH leadership is accountable for due diligence and quality control. If ghost projects passed through these pipes, the pipes are compromised. That’s the executive’s lane, and it is paved with signatures.
What now, Mr. President?
At this point, banalities about “horrible” corruption sound like background noise unless matched with visible, decisive consequences. Because when kickbacks become the norm and denial becomes policy, the rot of massive corruption isn’t confined to one office; it’s embedded and is the operating system.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth. We are just scratching the surface. The investigations are likely to sprawl into the broader infrastructure pipeline, exposing how systemic the problem really is. The longer Malacañang treats this as a messaging problem instead of a governance crisis, the more it bleeds legitimacy, faster than the nation bleeds funds every time the rains pour.
So, Mr. President, what now? If “no sacred cows” means anything, start where the herd grazes closest: with your own appointees and kin. Either the system changes under your watch, or the Filipino people will change it for you through the streets, and eventually, the ballot box. The law may be blind, but the people are not.
Again, command responsibility and accountability, Mr. President. When corruption is the system under your watch, the imperative question is, are you leading a Republic or running a syndicate? When your executive secretary, envoy, cousin and political allies are all named in billion-peso scams, is this still a presidency or a family syndicated franchise? Which is it?
Source: The Manila Times
https://www.manilatimes.net/2025/09/27/opinion/columns/command-responsibility-in-a-corruption-flooded-republic-does-marcos-still-have-the-legitimacy-and-mandate-to-govern/2191227
