Batangas 1st district Rep. Leandro Legarda Leviste turned heads and dropped jaws recently by being the lone member of the 200-plus House majority bloc to reject the third reading passage of the P6.793-trillion national budget for 2026.

Leviste's reasoning was simple but compelling to him: kickbacks can still happen under the 2026 General Appropriations Bill (GAB).

For weeks now, the 32-year-old neophyte congressman has been aggressively pushing for the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) to lower the price tag on its projects by 25 percent to end the systemic kickbacks in the agency, which have affected flood control works.

“After all the flood control hearings, we should not approve the same prices for projects of DPWH. We should lower prices by 25% to remove P150 Billion in possible kickbacks.”

According to him, the DPWH "sets the prices, does the bids, and even if a Congressman does not get a kickback, someone else can get it".

"Kickbacks are factored into DPWH’s high prices. We should lower prices so there’s no more budget for kickbacks of DPWH. Not lowering prices is tantamount to funding more kickbacks for 2026,” stressed Leviste, who earlier had a DPWH district engineer arrested for attempting to bribe him.

To prove that kickbacks are factored into the budget for DPWH projects, Leviste wrote to the House Committee on Appropriations to ask to lower by 30 percent the price of DPWH road projects in Batangas' first district and re-align P508 million in savings to fund the construction of over 200 classrooms.

“I don’t accept kickbacks, so I asked Congress to lower the price of DPWH even just in my district, so we can show that DPWH can build projects at lower prices as long as there’s no kickbacks. If we can end kickbacks in some districts, we can end kickbacks in the whole DPWH,” Leviste said.

Another reason why Leviste entered a "no” vote was the inequitable allocation of budgets. He cited the example of how Region 4A comprises 15 percent of the country’s population and gross domestic product, but only gets 10 percent of the DPWH budget.

“If the 2026 budget is amended to lower the prices of DPWH, hopefully the savings can be allocated to make the budget more equitable,” the son of Senator Loren Legarda said.

The House of Representatives approved the P6.793-trillion budget measure on third and final reading last Monday, Oct. 13 via vote of 287-12-2 (yes-no-abstain).

It immediately transmitted the 2026 GAB to the Senate, which is conducting its own deliberations in the proposed outlay.