We’ve been there before

Before the trillion-peso flood control mess hit the primetime news, there was a smaller, angrier dress rehearsal — and it happened in plain sight, on the floor of Congress.

In late 2018, Nosy Tarsee recalled a Budget chief with a temper for numbers squaring off against a House majority leader with a temper for headlines. The fight was framed as a dispute over transparency. It was really a fight about who gets to decide where flood control money goes — a question that would echo, almost word for word, six years later.

The accusation: A chunk of so-called “executive insertions,” reportedly in the P75-billion range, had been slipped into the public works portion of the following year’s budget. The target region, insiders said, happened to be where the Budget chief’s in-laws sat in local office — a vice governor here, a mayor there — and where a family-linked construction outfit had, by pure coincidence, been landing infrastructure contracts.

The company in question, based in a coastal town far from Metro Manila, was said to be working on joint ventures with a mainland contractor known for scooping up road and tourism-linked jobs. The total contract value cited at the time ran into the hundreds of millions of pesos, a rounding error next to today’s numbers, but the shape of the allegation was identical: money moving through flood control and public works line items toward firms with a direct line to power.

A Palace spokesperson dismissed the whole thing as a distraction. The Budget chief called the numbers “illusory” and noted, accurately, that his department didn’t award contracts; the procurement law did that, at least on paper.

And then, almost on cue, the official at the center of it got kicked upstairs to a far more powerful post, and the fire went out. The majority leader who started the probe quietly conceded it “was no longer the time.” No charges, resolution or follow-through.

Six years later, a bigger version of the same story broke — same agency, same insertions, same pattern of family-adjacent contractors, except this time the numbers had three more zeroes and nobody could look away.

Characters and modus sound familiar? They should.