A vendor name appears in a budget. The same vendor name appears in a different budget two years later, in a different jurisdiction. By the third budget the line item has been renamed. The work, the contract structure, and the underlying scope have not changed.
This short video traces one such vendor through three public budgets without naming a single confidential source. Everything in the film is publicly filed. Most of it has been publicly filed for years. Nobody had bothered to put the three budgets next to each other.
The procurement layer
Procurement is where policy gets implemented. By the time a vendor is on the payroll, the political conversation is over. The contract is the residue of a decision that has already been made and is now being carried out in a language designed to be read by accountants. The accountants are not the audience for a press cycle, which is the point.
Nobody had bothered to put the three budgets next to each other.
Total runtime: about eleven minutes. The visual material is mostly contracts on screen, side by side, with the relevant clauses highlighted. There is no music. There is no presenter. There is a narration that reads the contracts out loud, slowly, and lets the comparison do its own work.