No single bill proposed repealing the Philippines' targeted, performance-based incentive regime under the CREATE Act of 2021. Instead, three separate measures chipped away at it piece by piece: RA 11900 widened youth access to e-cigarettes under the guise of regulation, CREATE MORE broadened fiscal incentive eligibility and eroded the revenue base CREATE was designed to protect, and HB 9866 proposed VAT and duty exemptions specifically for e-cigarette manufacturing — an industry CREATE's own "crucial to national development" test would exclude. Each bill, read alone, looks like ordinary policymaking: a regulatory measure, an investment incentive expansion, a manufacturing subsidy. None of them reads as "repeal CREATE" or "abandon tobacco control." But summed, they reproduce the exact outcome — narrowly targeted incentives becoming broad and untargeted, public-health gains from taxation being clawed back — that a direct repeal bill would face organized opposition to pass openly. The general pattern: a reform built on a hard-won, legible principle (time-bound, performance-based, health-protective) is more vulnerable to erosion by many small, individually defensible amendments than to a single repeal vote, because each amendment can be evaluated and defended on its own narrow merits without ever being weighed against the cumulative effect. Anyone monitoring institutional reform for backsliding needs to track the sum of amendments against the original principle, not just watch for a headline repeal that will likely never come. **Cross-Domain Connections**: [[Industrial Policy Needs Sunset Discipline to Survive Political Cycles]] — that note explains why CREATE's sunset-clause, performance-tied design was the right structure for durable industrial policy; this one shows the same design being dismantled incrementally rather than replaced outright. ## Source - [[20241117 HB 9866- A threat to public health and fiscal stability]] — BusinessWorld, November 17, 2024 — Therese Hipol and Pia Rodrigo (Yellow Pad) — https://www.bworldonline.com/opinion/2024/11/18/635343/hb-9866-a-threat-to-public-health-and-fiscal-stability/