#39 pushed pagination into SQL for cog_spending()/cog_revenue(); the other two verbs were left materializing everything and slicing in R -- the pattern behind the 2026-08-06 production incident. cog_gov_search() had no LIMIT at all, so an unfiltered call returns the entire 40,336-row crosswalk. Extracted the #39 machinery into R/pagination.R first (.validate_pagination(), .paginate_sql(), .take_pagination_total()) rather than growing a third inline copy: three definitions of what total_rows means is three places for it to drift. Conflict refusals stay at the call sites because each verb's conflict set differs. .verb_spendrev() now uses the shared helpers and is unchanged in behaviour. The empty-page fallback query is now passed as a thunk, so the unpaginated SQL is only BUILT when an offset actually lands past the end instead of on every paged call. Two things #57 did not anticipate: - cog_gov_search()'s ORDER BY was not a total order. population_acs DESC NULLS LAST leaves ties -- and the whole NULL block -- in scan order, so two requests can order them differently and a paged sweep duplicates one row while dropping another. Added canonical_govid as tiebreaker. Unpaginated output changes only in the relative order of already-tied rows. - Basket mode returns one resolved row per requested name plus a sidecar covering all of them, so a page of it is not a page of anything the caller asked for. Refused with uscogdata_basket_pagination_conflict rather than silently ignoring the arguments. Both default to NULL, so cog-api adopts them behind its existing formals() probe with no lockstep deploy. Suite: 1067 passed, 0 failed, 0 warnings (2 pre-existing live-corpus skips).