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Every authorisation runs the same nine checks in the same order. The order is fixed, it is part of the specification, and it is doing three jobs at once.

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Why this order

Cheap before expensive. Gates 1 to 4 are structural: does an authority exist, is it live, is it in date, does it cover this. They are lookups. Policy evaluation at gate 7 is the expensive one, and an action that fails at gate 1 never reaches it. That is what makes the check affordable on the path of every consequential action rather than something you sample. Scale before kind. bounds sits ahead of policy on purpose. Policy asks whether this action is permitted; bounds asks how much of it there may be. In practice the dangerous agent is often the one doing a permitted thing at a scale nobody set a number on, and that check should not be gated behind the expensive one. Budget is debited last. After every structural check has passed. An action refused at gate 1 does not consume the allowance it never used, which sounds obvious and is the sort of thing that is wrong in systems that reconcile afterwards.

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Short-circuiting is a feature of the record

The gates short-circuit. When an authorisation stops at gate 7, gates 1 to 6 passed and gates 8 and 9 were never reached, and the record says exactly that rather than leaving them blank or defaulting them to a pass.
This is why a record can be read years later without knowing which release was deployed. “Not reached” is a recorded fact about that decision, not an absence of data.
Here is a real decision from the running demo, refused at gate 7:

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Reading a refusal

The gate that stopped an action is the most useful field in the record, because it tells you which conversation to have.
An administrative problem, not a policy one. The grant expired, was revoked, or never existed. Somebody needs to issue or renew one; nobody needs to debate what the agent should be allowed to do.
The agent tried something outside what was granted. Either the agent is doing more than intended, or the grant was drawn too narrowly. Both are worth knowing and they look identical from a log file.
Untrusted content entered this trajectory and this action requires that it had not. See Clean context.
The action was permitted and there was no room. bounds is a limit on scale, budget on spend, and exhausted is a different outcome from deny because retrying cannot help.
The rule on the grant refused it. This is the one that is genuinely a policy conversation.
Not a refusal. A person has to decide, and the trajectory parks until they do.