More than two decades ago, Congress declared that victims of government-caused nuclear contamination who developed cancer and other serious illnesses (including uranium miners and those exposed to radiation from Manhattan Project-era atomic testing) They should receive federal compensation.
“The health of individuals who unwittingly participated in these tests was put at risk to serve the national security interests of the United States,” said the law enacted in 1990. “The United States must recognize and take responsibility for the harm caused to these individuals.”
Now, that statute, known as the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, is in danger and will expire in June without a clear path to renewal. And an effort to expand it substantially beyond victims of the Cold War era, to others who have been harmed by the aftermath in the decades since, has hit a brick wall on Capitol Hill.
The Senate voted overwhelmingly in July to attach legislation renewing and expanding the program to the annual defense policy bill. But in the final version negotiated behind closed doors by congressional leaders, that measure, sponsored by Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Ben Ray Luján, D-New Mexico, was abandoned.
Republicans objected to its high price tag, which congressional evaluators estimated could exceed $100 billion.
In an angry speech Thursday, Hawley said the move amounted to Congress “rescinding” the apology it had offered to victims decades ago.
“That allows this program to expire,” he said. “That turns its back on the tens of thousands of good Americans who have sacrificed for their country, who have diligently given their health and in many cases their lives to this country, and have gotten nothing.”
The original legislation was drafted with a limited scope, intended to compensate those who participated in or were present in surface atomic bomb testing, a hallmark of the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, or uranium miners who worked between 1942 and 1971.
the law has paid more than 2.5 billion dollars in benefits to more than 55,000 applicants since its creation in 1990, according to congressional investigators. Claimants, who may include children or grandchildren of those who would have benefited from the program but have since died, receive a one-time payment ranging from $50,000 to $100,000.
He updated version of Mr. Hawley and Mr. Luján would expand the number of people eligible to receive compensation and also increase the highest payment to $150,000. Currently, the law restricts eligibility for “downwinders,” or people who lived near one of the testing sites, to those who resided in a handful of counties in Utah, Nevada and Arizona.
“The members who worked on this policy once left out states like New Mexico, and not just the entire state,” Luján, who has pushed to expand eligibility to people in most Western states, said in an interview. . . “They left out the entire county where the first bomb was tested. “That alone shows that people have been excluded.”
The bill, which President Biden has supportedargues that the federal government should compensate anyone seriously ill from the legacy of the nation’s nuclear weapons program.
It would extend access to the federal fund for 19 years and expand eligibility to Missourians sickened by radioactive waste that was never properly disposed of (and in some cases left outdoors near a stream) in St. Louis, home to a uranium plant. processing site in the 1940s.
TO blockbuster report By The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press earlier this year found that generations of families who grew up in the area have since faced “rare cancers, autoimmune disorders and other mysterious illnesses that they have come to believe were the result from exposure to its waters and sediment.”
It wasn’t until 2016 that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised residents to avoid the creek entirely, and the cleanup is expected to last until 2038.
“It’s true that the Manhattan Project is a thing of the past and the nuclear tests of the Cold War era are a thing of the past,” Hawley said in an interview. “But people are still dealing with the consequences of that.”
Unless Congress passes new legislation expanding the law, the fund will close in June. Republican leaders in both the House and Senate opposed including it in the annual defense bill, citing a Congressional Budget Office report that estimates the proposed renewal would introduce $140 billion in new spending and mandatory.
Hawley and Luján said they had tried to scale back the legislation to lower costs, but Republicans argued the billions of dollars involved would remain unsustainable.
Congress could still try to pass legislation on its own, but it’s increasingly rare for single-issue bills to make it through both chambers and land on Biden’s desk. That’s why the couple had tried to use the huge annual defense bill, considered a must-have, to push it through. Now they are regrouping.
“All options are on the table to achieve this,” Luján said.
