House leaves Washington without approving radiation exposure compensation act

With the House not set to return to Washington until next week, the clock has run out on time to extend and expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act.

“It is sitting in the House, the House needs to act,” said Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., in an interview with Spectrum News. “If the House doesn’t act, it’s going to be on the House. They’re going to have to explain to the American people why they don’t want to help our veterans, they don’t want to help folks exposed to radiation — they’re going to deny compensation to people who are dependent on it all their lives. I mean, this is crazy.” 

Hawley, who has been leading the charge for RECA expansion in the Senate alongside Sen. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., has expressed frustration over recent weeks by the lack of commitment from House leadership to bring up the bill for a vote, considering it passed the Senate by an overwhelming bipartisan measure not once, but twice. 

Under the proposed RECA expansion, coverage would be included for uranium miners and individuals who were “downwinders” from the testing and mining sites, including New Mexico, Idaho, Montana, Guam, Colorado, Tennessee, Kentucky and Alaska. In Missouri, it would cover people tied to almost two dozen ZIP codes who may have been sickened by contamination from uranium enrichment in the St. Louis dating back to the Manhattan Project. The bill would cost $50 billion over five years and add as many as 600,000 new claimants. 

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers confirmed Wednesday that work to remediate a small portion of a contaminated waterway where nuclear waste was dumped in North St. Louis County resulted in removing more than 7,000 cubic yards of soil–enough to fill eight Olympic-sized swimming pools. The entire Coldwater Creek corridor may not be fully remediated until the late 2030s.

According to the Department of Justice, which facilitates the claim program, the 1992 law has helped over 41,000 individuals access approximately $2.6 billion in funds to help pay for their medical bills for treating cancer and other illnesses traced to exposure to radiation waste.

Claims need to be postmarked by June 10 to be considered to receive compensation.

“If you’ve been poisoned by the federal government, if the government has exposed you to nuclear radiation, and that is so many people in Missouri, the government ought to make it right. They ought to help at the least with your medical bills — pay em. And that’s what my bill would do,” said Hawley.

“The state of Missouri has been lied to for 50 and 60 years. They’ve told us — the federal government — there was no radiation exposure in Missouri. That was a lie. They said it’s all cleaned up. That was a lie. They said we couldn’t get sick because of it. That was a lie. Now our schools are closed, we’ve got the highest rates of breast cancer in the nation, some of the highest rates of childhood cancers and other diseases associated with radiation. This needs to be fixed. It should have been fixed 50 years ago.”

“We shouldn’t have to beg for people to be taken care of because they were exposed to radioactive waste,” Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo. said bluntly Wednesday. “World War II is still killing people right now.”

Bush and other advocates are claiming a small victory in that a bill that would have only extended the existing program did not make it to the floor. They believe an extension would have killed momentum for expansion. 

But past experience with other pieces of legislation may not back that theory up. 

“History has shown that there’s been a number of things, such as the assault weapons ban and, others — such as the Patriot Act — that become much more difficult to reauthorize if you don’t give them the automatic extension,” said Todd Belt, a professor and Political Management program director at the George Washington University, 

“Generally, when the government has done something that has caused harm to people, you think of the burn pits legislation that was recently passed, you usually get real big bipartisan support for it. So it’s somewhat unusual that you would see some recalcitrance from the House to move on this Senate bill.” 

Advocates for expansion traveled to a political event featuring House Speaker Mike Johnson in Peoria, Illinois last weekend hoping to land a meeting in Washington this week. Once it became clear that no legislation was going to move in time to beat Friday’s deadline, those plans changed and they will instead be back at the Capitol next week.

Johnson’s staff did not respond to new questions about the possibility of a vote on the expansion bill this week.

Hawley said the fight is far from over.

“If it takes as long as I’m in the Senate, I will not stop until this is made right.”

Spectrum News’ Angi Gonzalez contributed to this report.