Senate G.O.P. Includes Expanded Fund for Radiation Victims in Policy Bill
Senate Republicans on Thursday included in their version of President Trump's domestic policy bill a provision that would revive and significantly expand a law for compensating victims of government-caused nuclear contamination who developed cancer and other serious illnesses.
The measure, long championed by Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, would overhaul a law passed more than three decades ago with a narrow scope. It was meant to compensate civilians sickened by the legacy of the nation's aboveground nuclear testing program, a hallmark of the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, and uranium miners who worked between 1942 and 1971. It paid out more than $2.6 billion in benefits to more than 55,000 claimants since its creation in 1990.
The Senate passed bipartisan legislation last year to substantially broaden the scope of that law — called the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, or RECA — beyond Cold War-era victims to cover others who have been harmed by the aftereffects in the decades since.
But after Republican leaders refused to allow it to come to a vote on the House floor, the law expired, dashing hopes of compensation for sickened civilians.
Senate Republican leaders are now, at the behest of Mr. Hawley, giving the measure another shot at passage, including it in the Senate version of the domestic policy bill that they are hoping to pass in weeks. He is considered a key vote on the bill because he opposes several provisions floated by his party for cutting Medicaid.
'I think about, in the St. Louis area alone, how many folks I've talked to whose grandfathers or grandmothers were involved with the radiation project and whose families have subsequently had cancer in the family for generations,' Mr. Hawley said in an interview. 'And they're very proud of their service to the nation, but they would like to be thanked for that and be treated appropriately and not lied to anymore by their government.'
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