Hawley bill gives radiation exposure victims another chance at expanded compensation

The Senate is set to vote Thursday on a stand-alone bill introduced by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) to expand and renew a 30-year-old law compensating Americans exposed to radiation by the federal government.

The expansion has seen nearly a year of false starts and unsuccessful amendments, which have caused Hawley to openly vent frustration with outgoing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). With a vote scheduled for Thursday afternoon, advocates are hopeful the measure has the votes to pass on its own now.

The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), initially passed in 1990, provides compensation for people exposed to radiation by the federal government through nuclear testing or uranium mining during World War II and the Cold War. However, the scope of the original law does not cover New Mexicans exposed to the effects of the 1945 Trinity atomic bomb test or those exposed to contamination from St. Louis-area uranium processing, which prompted Hawley’s interest in the matter.

The RECA is set to expire later this year, after President Biden signed an executive order extending it two years in 2022. A stand-alone bill extending the law another five years and expanding its coverage to Missouri, Idaho, Montana, Guam, Colorado, Tennessee, Kentucky and Alaska will receive a Senate vote this week under the terms of a unanimous agreement, Hawley confirmed Monday.

A bipartisan amendment to the Senate’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act that would have expanded and reauthorized the law passed the Senate with a supermajority earlier this year, but it was ultimately removed during the conference process, for which Hawley blamed McConnell and Republican leaders. That amendment would have extended the law another 19 years.

“That was a serious mistake. I have told [McConnell] that to his face,” Hawley said during a Monday call with reporters. The Missouri Republican said last week that he walked out of a meeting with McConnell over his role in stripping the amendment from the bill.

“He brought up the cost and I said I didn’t hear a lot of grousing about the cost when we were voting on Ukraine funding or anything else for that matter. He called it an entitlement. I said it’s not an entitlement, it’s a compensation program for people the government has poisoned,” Hawley said last week following the meeting. “I was very direct.”

Hawley’s push comes amid uncertainty about who will succeed McConnell as leader of the Senate GOP caucus, with Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) and former Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) in the mix so far. Hawley said he has yet to decide whom he’ll back for the top spot, but said their respective votes on the RECA bill will factor into his decision.

“I’ve talked to all the members of my caucus about RECA expansion, so we’ll see,” Hawley told The Hill on Wednesday.

The vote also comes the week before Sunday’s Oscars telecast, where Christopher Nolan’s biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” is considered the favorite for best picture. Hawley, who has urged the telecast to acknowledge the struggle of downwinders, or those exposed to radiation due to being “downwind” from nuclear facilities or test sites, called the timing “fortuitous.”

“I hope that the real heroes here will get the attention they deserve,” Hawley said.

Proponents of the expansion have frequently sought to use public interest in the film, which depicts the first detonation of an atomic bomb in the Manhattan Project’s Trinity test, as a springboard to advocate for the measure.

Under the extension Biden signed, June 7 is the “go-dark date” for the law, Hawley said, and as such “there is a sense of urgency.” However, he added, “we’ll do it over and over and over again if that’s what it takes.”

Hawley said Monday that “we have every reason to believe” Biden would sign the bill if it reached his desk, and the White House made it official Wednesday, saying in a statement that “the President believes we have a solemn obligation to address toxic exposure, especially among those who have been placed in harm’s way by the government’s actions.”

For many of the people directly affected by radiation exposure, time and resources are in short supply. In addition to Hawley’s constituents and residents of several other states not covered by the original law, the proposed expansion would extend the window of coverage for uranium miners active between 1971 and 1990, as opposed to the current statute, which cuts off after 1971.

The federal government ended uranium procurement for atomic weapons development after 1971, but the industry continued production throughout the 1980s, and the uranium mines themselves remained major national security assets, according to the Navajo Nation, which has lobbied heavily for expansion.

Phil Harrison, a Navajo Nation member who worked as a uranium miner and a remediation worker for the Energy Department, noted that he and fellow advocates spend their own money for lobbying-related costs.

“Since 2009, we’ve been going back and forth, trying to get Congress to be sympathetic about the First Americans and Native Americans that protected this country’s national security,” he told The Hill in an interview.

Harrison, an Air Force veteran, told The Hill that at least 400 men in his community associated with uranium mining have died of lung cancer or other lung ailments. Cancer comprises 11.5 percent of all deaths among members of the nation, the third-leading cause of death, according to an October 2023 report from the Navajo Epidemiology Center.

Harrison testified before Congress in favor of RECA amendments in 2018 and 2022, and each time compensation has failed to pass has heightened the sense he was a David figure taking on the Goliath federal government.

“This is all on a voluntary basis — we sell fry bread on the streets to pay for our travel,” he said. “We’re fighting Star Wars with a golf club.”