UCS, Hawley praise inclusion of radiation compensation in megabill

The final version of the budget reconciliation package signed into law July 4 by President Donald Trump includes a long-sought bipartisan proposal to extend the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA).

“After nearly two years of negotiations—and two separate passages of RECA packages by the Senate in 2023 and 2024,” the RECA expansion was included in the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act,” longtime sponsor Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said in a press release.

Hawley issued a statement praising inclusion of the RECA package on July 3, after the House of Representatives passed Trump’s 900-page megabill, 218-to-214. Earlier last week, the Senate passed the legislation 51-to-50 with Vice President J.D. Vance casting the tie-breaking vote.

“A bright spot in this otherwise terrible reconciliation bill is that it finally allows some of the people harmed by nuclear weapons testing and production to access a federal program from which they were unfairly excluded,” said Gretchen Goldman, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). “That truly is a win for thousands of people across the country, including the people harmed by the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico,” Goldman said in a July 3 UCS statement. 

RECA lapsed last year after the House of Representatives failed to take up the measure after it passed the Senate. The RECA language included in the reconciliation package, keeps the compensation program going through 2028.

“HUGE WIN for Missouri,” Hawley said via the X social media platform. After five decades, survivors of nuclear radiation in the state will “FINALLY be compensated by the government that poisoned them.”

“The RECA provision will deliver long-overdue compensation and health care for survivors of radiation-linked cancers in the St. Louis and St. Charles areas, dating back from negligently exposed Manhattan Project waste,” according to the Hawley press release. “The provision will also expand compensation for uranium miners and downwinders in Western states,” Hawley said.

UCS said in its statement, the compensation bill is expanded to include testing victims, or downwinders, in all of New Mexico, Utah and Idaho, as well as northern Arizona; new categories of uranium workers; and communities impacted by nuclear waste storage in Alaska, Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee. Claims must be filed before December 31, 2027.