U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley is making a new push to pass funding for St. Louisans sick from exposure to radioactive waste.
The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act is a federal program that gives money to people with illnesses that were likely caused by exposure to U.S. nuclear tests or uranium enrichment. The U.S. Senate passed two bills to renew the program, but Congress ultimately allowed the original funding to expire in June.
Efforts to renew the program have largely failed because of their cost, Hawley said Wednesday.
“We've heard over and over and over from the [U.S.] House and the speaker [of the House] that it needed to score more cheaply, that the $50 billion price tag, which is the last version passed by the Senate, was too high,” Hawley said.
Now, Hawley is introducing a new version of the legislation that he thinks will be more palatable to his colleagues in the U.S. House of Representatives.
“We've given up no coverage whatsoever in terms of geography, no coverage in terms of key diseases,” Hawley said. “This is really a matter of how the program is administered.”
The legislation would have a $5 billion mandatory spending cap. Costs above that amount would be discretionary spending, meaning they would need to be appropriated by Congress.
The St. Louis region was not included in the original program, despite well-documented contamination around the area left over from St. Louis’ role in the World War II-era effort to build nuclear bombs. Recent proposals expanded the qualifying ZIP codes to include parts of St. Louis and other communities that were similarly excluded.
Advocate and co-founder of Just Moms STL Dawn Chapman said she’s hopeful about this new proposal.
“We're not going to go anywhere, and we're also not going to be split apart,” Chapman said. “We're not going to be pit against each other for which communities deserve to be taken care of.”
Hawley wants the legislation to pass this year and be signed by President Joe Biden. If that does not happen, he said he has spoken with President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance about the program.
