Hawley bill to aid St. Louis radiation victims passes Senate but faces tough path in House

The Senate on Thursday passed a bill seeking to expand health benefits for Americans who live in areas contaminated by nuclear radiation from the Manhattan project, part of a months-long quest by Sen. Josh Hawley to get aid for constituents in the St. Louis area.

In a speech that began by quoting Abraham Lincoln, Hawley painted the legislation as a moral obligation that the government owed to the people who were exposed to the nuclear weapons that helped win World War II.

“This isn’t about a handout,” Hawley said. “This isn’t about some kind of welfare program. This is about doing basic justice by the working people of this nation, who their own government has poisoned.”

The bill passed the Senate 69-30. It expands a 1990 law, set to expire in June, that provides a one-time payment for uranium miners, people who worked on nuclear weapons tests and people who lived downwind of nuclear tests in Nevada if they became ill because of their exposure to radiation. Hawley’s version allows people from Missouri, Kentucky, Alaska and Tennessee to gain access to the program over the next six years.

While it has the support of President Joe Biden, the bill will face a tough road in the House, where a narrow Republican majority is looking to cut government spending, not expand it. The bill is anticipated to cost around $50 billion.

“We’re just not looking to raise our deficits and debts any further than they already are,” said Rep. Ann Wagner, a St. Louis County Republican. “So there needs to be a legit pay-for on this.”

It would be the second time that the bill has hit a roadblock in the House. Hawley managed to secure an earlier version of the bill, which expanded the benefits for 19 years, included more illnesses and cost around $150 billion, into the Senate’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act.

But there was no companion in the House and it was stripped out of the final version of the bill by House and Senate leadership.

Wagner said she’s supportive of helping the people who were exposed to radioactive material used to make nuclear bombs for the Manhattan Project in St. Louis County in the 1940s, where nuclear waste spilled into Coldwater Creek. But she said House Republicans had problems with the first bill – specifically that it cost around $150 billion and did not have any designated way to help pay for the cost.

While Wagner said Hawley has not reached out to her directly about the new version of the bill, she said she told advocates like Dawn Chapman, who co-founded Just Moms STL, that the bill needed to be narrower in scope, needed to pass as stand-alone legislation and it needed to have a smaller price tag.

The new legislation does most of what Wagner was suggesting, but it doesn’t contain a measure to help shoulder the high cost. The last time Congress renewed the program, in 2022, it only cost $50 million, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Government, a conservative think tank that opposes government spending.

“The RECA program has never had a standalone pay-for in the statute ever,” Hawley said. “It doesn’t now and we’re not going to amend it to have one.”

Hawley said he plans to keep pressing for the legislation to pass and that he’s spoken to House Speaker Mike Johnson about the bill.

On Thursday night, as President Joe Biden stands behind the House Dias to give the State of the Union address, Chapman will be in the audience as Hawley’s guest.

“This will be the fourth time we’ve been to D.C. in six months and we’ll keep doing it,” Chapman said Monday. “We’ll start selling T shirts, we’ll have bake sales we’ll do what we need until this program is passed and expanded.”