Radiation exposure compensation program in limbo. What that means for Idaho downwinders

Republican leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives flip-flopped on a program to compensate people the federal government exposed to radiation, as advocates held their stance that now is the best chance to adopt an expansion in the program.

Last Wednesday, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, and Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-California, announced that they intended to continue the Radiation Exposure and Compensation Act for only two years and would not support adding people from Missouri, New Mexico, Idaho and elsewhere.

In a statement, Johnson said he would not support the expansion passed by the Senate because he claimed it was too expensive and didn’t include enough support from the Senate GOP. It passed easily in the Senate, with 40% of Republicans supporting it. Idaho Sen. Mike Crapo is a co-sponsor of the bill, and both he and Sen. Jim Risch voted in favor.

“Unfortunately, the current Senate bill is estimated to cost $50-60 billion in new mandatory spending with no offsets and was supported by only 20 of 49 Republicans in the Senate,” read a statement from a spokesperson for Johnson’s office to Source NM.

Then, Johnson and Scalise walked back the decision to keep RECA as-is and pulled a motion from the House calendar last Wednesday evening, citing conversations with Rep. Anne Wagner R-Missouri.

However, it’s unclear whether any vote will be held on RECA before the fund is set to expire on June 10. His office did not respond to follow up questions clarifying his position on RECA.

Advocates are reframing this latest hurdle as another opportunity that could actually lead to Idahoans and others across the country joining the RECA program and receiving some justice for the generational harms caused by the U.S. atomic program.

What is at stake for downwinders

Adopted in 1990, RECA is a fund set up by the federal government to pay lump-sum payments for people exposed to radiation and their descendants during decades of above-ground nuclear tests in the American West.

Currently, the program applies only to uranium workers before 1971. It also helps civilians in specific counties of Utah, Arizona and Nevada, and federal workers at nuclear test sites.

A lot of people remain excluded.

This includes Idahoans and others who lived “downwind” from nuclear testing sites in Nevada, St. Louis communities used as dumping grounds for Manhattan Project Waste, Southern New Mexicans who lived near the Trinity Site, and uranium workers after 1971.

These communities, while experiencing cancers, diseases, deaths and more, have been neither recognized nor compensated.

Their chance to be recognized is held in this proposed legislation before the House which seeks to increase the scope and life of the program.

S. 3853 passed the Senate in a 69-30 vote in March. The bill would incorporate the entire states of Nevada, Utah and Arizona, and further expands RECA to cover people in Idaho, Montana, Colorado, New Mexico and Guam. Uranium workers and their descendants on the Navajo Nation and Laguna Pueblo who worked after 1971 would also then be eligible for lump-sum payments for health care.

House Speaker plays reverse card

The reversal by Johnson exposes a tension: Do advocates who’ve been fighting for inclusion opt to keep the current limited program or continue to fight for expansion?

“This is the closest we’ve ever gotten,” said Tona Henderson, director of the Idaho Downwinders.

“We do not want a two-year extension,” Henderson said. “We want the expansion all in one. How many billions of dollars have we sent to Ukraine or Israel? How about the people who your own government harmed?”

Henderson was born in Emmett and raised on a dairy farm. For decades, she has tracked which of her relatives and community members have been diagnosed with cancer, because Gem County — along with Idaho’s Custer, Blaine and Lemhi counties — is among the top five counties in the U.S. that were most affected by fallout from Nevada nuclear tests in the mid-20th century, according to research by the National Cancer Institute.

“When people say, ‘RECA is too much money,’ how can you say that about my community and my family? What if it was your family?” Henderson said. “We didn’t sign up for this, but we’re still victims of the Cold War.”

It’s time to fight for a more-inclusive RECA, said Tina Cordova, a longtime advocate for Southern New Mexicans and their families suffering from radiation exposure after the first nuclear test at the Trinity Site.

“That two-year extension was going to do nothing, but take away that momentum we’ve built,” she said.

Advocates accepted a two-year extension of the program in 2022, she said, because there didn’t feel like a better alternative. She said with bipartisan support, the stakes are higher in 2024.

“We can’t allow them to pass an extension and think they’re going to move us along,” she said.

Cordova, a cancer survivor, said that while the RECA fund is set to expire in June, that lawmakers said they can offer small extensions while negotiating the expansion under the Senate bill.

In the last two years, we’ve lost so many people,” she said. “What’s worse is that more people are dying all the time, waiting.”

Advocates say full downwinder expansion needs to pass

Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, D-N.M., told Source NM on Wednesday that Johnson’s move to pull the extension bill that excluded so many was the right thing. But that view relies on the House bringing forward the expansion proposal passed by the Senate.

“Let’s vote on the bipartisan expansion bill that gives all victims of radiation exposure compensation before any more die,” Leger Fernández said in a statement.

Leger Fernández said Johnson’s focus on costs ignores the injustice of harms caused by building and testing nuclear bombs, in New Mexico and elsewhere.

“Continuously pointing to the bill’s cost without good-faith negotiations is an additional insult on top of denying justice to radiation-exposed victims,” she wrote.

Two weeks ago, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, brought forward an extension that would have admitted New Mexico and Missouri communities into the program, but not Idaho. It failed after the objections of Republican Sen. Josh Hawley from Missouri and Sen. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, who co-sponsored the RECA expansion bill.

“I want to be clear. I will not consent to any short-term stopgap, any halfway measure. I will not give my consent to it,” Hawley said on the floor.

Luján said Lee’s bill was an “attempt to undermine the strong bipartisan coalition” that passed the RECA expansion, and said he believed there was support in the House.

In a statement, Adán Serna, spokesperson for Luján, said the senator is considering “all possible options” to keep the RECA program alive, including potentially bringing an extension.

But focus is on what the House will do with the Senate legislation this week, the last chance to take action.

“The best possible option to strengthen RECA and provide justice for victims is for the House to pass the standalone bill,” Serna said.

Idaho Capital Sun reporter Mia Maldonado contributed to this story.