WASHINGTON — If the U.S. House of Representatives tries to include a slimmed-down version of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, or RECA, in Congress’ end of year funding bill, it faces a roadblock in the form of Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley.
Hawley on Tuesday criticized rumors that House leadership was working to include a Utah-only expansion of RECA as part of the continuing resolution, or CR, that Congress must pass to fund the federal government.
For years, RECA provided payments to people diagnosed with certain cancers if they lived in a handful of counties in Utah, Arizona and Nevada near above-ground nuclear testing sites in the 1950s and early 1960s. Cold-war era uranium workers in 11 Western states were also covered. But the program expired in June, and in the last six months lawmakers have floated several proposals to renew or expand the program.
Now, Hawley says the House is attempting to include a slimmed-down version of RECA in the spending bill that would extend coverage to “just a few counties” in Utah. Speaking on the Senate floor Tuesday, Hawley vowed to reject the proposal, calling it “a backroom deal, rigged for only a few insiders, excluding most of the country.”
Sources familiar with the matter said none of Utah’s four Republican House representatives — Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, John Curtis and Burgess Owens — knew what Hawley was referencing.
The Utah delegation and House leadership have spoken with Hawley’s office several times and there is a genuine desire to reach some kind of agreement with RECA, multiple sources said. But Utah’s four lawmakers in the House are unaware of whether a Utah-only deal is being worked on as part of the end-of-year spending bill.
In response to a request for comment, Hawley’s office directed Utah News Dispatch to his remarks on the Senate floor. Staff with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, did not provide comment on Thursday.
Advocates have long decried RECA as inadequate, citing research that showed nuclear radiation from the tests went far beyond the counties currently covered. Called downwinders, people across Utah and the Western U.S. suffered from cancers likely caused by nuclear fallout, but were not eligible for compensation because they didn’t fit within RECA’s narrow requirements.
The exposure of Missourians to radioactive waste came from uranium processing in St. Louis for the World War II Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb.
While the presence of radioactive contamination in suburban St. Louis was known for years, an investigation by The Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press revealed in 2023 that the federal government and companies handling the waste were aware of the threat to the public long before informing residents.
In 2022, Congress passed a bill extending RECA by two years, with the intent of using that window to expand the program.
Hawley proposed a bill that did just that and in March it passed the Senate, for the second time, after a bipartisan 69-30 vote. The bill would increase how much compensation downwinders could receive, expand eligibility for certain uranium workers, and widen the current definition of an “affected area” to include all of Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico and Guam. It would also cover some of Hawley’s constituents near St. Louis, where creek water was contaminated by radiation during nuclear weapons development.
But the House failed to act, and in June the program expired.
The price tag of Hawley’s bill gave some members of the House pause, including Maloy, who previously told reporters it likely won’t get a vote.
“That adds a lot of new costs. So that bill won’t come up for a vote in the House. The House will not take up a bill that has that much unpaid liability,” she said, following a debate in October.
Now, with Congress’ lame-duck session nearing an end, Hawley has taken to the Senate floor, X (the social media platform formerly known as Twitter) and sent out a press release vowing to reject any proposal from the House that would only cover Utah.
“I cannot emphasize to you enough, Mr. President, what an offense this would be,” Hawley said.
In November, dozens of advocacy groups from 17 states and territories, including Utah, penned a letter to House leadership, urging them to pass Hawley’s bill during the lame-duck session.
“While we wait for Congress to fix this flawed program, people are getting sicker, and people are dying. We cannot afford to wait again. We cannot be asked to accept more cancers, more deaths, more bankruptcies in our communities while Congress goes back on its promises,” the letter reads.
This story was first published by the Utah News Dispatch, a States Newsroom affiliate. This story from the Missouri Independent is published on KSDK.com under the Creative Commons license. The Missouri Independent is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization covering state government, politics and policy.
