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Lawmakers strip radiation compensation amendment from national defense bill

Tina Cordova, co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, at a protest in October 2019 near the entrance to the Trinity site.
Megan Kamerick
Tina Cordova, co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, at a protest in October 2019 near the entrance to the Trinity site.

Advocates who recently celebrated the possibility of expanded compensation for those harmed by radiation are reeling from a setback in Congress.

The compromise version of National Defense Authorization Act does not include a Senate-passed amendment expanding the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. The expansion would have, for the first time, included people who lived near the Trinity Test site in New Mexico and their descendants, as well as uranium miners who did work after 1971.

"They went about testing nuclear devices in the American West in a reckless way, knowing full well that they were harming people," said Tina Cordova, co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium and the fourth generation in her family to develop cancer. "And our government has shrugged off the responsibility for that, for 78 years in New Mexico."

 Source New Mexico’s Danielle Prokop reports the amendment would have expanded RECA for 19 years. Right now it’s due to end next summer. It also would have made people in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Guam eligible for lump-sum payments. I

 It also would allow payments to people and their descendants in St. Louis County, Missouri impacted by waste from the Manhattan Project. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the cost of expanding RECA to cover Downwinders and more miners would be about $143 billion.

 Cordova called the stripping of the amendment unconscionable.

"We've spent something like $12 trillion on our nuclear program since its inception. And what we're asking for is less than 1/10 of 1% of that budget," she said. "And so, you know, once there's political will they always find the way to fund things. And it's time for that to happen in this case, as well."

 The RECA expansion was a rare bipartisan effort, backed by Democratic Senator Ben Rey Lujan from New Mexico as well as Republican Sens. Josh Hawley and Mike Crapo. Hawley did not hold back in a speech Thursday lambasting his colleagues.

"This isn’t an inconvenience. This isn’t an 'Oops, I wish it were different.' This is an injustice," he said. "This is this body turning its back on these good, proud Americans."

Hawley pledged not to vote for the compromise bill. And Cordova says the fight is not over. The reconciled legislation still faces a final vote in both chambers.

Megan has been a journalist for 25 years and worked at business weeklies in San Antonio, New Orleans and Albuquerque. She first came to KUNM as a phone volunteer on the pledge drive in 2005. That led to volunteering on Women’s Focus, Weekend Edition and the Global Music Show. She was then hired as Morning Edition host in 2015, then the All Things Considered host in 2018. Megan was hired as News Director in 2021.
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