RECA Passes in Trump’s Big Bill August 19, 2025

Honoring America’s Cold War Survivors

Maggie Billiman, Dine from Sawmill in Arizona

PSR-Arizona has been tracking the fate of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) since House Speaker Mike Johnson held it back from budget talks last year. He said then that RECA, which supports Americans sickened by the nation’s nuclear weapons testing, was too expensive.

Over the past year, the RECA Working Group hosted by the Union of Concerned Scientists has labored practically non-stop to get the bill back in this year’s budget, meeting weekly, coordinating and planning strategies including rallies, calls to legislators, trips to Capitol Hill, interviews with media — in other words, all the tools in the activist toolbox.

They succeeded.

RECA survivors, supporters, and their champions in Congress not only got the bill reauthorized in Trump’s “OBBBA” spending tome but its reach has been expanded from the currently covered 41,000 to more than 125,000 people who are now eligible to apply.

RECA is a private club. The perquisite is to have contracted one or more of the 20 types of cancers known to be caused by radiation, as listed in the bill. The infected populations are identified by county and zip codes within selected states and areas that correspond to official Cold War sites, including the proliferation of uranium mines on Navajo land in Arizona and New Mexico.

Another category is onsite participants attached to the Nevada and Trinity in New Mexico test sites and other military / government operations with a radiation-threatened workspace.

Still others are the Downwinders, a select group that grew up with radioactive isotopes borne on the wind and fanning east from the Nevada-based site north of Las Vegas. There, more than 100 above-ground tests between 1951 and 1962 polluted the air with the poison of the Atomic Age, forever changing the lives of unsuspecting Americans.

Downwinder states include:

Nevada: Lander, Eureka, White Pine, Nye, and portions of Clark County (does not include Las Vegas)
Utah: All counties
Arizona: Coconino, Apache, Gila, Yavapai, Navajo, and all of Mohave County
New Mexico and Idaho: Now included under the 2025 expansion

RECA’s reach was also extended in this reauthorization, the largest expansion of the program since it was signed into law in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush.

Among the newly recognized locations is the Tularosa Basin in central New Mexico 30 miles from the Trinity dress rehearsal, the first plutonium device and the model for Little Boy that destroyed Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.

“It was overpacked with plutonium. They were testing it for Japan,” said Tina Cordova, a fifth generation Tularosa Downwinder, who has been fighting for 20 years to earn the title.

The fallout from Trinity, which was exploded 100 feet above ground, “spread all over the basin,” said Cordova, who has battled thyroid cancer. Both her great grandfathers died of stomach cancer in 1955; both her grandmothers had cancer; her father, who was a child when the radiation contaminated their fresh water, crops, soil, the clothes they wore, and the milk they drank from cows that had eaten radiated grass, died after two bouts of oral cancer and the prostate cancer that killed him.

“We’ve been left unacknowledged for 80 years,” she said, the reason having to do with federal bureaucracy.

“We need the healthcare coverage” that RECA provides, Cordova said. If RECA had not been reauthorized, the Tularosa Downwinders would be in dire straits, she said. More than 40 percent of New Mexico’s population relies on Medicaid, which the Trump bill targeted for cuts.

“We are trying to get everyone enrolled as fast as we can.”

RECA provides a one-time payment of $100,000 per authorized recipient. It also distributes that amount to survivors and if the patient has died, it is distributed to family members.

If you or someone you know might qualify for RECA benefit, visit Downwinders.com