RECA Remains Somewhere in the Shadows of the ‘Temporary’ US Budget March 19, 2025
In the chaos that has accompanied the first agonizing days of the Trump Administration, one piece of humanitarian legislation among the hundreds he has quashed continues to be MIA, despite the numerous pleas by victims and lawmakers to bring it back to life: RECA, the 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act.
If this lament sounds familiar, it is. This time last year, House Speaker Mike Johnson said RECA, which is up for reauthorization, was too pricey at the estimated $150 billion. The price went up to expand coverage to a greater number of people still becoming sick with cancers and radiation-related illnesses.
While RECA passed with bi-partisan support in the Senate, Johnson held it back from a House vote, and it melted into the background. Where it stands today, literally, isn’t clear. The budget as passed March 14 is heavy on military spending and cuts to everything else. RECA funding is from the Department of Justice.
But RECA has friends in high and hometown places. In Arizona, Sen. Mark Kelly, Republican Rep. Paul Gosar, and the late Rep. Raul Grijalva. New Mexico’s Sen. Ben Ray Luján and Sen. Martin Heinrich, both Democrats, are hoping to extend RECA benefits to more of New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was dropped at Los Alamos and among the Navajo and Hopi uranium miners.
Missouri Republican Senators Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt added St. Louis, where a processing plant leaked highly carcinogenic uranium into a city creek for decades.
We’ll keep you posted as we learn more, but for now check out the more encouraging” RECA news.
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“This is not a partisan issue. This is for the American people, and especially those who live downwind of this testing and those uranium mine workers who are sacrificing their lives and their careers for national security purposes,” said New Mexico Sen. Luján in this March 10 Interview in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Read “House Memorial asking for federal RECA revival clears committee.”
While it does nothing legally to release the funds into the hands of America’s victims of radiation exposure, Memorial Bill 15 passed this past week by the New Mexico legislature goes a long way to lending emotional and practical support for final passage of RECA by their counterparts in Washington.
The memorial bill was co-sponsored by Rep. Joseph Franklin Hernandez (D-Shiprock) who told fellow lawmakers, “Both my grandfathers were miners and millers at a uranium mine, and the only memories I have of them is taking them to their doctor’s appointments and seeing the suffering that they had.”
Full text of the RECA reauthorization bill as of January 24, 2025, sponsored by Sen. Hawley and cosponsored by Luján, Heinrich, Schmitt, Kelly, Mike Crapo (R-ID), and John Hickenlooper (D-CO).
Learn for yourself what RECA means to these innocent victims. And let Mike Johnson know that costs can be negotiated but illness has its own agenda.
Email: mikejohnson.house.gov/contact
Phone: 202-225-2777
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