A year to the week after it inexplicably was allowed to expire, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley announced Friday a federal program to help today’s continued victims of atomic-age radiation exposure has been resurrected in President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill.

The 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) compensated victims of World War II and Cold War bombmaking and radiation exposure, many of whom have had dire and fatal illnesses throughout their families over the decades.

Due in large part to Hawley’s bareknuckle advocacy, a bipartisan Senate majority over the past couple years had twice not only reauthorized but expanded RECA to include Missourians and others who had been excluded from the compensation since the law’s inception. The House had enigmatically failed to concur.

The Big Beautiful Bill now does all that, Hawley announced on a press call Friday morning, saying the Congressional Budget Office estimates the cost at $5 billion over multiple years.

More expansive, expensive versions of the reauthorization had been said to cost up to $150 billion, though Hawley said he thinks the CBO vastly overestimated that.

The bill must still pass the Senate and be approved in its altered form by the House – with the RECA component still intact.

Dawn Chapman, a St. Louis victim and co-founder of the Just Moms STL nonprofit advocacy group, heralded the inclusion of RECA in the bill – but remains wary of being disappointed yet again.

“We’re just hopeful that this is the one thing in this bill that everybody will agree on is a great thing and not touch and leave it in there,” she told reporters on Hawley’s press call.

“Let us have our justice and peace.”

Whatever the cost to taxpayers, the price paid by families of Manhattan Project workers who built the world’s first nuclear arsenal, as well as those downwind from tests and those still being sickened by poorly interred radioactive waste, has been much higher, Hawley notes.

“That’s true in St. Louis,” Hawley told The Heartlander, “where, because of 50-60 years of exposure, you see whole families who now have histories of very severe cancers and other diseases directly associated with nuclear radiation. They have those in their family. You see it out west in New Mexico and Utah and the Navajo Nation, where whole families for generations will have these diseases because of what’s happened.”

Those victims, Hawley said, are “very proud to have played [their] part in helping this nation build the most powerful, significant nuclear program in the world and winning the Cold War. But these folks deserve to be recognized for the sacrifices that they made, and compensated when the government has poisoned them without telling them, without helping them, without making it right.  

“This is a chance, finally, to make it right.

“All of this is caused by the federal government’s negligence in its testing program and its disposal program, where repeatedly the government over the years exposed citizens unwillingly and unwittingly to nuclear radiation – didn’t tell them in almost all cases, didn’t clean it up in many cases, including obviously in Missouri, where we’re still dealing with nuclear radiation and nuclear toxins that have not been cleaned up, and then failed to compensate any of these individuals for decades.”

Hawley’s quest to reauthorize and expand the aid to radiation victims in Missouri and beyond – his No. 1 legislative priority, he says – has had an oddly quixotic feel to it the past few years.

Why has it been so hard – particularly in the House, which is designed by the Founders to be closest to the people?

“I think there’s been a lot of education to do,” Hawley says. “I think a lot of people just don’t realize the scope here of the nuclear exposure and the scope of the harm.  

“And I think if you haven’t seen it yourself, if you haven’t talked to survivors, if you haven’t sat with their families, if you haven’t looked at the pictures of loved ones that they’ve lost, sometimes it’s hard to quite fully capture it. 

“And I think a lot of people just think this isn’t a big deal, there’s not much to this. In fact, it’s a huge deal. It’s a huge number of people. And it’s lives, not just a little bit impacted; it’s lives destroyed and whole family lines generationally impacted.”