New Mexico senator still pushing for compensation for New Mexico downwinders

The 79th anniversary of the Trinity Test is less than a week away, and one New Mexico senator is still pushing to expand a federal program that would compensate New Mexico downwinders.

Congress allowed a federal program to help former uranium miners and people living downwind of nuclear testing with medical costs to sunset last month, but Sen. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., is trying to get a clearer estimate of the cost to expand the program.

The last above-ground nuclear test in the U.S. was in Nevada in 1962.

The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) extension and expansion passed the Senate in March and would extend the existing federal program that gives money to people with certain types of cancer who worked in uranium mines or were downwind of U.S. nuclear tests. The existing program does not give benefits to descendants of downwinders, but the proposed expansion would.

The House has not taken up the bill, allowing the program to sunset.

The proposed expansion would include uranium mine workers from after 1971 and New Mexican downwinders for the first time, along with a host of other states. It would also increase the number of ailments that would qualify for compensation.

Luján secured a commitment from Phillip Swagel, director of the Congressional Budget Office, during a Senate Budget Committee hearing on Tuesday that the CBO would meet to discuss the program’s cost. Luján wants state-by-state cost estimates for the RECA expansion and extension. Getting a state-by-state estimate is a challenge, Swagel told Luján.

Luján took issue with the CBO’s original rough estimate of the cost of the expansion, $150 billion, because it is much higher than what the program has already paid out. The RECA program began in 1990 and so far has paid out $2.6 billion, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Justice.

“I want to make sure we have the correct receipts so we can have an honest conversation about the policy and get help to a whole bunch of people across America who this country owes a liability to, an apology to, and cost them their lives in many instances,” Luján said.

The estimated cost may have been the reason that House Republicans pulled a RECA expansion from a military spending bill at the last minute in December.

The first atomic bomb test, the Trinity Test, took place on July 16, 1945, in New Mexico. An interfaith coalition is hosting an event to commemorate the anniversary Sunday at St. John XXIII Catholic Community, 4831 Tramway Ridge NE.

“We are in a new nuclear arms race far more dangerous than the first, and I believe we need to rejuvenate a sustained, serious conversation about universal, verifiable nuclear disarmament,” Archbishop of Santa Fe John Wester said.