IPS has done extensive research and analyses on the massive cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, and other vital programs that are being used to fund huge tax breaks for billionaires and the wealthy under the big, brutal GOP budget bill. There has been little to celebrate about the reconciliation bill that Congress passed in early July.
As IPS New Mexico Fellow Feleecia Guillen explains in a powerful op-ed, an unlikely victory in the GOP budget to renew and expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), is undermined by the bill’s cuts to healthcare, food stamps, and other vital programs and services that enable communities to survive and thrive.
The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) provides partial restitution to people who have developed certain serious illnesses following exposure to radiation from the U.S. nuclear weapons program, and to their survivors.
That process of restitution is undermined when families who are impacted by exposure cannot access the health care they need. In a new fact sheet for IPS, Feleecia found that in 16 RECA-eligible states alone, the budget bill will rip health insurance away from over 3.9 million people — including 103,719 in New Mexico, the very state whose residents were sacrificed and exposed to U.S. nuclear testing.
New Mexicans — indigenous, Hispanic and rural families in particular — are owed a great deal of restitution, as the first atomic bombs were tested at the Trinity site in Los Alamos and across their lands without their consent.
In an interview with KZFR, IPS New Mexico Fellow Feleecia Guillen shares her deeply personal perspective on how nuclear testing has reshaped the lives of generations of families in New Mexico. Feleecia says that the price of being on the frontlines of nuclear weapons testing and radiation exposure is watching your family members die from cancers linked to radiation exposure and from exposure to uranium mining, and building plutonium pits.
Yet, when it comes to restitution for exposure to nuclear testing, New Mexican communities have historically been left behind: “This original RECA bill that we passed in 1990, it really just included folks in Utah, Arizona and Nevada, and included some uranium workers as well, prominently in the Navajo Nation, but it failed to really include the vast of majority of people who were affected by exposure to nuclear testing,” she explains.
“For more than three decades, my community, along with activists, have really fought for New Mexico ‘downwinders’ to be included [in restitution measures] because we were the first victims of nuclear weapons testing,” she adds.
Tucked into Trump’s “Big, Ugly, Nasty Bill” is a provision to expand RECA to include ‘downwinders’ of the original Trinity site in New Mexico, and post-1971 uranium workers. “It’s a long overdue acknowledgement of our suffering, but it comes with a lot of limitations, ” Feleecia explains. “First and foremost, RECA itself — this expansion — would only be funded until the end of 2028. It still leaves out parts of Nevada, Arizona, Montana, Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Washington, and even Guam — all of which were exposed to radiation.”
Perhaps the most glaring issue of all though, Feleecia says, is that the bill refuses to fund healthcare in addition to the cash restitution for generations of health issues related to nuclear exposure. “This compensation act itself doesn’t include health benefits for downwinders at all. It’s just a one-time compensation,” she warns. “When you’ve got people with cancer, with organ damage and other illnesses, a single check isn’t enough. It’s not reparations. They need lifelong care.” Meanwhile, steep cuts to Medicaid and other affordable healthcare programs under the budget bill will undermine the life-saving care these communities urgently require.
As Feleecia urges in her powerful op-ed, more can and must be done to ensure that multiple generations of families impacted by nuclear exposure can access the care that they need: “We deserve compensation without compromise. RECA should be expanded for longer — without compromising Medicaid or rural health care.”
Listen to Feleecia’s full interview with KZFR here
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