A Radiation Compensation Fund Paid $2.7 Billion in 35 Years. Congress Just Tripled Its Price Tag.

The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act pays lump sums to people who developed cancer and other diseases after exposure to U.S. nuclear weapons testing or uranium mining — downwinders in the Southwest, miners and millers, soldiers who stood near a test blast.▸ Congress let it lapse on June 10, 2024. On July 4, 2025, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Public Law 119-21, revived it and rewrote its terms: higher payments, new eligible categories, new geography. The Justice Department's claims office has been trying to keep up ever since.

Under the original 1990 law, compensation depended on category: downwinders received $50,000, onsite test participants received $75,000, uranium workers received $100,000.▸ Public Law 119-21 flattened that scale — downwinders and onsite participants now both receive $100,000, the same as uranium workers — and widened who qualifies: core drillers and mine remediation workers are newly covered, uranium work through 1990 (not just 1971) counts, chronic renal disease was added to the list of compensable illnesses, and an entirely new category, "Manhattan Project waste," now covers people who lived, worked, or attended school for at least two years in specific contaminated zip codes in Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Alaska. All claims must be filed by December 31, 2027.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated the reauthorization would cost $7.7 billion through 2028 — an estimate independently reported by Ploughshares Fund in the same range, which called it "tripling the scale of past RECA compensation."▸ That's not hyperbole: the Department of Justice's own running tally of awards, current as of July 10, 2026, shows the original program paid $2,739,432,080 to 42,596 approved claimants on claims received over 35 years, from the program's 1990 start through the July 2025 reauthorization. A program CBO expects to cost $7.7 billion in roughly three years is being scored at nearly three times what it spent in three and a half decades.

The scale shift shows up immediately in the claims office's own numbers.▸ In the roughly one year since the reauthorized law took effect, DOJ has received 42,052 claims — almost matching the entire 57,081-claim, 35-year history of the original program in a fraction of the time. It has already approved $489,215,015 across 7,011 of them, at a 99.9% approval rate among claims actually decided. But deciding claims is the bottleneck: 35,036 claims — 83% of everything filed since reauthorization — are still sitting in the queue, neither approved nor denied. Only 5 claims have been denied outright, which suggests the office isn't rejecting people; it simply hasn't gotten to them yet.

The backlog is heaviest in the two categories the new law either expanded or created from scratch:

Downwinder claims — the largest and longest-running category — have 17,256 of 20,114 filings still pending.▸ Manhattan Project waste, the brand-new category with no processing history to build on, has 16,618 of 20,535 pending, an 81% backlog rate on claims that didn't exist as a legal category thirteen months ago. Many of these claimants are elderly and already sick; the statute exists precisely because Congress judged that ordinary litigation would take too long for people with a cancer diagnosis. The reauthorization gave more of them a right to file. It did not, on this evidence, give the office enough capacity to decide.

The $7.7 billion CBO figure is drawn from CBO's cost estimate as reported independently by two nuclear-policy nonprofits, not from a CBO document fetched directly — CBO's own site did not load from this network at the time of writing; all claims and dollar figures from the Justice Department are read directly from its live, dated "Awards to Date" page.