Congress Closed the World Trade Center Health Program's $3 Billion Funding Gap. 30% of Its Staff Positions Are Still Empty.

Two federal programs serve the people who responded to or survived the September 11 attacks.▸ One pays claims. The other provides the medical care. They are run by different agencies, funded through different mechanisms, and — as the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund (VCF) put it in its own 2025 Annual Report — frequently confused for each other: "if there was just one area of confusion they would like to help clarify, it would be that the World Trade Center (WTC) Health Program and the VCF are completely separate entities." In 2025 and 2026, that separation became the story. One program's money problem got fixed. The other program's people problem did not.

The VCF compensates people harmed by the attacks or by the toxic debris removal that followed — a no-fault alternative to suing over 9/11-related death or illness.▸ Congress made its funding permanent and uncapped through fiscal 2092 in the Never Forget the Heroes: James Zadroga, Ray Pfeifer, and Luis Alvarez Permanent Authorization Act of 2019, so the VCF's constraint has never been money — it has been throughput. In 2025 the fund notified claimants of more than 9,800 award determinations and paid out $1.8 billion, bringing the total paid to claimants since the fund reopened in October 2011 to more than $16.8 billion, across over 71,000 people, per the VCF's own 2025 Annual Report. Administrative costs — salaries for the roughly 200 staff who run the fund's operations, claims-processing technology, and facilities — remain under 3% of total spend, the report states.

The fund's own service is measurably improving.▸ New claims are also arriving faster than the VCF can easily absorb — up from an average of 700 a month in 2024 to 900 a month in 2025 — yet the Special Master's office cut the time it takes to decide an appeal from an average of 14 months in November 2024 to a routine 90 days by the end of 2025, deciding more than 1,100 appeals over the year. The fund's public target, stated in its FAQ as of July 2026, is to issue a decision on every properly filed claim within a year of submission — a goal it says it is still working toward, not one it has yet hit for every claimant, but a goal all the same.

The World Trade Center Health Program (WTCHP) is the sister program: it provides medical monitoring and treatment, administered by NIOSH, a part of the CDC.▸ Unlike the VCF, its funding was never permanent — it ran on a formula written into the 2011 James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act that Congress and advocates said had stopped keeping pace with the program's growth. By December 2024 that gap had become concrete: a bipartisan fix, negotiated by Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-NY) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) with House and Senate leadership, would have locked in "annual funding sufficient to cover the nearly $3 billion shortfall facing the WTCHP over the next 15 years," per Garbarino's own December 18, 2024 announcement. It was written into that year's government funding bill — and then stripped out at the last minute after Elon Musk publicly threatened to back primary challengers against any Republican who voted for the spending package it rode on.

Lawmakers reintroduced the fix as a standalone bill, the 9/11 Responder and Survivor Health Funding Correction Act of 2025, on February 26, 2025.▸ It took a full year to become law. On February 3, 2026, the President signed H.R. 7148, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026, which incorporated the funding-formula fix and secured WTCHP funding through 2040 — closing the shortfall that, left alone, would have forced the program to stop enrolling new members and ration care for existing ones starting in 2027.

Two months after the original fix collapsed, the staffing side of the same program was cut regardless — by the same administration, for unrelated reasons.▸ In February 2025, newly confirmed HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s department-wide probationary firings took roughly 20% of WTCHP's staff; some of that was reversed within days after public backlash. A larger, agency-wide reduction at NIOSH in April 2025 hit the WTCHP's supporting staff again; NPR reported that of roughly 900 planned NIOSH-wide layoffs, 328 employees — including some at the WTC Health Program — were eventually reinstated after congressional pressure. The reinstatements were partial.

By March 2026 — a month after the funding fix was signed into law — the program was still running with 84 of its 120 funded staff positions filled, a 30% vacancy rate, down from 93 filled positions in January 2025, Sens. Gillibrand and Schumer told HHS Secretary Kennedy in a follow-up letter.▸ The senators' letter also flagged more than $20 million in research contracts the program had not yet been able to award. The program serves about 140,000 enrolled responders and survivors, a population that CDC and lawmakers expect to keep growing by roughly 10,000 people a year as more people who were exposed as children or young adults develop 9/11-linked conditions.

The staffing gap shows up as delay.▸ The wait for a first WTCHP health evaluation — the appointment that starts the process of certifying a 9/11-related condition for treatment — grew from roughly three months before the 2025 cuts to roughly eight months after them, Newsweek reported, citing program members and advocates; separate reporting has put the wait for a decision on an appealed enrollment denial at over a year. In April 2026, HHS told the senators it would allow the program to hire 37 more staff toward a target of 120 full-time workers — the same number the program was already supposed to have filled.

Dollar figures for the VCF are drawn from its 2025 Annual Report, covering claims and awards through December 31, 2025. WTC Health Program staffing and wait-time figures reflect the most recent reporting available as of this piece's publication and may have changed since; Congress's funding fix, signed February 3, 2026, covers WTCHP appropriations through fiscal year 2040.