ST. LOUIS–Missouri U.S. Senators Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt reintroduced federal legislation Friday that would reauthorize a trust fund that pays victims of nuclear radiation and would make people in certain St. Louis-area ZIP codes eligible for reimbursement of medical bills.

The previous Radiation Exposure Compensation Act expired last spring, although the federal government has continued to pay out claims filed before June of last year. Legislation that would extend and expand it twice passed the Senate but failed to reach a House vote in 2024. House leadership balked at the earlier projected costs of the measure. Hawley then negotiated with Speaker Mike Johnson’s office on a compromise that would have capped mandatory expenditures, but that bill also never made it to the floor. 

The reintroduction had been expected but comes just days after the state of Missouri wrote the Environmental Protection Agency, asking the agency to take over the Bridgeton landfill over new concerns that nuclear radiation may have reached the site from the adjacent West Lake Landfill.

“The EPA needs to clean it up and Congress needs to pass RECA. They need to compensate everybody in our state who has been exposed to radiation because of the federal government,” Hawley said in an interview Thursday with Spectrum News. 

RECA did not come up in a conversation Hawley had with President Trump on Thursday, but he said the topic has been raised with him recently.

“I just pointed out to him, other administrations have not been able to get this done. For Missouri, we have been decades, and no presidential administration has cleaned it up yet and no presidential administration has compensated victims in Missouri…it’s time to do it and I think he wants to be the first,” Hawley said. The topic has also come up with Trump cabinet nominees, with Hawley recently saying that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the president’s choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, is also on board with the bill.