Nearly six years after Congress created a compensation program, sick and dying former nuclear defense workers are still having to navigate an incomprehensible bureaucratic labyrinth. A recent report shows why Congress and the U.S. Department of Labor must expedite claims, including thousands from Rocky Flats, the now-demolished nuclear bomb factory near Boulder.
Frankly, the government’s behavior has been shameful. During half a century of bomb making, workers often weren’t warned of the risks or told when they were exposed to radiation or toxins. Today, the workers face an insurmountable legal burden to prove that their fatal illnesses are job-related – but the government and its contractors have lost or destroyed key records. Many former workers are elderly or so sick they can’t hold a job, and spending countless hours searching for missing records is a hardship. Yet inside the bureaucracy, there’s no sense of urgency to resolve the claims, an agency ombudsman said.
Meanwhile, President Bush’s budget proposes to cut the program by $686 million, or nearly half.
No wonder former workers think the government is delaying their benefits to “wait them out,” that is, to wait for them to die. “This perception has been keenly felt” by the workers, said ombudsman Donald G. Shalhoub.
The program must be made more efficient if the workers who built America’s arsenal are to see justice. Congress authorized the compensation effort in 2000 and in 2004 moved it from the Department of Energy (which in four years paid only 31 of 25,000 claims) to the Department of Labor, which has done better.
But not good enough. Under part of the program that pays medical expenses, Labor has received 71,900 claims from former workers, spouses and children. Some 28,600 were denied, 19,300 were approved and 24,000 are pending. Rocky Flats cases fared a bit better: Of 4,600 claims, 2,400 were approved, 1,000 were denied and 1,200 are pending – and only a few hundred have been paid.
The numbers would improve greatly, though, if Labor granted a Steelworkers Union petition to relax the overly strict evidence rules for Rocky Flats workers. (The government already gave this “special exposure cohort” status to workers at three other nuclear sites.)
Thousands of former defense workers face prolonged illnesses and premature death as they wait for compensation. Let’s eliminate the delays.
