Tens of thousands of sick nuclear arms workers (and their survivors) from every state in the nation have applied for compensation that Congress established for them in 2000. But most have never seen a dime. Many ill workers have become mired in a process so adversarial that top program officials at one point considered putting some of them under government surveillance — spying on them.
Thousands of nuclear arms workers became sick or died building atomic weapons to defend America. They did top-secret work that exposed them to radiation, chemicals, heavy metals and other poisons. For half a century, the federal government's official policy was to fight any workers who claimed job-related illness, often spending tens of millions in tax dollars annually to do so. The government at times absolutely denied that the workers faced undue danger.
All of that was supposed to have changed at the start of this decade, when the Clinton administration reversed the government's stonewalling and a Republican Congress decided to pay sick workers' medical bills and offer them $150,000 in compensation.
The workers were to be compensated if evidence linked their radiation or chemical exposures to their illnesses. Congress realized that the secrecy surrounding their jobs could make finding proof particularly difficult, and instructed government agencies to help the workers through the process.
The compensation program got off to a wasteful start when the Department of Energy ran up a $90 million administrative bill in four years but compensated only 32 people. Congress thought it had fixed the program when it "fired" the Energy Department in 2004 and transferred the entire responsibility to the U.S. Department of Labor, which had explicit instructions to make the compensation "timely, uniform and adequate."
Since then, sick nuclear workers have protested bitterly about the program's failure to meet their needs. In 2006, congressional hearings uncovered White House attempts to cut costs by denying compensation to more workers.
An investigation by the Rocky Mountain News last month found that the Labor Department has delayed the cases of sick nuclear weapons workers or their survivors across the nation by giving misleading information, withholding records essential to their cases, failing to inform them of alternative paths to aid, repeatedly claiming to have lost evidence sent by ill workers and making requirements for compensation impossibly high.
"It's denial by design," said Janine Anderson, a sick worker who has spent seven years fighting for compensation while the government alternated between losing her file and denying her case. "I'll go to my deathbed believing this was set up to deny claims."
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