New Measure Aims to Fund WTC Health Program Through 2040
The U.S. Senators representing New York, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, announced Wednesday that they have reached a provisional agreement with the Senate’s Republican majority to allocate long-term funding to the World Trade Center Health Program, which serves people made sick by toxic debris from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Mr. Schumer and Ms. Gillibrand have inserted into the budget a provision that, if enacted, will earmark $3 billion to fund the Health Program through 2040. This spending bill, which runs to more than 1,000 pages, is scheduled for a preliminary Senate vote next week.
“The Health Program helps honor our promise to never forget by ensuring medical monitoring and treatment for the September 11 survivors and responders who stepped up in one of our nation’s darkest hours,” Ms. Gillibrand said, in announcing the agreement. “Allowing a funding shortfall to disrupt access to their care would be a betrayal of their service to New York and our nation.”
If this measure survives the appropriations process (which still requires agreement from the House of Representatives and a presidential signature), it could avert an impending Health Program budget shortfall now projected for 2027, after which it will become necessary to scale back care for participants and turn away new applicants.
Yesterday’s measure announced by Mr. Schumer and Ms. Gillibrand amounts to a reprise of a similar bi-partisan agreement reached in late 2024, which would have provided the Health Program with interim funding through 2034, after which its budget mechanism would have been revised to prevent future shortfalls through the planned sunset of benefits in 2090. That plan was scuttled at the last minute by the Trump administration, which removed this funding from a year-end budget agreement designed to prevent the federal government from shutting down. The 2024 bill also contained provisions to increase funding for research and data collection related to conditions associated with September 11, with a focus on mental health and dementia, which have been omitted from the new plan.
Additional budget allocations are needed because when the Health Program was launched in 2010, no policymaker could foresee the number of people who would eventually need its services. The program’s initial budget was drained in a few years, and the bill required reauthorization in 2015. The additional funds allocated at that time were nearly depleted by the end of 2023, which led Congress to provide a onetime cash infusion of $676 million. It is that allocation that is poised to run out in 2027, unless the measure that Mr. Schumer and Ms. Gillibrand are advocating is enacted.
The population affected by turmoil in the Health Program is considerable, with more than 140,000 people currently covered in all 50 states. In recent years, the number of people made sick (and eventually killed) by exposure to toxic debris from September 11 has surpassed the tally of people who died on that day, and the preponderance of newly diagnosed illness has shifted toward the survivor community (defined as those who lived, worked, or attended school or day care facilities within the eligibility zone during the specified time period), rather than first responders.
According to the Health Program’s most recent quarterly report (issued last September), 25,327 survivors are now certified to suffer from cancer related to September 11 exposure, which is within one percent of the corresponding tally of 25,571 cases among responders. For the 12-month period that ended September 30, new cancer diagnoses among survivors have surpassed those among responders by 38 percent (5,882 new cases among survivors, compared to 4,264 among responders). The quarterly report also notes that during the same 12-month period, the Health Program spent $337.2 million on care (including $52 million on prescription medications), or almost exactly half of the onetime allocation budgeted in 2023.