National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2005

CONGRESSIONAL RECORD
SENATE

NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2005

Ms. CANTWELL. Madam President, I rise as a sponsor of the Bunning amendment, and I thank the Senator from Kentucky for his hard work-both on the Energy Committee and here on the floor of the Senate.

Obviously, we are taking a giant step forward in moving major responsibility for the Energy Employee Occupational Illness Compensation Program at the Department of Labor.

There are thousands of people in Washington State who have been impacted by exposure while working at the Hanford Reservation. The issue is that in 2000, with passage of the original act, as my colleague from Iowa stated, we set up specific exposure cohorts that allowed workers in particular regions of the country to get compensation based on their exposure to beryllium. But where we are today is there are still thousands of workers who have not had their claims processed.

One of the reasons why claims haven't been processed is specific information doesn't exist or was not kept by the various employers at these reservation sites across the country to show what exposed employees endured. The issue then becomes that they have been left to fight their own battles-to fight to get compensation, to fight to prove they actually had exposure, and to fight to pay their medical bills.

With thousands of people in Washington State affected by this, I have been a big supporter of those responsibilities over at the Department of Labor. Besides that, this great ombudsman program is where individual employees can go to ask for help and support in moving their cases.

It also helps in establishing a willing payer. Some of the companies that have been involved in the cleanup process throughout the U.S. no longer exist. We have had employees who wanted to get compensation, and have proven their cases, only to find that no employer existed. This helps in establishing a willing partner and payer.

But the most specific and positive aspect of this legislation is the step forward in saying, let us do site profiles. Site profiles are specifically the responsibility of the Department of Labor to go to a place such as the Hanford nuclear reservation and say, even though some of the employers may not have kept day-to-day logs and details about every specific employee and how they were exposed-and my colleagues have articulated on the Senate floor already how so many people in their States did not have records kept and went to get records by the Department of Energy only to find they didn't exist for the individual employee. When the Department of Labor does a site profile, it will help us when we come back and say that a large class of people at the Hanford Reservation and possibly these other sites around the country now qualify for compensation. This will help expedite that.

The amendment that was modified by the Senator from Kentucky, which the Senator from Iowa worked on, is a very helpful amendment because it actually helps speed up that process of those site profiles.

I don't think it is lost on my colleagues that many of these people are dying. Many of these people, by the time this program under the DOE was going to be finished, were never going to get the help they deserved.

This amendment takes a very positive step forward in getting site profiles done, getting the information needed to prove that these people have been impacted, that they have had illness due to exposure on the job, and that they will not get some help.

I yield the floor.