Legislation passed over the summer providing lifetime healthcare and disability benefits to military personnel sickened by toxic smoke from massive trash-burning pits in Iraq and Afghanistan excludes tens of thousands of civilians who breathed the same air.
For more than a decade, the Department of Defense has acknowledged that air on many military bases in war zones was contaminated by toxic smoke from these burn pits: Football field-sized open air incinerators where military contractors disposed of everything from body parts and household trash to raw sewage and war-damaged vehicle parts, spraying it all with jet fuel and lighting it on fire.
The Honoring Our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act (Honoring Our PACT Act) covers military veterans who served on these bases, but excludes thousands of federal civilian employees sent to serve alongside them by the Department of Defense and U.S. intelligence agencies, as well as the State Department, Treasury and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Sidelined by bureacratic wrangling in Congress, many of these employees say they are stuck pursuing compensation through a process so onerous that it makes it impossible for them to get help.
“The evidentiary requirements… are in practice impossible to meet for those of us who got sick,” Debora Pfaff, who was deployed to Iraq in 2009 as a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, told Newsweek. Pfaff developed on her return a series of debilitating chronic ailments that have left her with the bone density of an 84-year old and only 56 percent lung function.
Anecdotal accounts compiled by Newsweek and survey research by the Rand Corp., a think tank with historic ties to the U.S. military, suggest that a growing number of deployed civilians and contractors are developing many of the same chronic conditions and ailments as military personnel: They range from cancer and respiratory disease to immune disorders.
In a statement, the defense department said it provides civilians with advisers to help navigate the injury compensation process but acknowledged their health is more difficult to track because they use private medical providers for most of their care.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
For veterans, the PACT Act signed into law by President Joe Biden Aug. 10 slices through the red tape at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), relieving them of the burden of proving that their chronic illness or disability is the direct result of exposure to toxic burn pit smoke.
Biden has said he believes there might be a link between his son Beau’s exposure to burn pit smoke while serving in Iraq and his 2015 death from brain cancer. But the scientific uncertainty about the causal link is an example of the bind that many veterans found themselves in before the passage of the PACT Act.
Now, if military veterans get sick from any one of a list of conditions known to be caused by toxic exposure (including the brain cancer that killed Beau Biden), they get a “presumption” that the illness is service-related. And that entitles them to lifetime healthcare and possible disability compensation payments at taxpayer expense.
Worker’s compensation: A broken system
But the civilians who served alongside them are left applying for benefits from the Office of Worker’s Compensation Programs, or OWCP, an agency within the Department of Labor. The agency administers the Federal Employees’ Compensation Act, setting strict standards claimants must meet to qualify for compensation. Specifically, for employment-related illnesses such as toxic exposure, the regulations require…
Read More: Deal to Help Vets Exposed to Toxins Leaves Out Thousands of U.S. Civilians