Senate OBBBA Includes Major "RECA" Entitlement Expansion

In addition to adding an extra $1.1 trillion to the national debt above the House bill to a total of over $4.1 trillion, the Senate-passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) added a massive but temporary expansion to the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA). The official cost of this expansion is modest as it is only in effect for two years – but if made permanent, it could cost tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars.

The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) provides cash payments of up to $100,000 to victims of domestic radiation exposure from uranium mining and impacts of the Manhattan Project, at a cost of roughly $50 million per year. The Senate bill would massively expand RECA – most significantly by adding a large number of medical diagnoses that make applicants eligible for payments and substantially expanding the geographic areas eligible for those benefits.

Because the Senate expansion would remain in effect for only two years and the new expansion would take time to ramp up, CBO estimates it would cost about $8 billion – already more than 50 times as large as the current program in its peak year. But the Senate’s arbitrary expiration masks what could be huge costs. Previous expansion proposals have been estimated to cost between $50 billion and $150 billion over a decade.

The Senate bill effectively creates a ticking entitlement time bomb that would put massive pressure on policymakers to extend this program.

Unfortunately, this is not the only costly new entitlement the Senate bill introduces on a temporary basis. It also creates a new rural hospital fund that expires after 2030, state and local homeland security assistance that expires by the end of 2029, an expansion of the SALT cap that expires after five years, and new tax breaks for tips, overtime, seniors, and auto loans that expire after four years.

Extending these and other provisions could add nearly $1.5 trillion to the cost of an already expensive bill, throwing the country even further into debt.