“I almost feel like that’s the game being played against us by the Speaker,” said Chapman, who helped launch Just Moms STL, a nonprofit that advocates for those suffering from radiation exposure in their local community. “We have to go back and educate all these other elected officials on what happened in St. Louis, because they don’t know. We’re left out.”

Reuters recently published an investigation diving into how a federal health agency failed a neighborhood near Chapman, also ailing from radiation exposure.

It’s a similar story in Idaho, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah, where communities that sit downwind of former nuclear testing sites have been ravaged by cancers and other diseases yet excluded from RECA benefits for decades.