Bill To Keep 9/11 Fund Alive Passes House Committee After Shaming

NEW YORK — A bill to preserve a cash-strapped fund for 9/11 victims cleared a House committee on Wednesday after lawmakers were shamed over their inaction to help first-responders.

The House Judiciary Committee passed the bill to reauthorize and fund the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund for about seven more decades. It now goes to the full House.

"It is time for us to give responders and survivors peace of mind once and for all and pass this long-term reauthorization to ensure the (fund) will be there for them as long as they need it," said U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler, a Manhattan Democrat who chairs the committee.

The bill, sponsored by Manhattan Rep. Carolyn Maloney, aims to maintain the fund for victims of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and other sites as it faces a shortage of money that has led to steep cuts in payments to survivors and first-repsonders.

The legislation would keep the fund running through the 2090 fiscal year, giving victims and their families until October 2089 to file claims. It would also make claimants whole if their payments were reduced because of insufficient funding.

The committee vote came a day after the comedian Jon Stewart excoriated lawmakers for hestitating to support the fund, which had paid out more than 21,000 claims as of February. With a spike in claims in recent years and money running out, the fund announced that month that it would cut payments as much as 70 percent.

New York's Democratic senators called on Congress to quickly pass the bill to assure first-responders that the fund will exist well into the future. The fund is currently slated to shut down in 2020, 10 years after it was established in its current form; it was last reauthorized in 2015.

"Yesterday should be the last time our first responders have to come to Washington," Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said in a statement. "As they so eloquently testified — they are sick, they are dying, and they shouldn’t have to keep coming back to Congress every five years just to receive basic decency for their sacrifice."

The 9/11 attacks on New York City, Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania killed 2,996 people and hurt more than 6,000 others. In the years since, thousands of firefighters have come down with diseases stemming from their work at the World Trade Center including cancer, asthma and chronic bronchitis.