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u/LKM_44122 20h ago
9/11 RESPONDERS STILL FIGHTING FOR HEALTHCARE
We honor our first responders, those we lost, and others who are still suffering the effects of 9/11 today.
We stood silent to the sound of the bell on a bridge over the Shoreway in Cleveland this morning at the key times for each event from that fateful day:
* 8:46 a.m. - American 11 hit the North Tower of the WTC
* 9:03 a.m. - United 175 hit the South Tower
* 9:37 a.m. - American 77 hit the Pentagon
* 9:59 a.m. - the South Tower collapsed
* 10:03 a.m. - United 93 went down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania
* 10:28 a.m. - the North Tower collapsed
Everybody says never forget. Then they forget for 364 days and post a meme each September.
The people who ran toward the towers were firefighters, cops, EMTs, ironworkers, operating engineers, laborers, truck drivers, and volunteers, from the city and from other states. Salman Hamdani, a 23-year-old NYPD cadet and certified EMT from Queens, went to the towers to help and never came home. His remains were found near the North Tower the following March. For months, he was publicly suspected of having had something to do with the attacks. Congress later named him as a hero in the PATRIOT Act.
2,977 people were killed on September 11th. More than 9,000 have now died of 9/11-related illnesses, roughly three times that number, according to the World Trade Center Health Program. Cancer cases tied to the exposure have gone from 3,200 in 2015 to nearly 53,000 this year. Today the 9/11 Memorial rang a seventh bell for the first time in 25 years, at the end of the reading of the names, for the people who died in the years after.
Many of them got sick because they were told it was already safe.
On September 8th, Mayor Mamdani opened a public portal with roughly 170,000 pages of city records on 9/11 air quality. It's the first batch of what the city says runs to millions of pages. It includes the Harding memo and 68 boxes of records that turned up in a Department of Environmental Protection office in 2025, after years of public records requests that came back with nothing.
One document is a memo from Associate Health Commissioner Kelly McKinney, dated October 6, 2001, warning that asbestos levels at those locations were "not yet suitable for reoccupancy." Giuliani publicly said the air was safe that same day.
Another, from May 2002, says the word "risk" would be kept out of letters about the Lower Manhattan cleanup because using it would "defeat the purpose of creating public confidence."
Millions of the records had been handed off to the city's captive insurance company to help defend against lawsuits, and the Law Department kept no copies. The Mamdani administration asked for them back after taking office and had them within months. Asked why nobody had asked sooner, a Law Department official said he couldn't explain the delay.
Four mayors sat on those records. Giuliani, Bloomberg, de Blasio, Adams. It took 25 years, letters from Congress, a lawsuit, and a settlement to pry them loose. Giuliani's answer is that the EPA got it wrong and nobody covered anything up. The documents are public now. Read them and decide for yourself.
One of the people most responsible for getting these responders covered was never on site at all. He didn't get involved until 2010.
That person is Jon Stewart. He spent years fighting a handful of people in Congress to pass legislation for the men and women dying from what they breathed.
It was called the Never Forget the Heroes Act, named for James Zadroga, Ray Pfeifer and Luis Alvarez. All three were responders. All three died from exposure. Alvarez testified to a House subcommittee on June 11, 2019, told them he should have been in chemo that morning, and died eighteen days later.
Most of the seats at that hearing were empty. That's the clip people remember, Stewart looking at the empty chairs and asking where the politicians were.
Senator Mitch McConnell, then the Senate Majority Leader, sat on the bill for months and told a reporter Stewart was bent out of shape about it. Stewart's answer was that McConnell should meet the responders face to face instead of making them beg for it every few years.
On July 17th, 2019, Kirsten Gillibrand asked the Senate to pass it by unanimous consent. Rand Paul objected over the deficit. Mike Lee put a procedural hold on it. Two senators held up a bill with 97 votes behind it. The special master who manages the fund had already testified that there was not one proven case of fraud in it.
On July 23rd both of their amendments were voted down. Paul's failed 22 to 77. Lee's failed 32 to 66. The bill then passed 97 to 2, and the only two no votes in the United States Senate were Rand Paul and Mike Lee. More than 200 responders died during the years it took to get there.
Where do we go from here?
The funding fight is over. The appropriations bill was signed into law on February 3rd of this year. The World Trade Center Health Program is funded through 2040. Both parties worked on it and both earned the credit.
Unfortunately, the program spent the last eighteen months under HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. being taken apart and put back together, and it's still recovering from it.
In February of 2025, weeks after RFK Jr. was sworn in, roughly 16 staff were fired, about 20 percent, plus buyouts. April 2025, Dr. John Howard was fired, the longtime head of the program, originally appointed under the first Trump administration. May 2025, another 16. Cancer certifications stopped. The process for adding autoimmune, cardiac and cognitive conditions, which was supposed to produce decisions by March 2025, halted. The Responders and Survivors Steering Committee stopped meeting. A communications pause cut the program off from the 9/11 community. Kennedy later told Congress the firings were a mistake.
By January of this year the program was at 84 filled positions out of 120. In March, staff including the program's deputy director were reassigned to ICE and the Indian Health Service. Asked about it in April, Kennedy told NY1 he was fixing it and took no further questions. He restored the staffing that same month, ahead of his testimony on the Hill.
Doctors and nurses who were fired, rehired and fired again took the buyouts and left. Attorney Michael Barasch, who represents thousands of enrollees, says enrollment now takes over six months start to finish. As of June, InvestigateTV reported the program was still digging out of a backlog built by roughly 18 months of understaffing.
The program now serves nearly 140,000 responders and survivors. They live in every state and in 434 of the 435 congressional districts in this country. That includes yours.
New York and New Jersey have written to HHS about this over and over. Rep. Nick LaLota, a Republican, led a letter in March signed by eight more Republicans. Nine days later Reps. Dan Goldman and Jerrold Nadler, both Democrats, led their own with six colleagues. Senators Gillibrand and Schumer sent one. In July, Garbarino and Gillibrand led a bipartisan letter with more than two dozen signers asking Kennedy to reappoint Dr. Howard.
Both parties. Repeatedly. The people they're fighting for live in all fifty states.
FEMA deployed 26 of its 28 national urban search and rescue task forces. Twenty-one went to New York, five to the Pentagon. The teams that went to the World Trade Center came from about a dozen states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, and Ohio. People from all of those states may still be eligible for help, and there are probably many who came in on their own from other states.
Here's what you can do to help them.
If you or somebody you know was in Lower Manhattan or nearby parts of Brooklyn between September 2001 and May 2002, apply. The area is bigger than most people assume, and it covers cleanup and recovery crews as well as people who lived, worked or went to school down there. Pentagon and Shanksville responders were added in 2024. There's a nationwide provider network, so it doesn't matter where you live now. Roughly 400,000 people were exposed and only about a third are enrolled. 1-888-982-4748, weekdays 8 to 5.
Apply: https://www.cdc.gov/wtc/apply.html
Check if you qualify, as a responder or a survivor: https://www.cdc.gov/wtc/eligiblegroups.html
Then call your member of Congress and ask what they've done to help the survivors.
Find your representative: https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative
Never forget is easy to say. What you do afterwards can help make a difference in the lives of the survivors.
The documents just released:
New York City's 9/11 records portal: https://www.nyc.gov/sept11docs
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20h ago
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u/Zippier92 18h ago
Where is Rudy?
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17h ago
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u/LKM_44122 17h ago
We wrote about this on our FB. He needs to testify under oath.
All of the other mayors had the info too.
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u/Ohgood9002 21h ago
The Jack Daniel's ad right under the picture is maybe not the best suggestion for this topic
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u/Duncan_PhD 18h ago
Not a single Republican showed up to that hearing with Jon Stewert.