When Congress passed a law to get benefits to Americans exposed to toxic burn pits overseas, it left someone out. Thousands of them, actually — civilian workers employed by the federal government who stood in the same smoke, breathed the same air, and came home with the same illnesses as the veterans the law was written to help.
Now there’s a push to change that.
Burn pits were used extensively at military bases in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere to dispose of waste — everything from chemicals and munitions to medical supplies and human waste. The open-air fires burned around the clock. Troops who served near them have reported cancers, respiratory disease, and neurological conditions at elevated rates. So have the civilian workers stationed alongside them.
The 2022 PACT Act — the law Congress passed to address toxic exposure — extended VA health care and disability benefits to millions of veterans. Civilian federal employees weren’t included. They don’t go through the VA. Their benefits run through different federal agencies, and the PACT Act didn’t touch those systems.
The gap isn’t a small one. Thousands of civilian workers — federal employees and some government contractors — were deployed to the same bases where burn pits operated. They aren’t veterans under the law’s definition, so the benefits don’t apply, even if their diagnoses match what the PACT Act was designed to cover.
Efforts to close that gap are now underway in Washington. The specifics of any legislation — who it would cover, which agencies would administer it, what benefit levels would look like — hadn’t been finalized as of early July 2026.
Whether Congress moves fast enough, or at all, is an open question. The PACT Act itself took years of advocacy before it passed, driven in large part by veterans groups and the families of service members who died from burn pit-related illness. Civilian workers don’t have the same organized lobbying infrastructure behind them — and it’s unclear how much political momentum their cause has built so far.
