At 9:46 on the night of July 29, 2010, the House of Representatives voted on a bill to guarantee medical care for the firefighters, police officers and construction workers who breathed the dust at Ground Zero.

A clear majority voted yes. The bill failed anyway.

A list of the Republicans who voted to block the bill went around X this week, in the days before the 25th anniversary of the attacks. It has been seen more than 129,000 times. We checked all 42 names on it against the official roll calls kept by the Clerk of the House and the Secretary of the Senate.

Every name on it voted against the bill. Forty of the 42 voted no that night; the other two, Brett Guthrie and Jerry Moran, were not there for it and voted no at the next vote two months later. And the full record is worse than the list says.

Twenty-six of those people have a report card on this site. Twenty-five of them are still in Congress right now. Three of them hold some of the most powerful posts in it.

The vote that failed

The bill was the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act. It is named for an NYPD detective who logged about 500 hours in the rubble at the World Trade Center and died in January 2006, at 34. The bill would have paid for medical monitoring and treatment for people made sick by the toxic air at the site, and reopened the fund that compensates them.

Democrats brought it to the floor under a fast procedure called suspension of the rules, which requires two-thirds of the members voting rather than a simple majority. Two-thirds of the 414 members who voted that night was 276 votes.

The bill got 255. One hundred fifty-nine members voted no. All but four of them were Republicans. Of the 167 Republicans who cast a vote, 155 voted no and 12 voted yes.

Republicans said at the time that the objection was the price — $7.4 billion — and that the money should not be guaranteed permanently. Some argued it should come from states rather than the federal government.

"It was just a procedural vote" does not survive what happened next

The usual defense of that night is that the two-thirds threshold was the real problem, not the policy — that Republicans were objecting to being denied a chance to amend the bill.

The House tested that two months later.

On September 29, 2010, the same bill came back to the floor under ordinary House procedures, where a simple majority is enough and amendments are in order. It passed 268 to 160. One hundred fifty-seven Republicans voted no again.

Of the 24 House members on this site, 23 voted no both times. The 24th, Brett Guthrie, missed the July vote and voted no in September.

Then it went to the Senate, where it was filibustered. On December 9, 2010, the motion to begin debating the bill got 57 votes. It needed 60. Susan Collins and Jim Risch were among the 42 senators who voted no.

They cut the bill nearly in half, and thirteen of them still voted no

With the program about to die, the bill's sponsors cut it. The $7.4 billion package came back as a $4.3 billion one, stripped down and shortened, and the Senate agreed to pass that version in the last days of the year.

The House took up that compromise on December 22, 2010, and passed it 206 to 60. President Obama signed it on January 2, 2011.

Of the 24 House members on this site who had spent five months voting against the bill, 13 voted against the compromise too: Gus Bilirakis, Mario Diaz-Balart, Virginia Foxx, Brett Guthrie, Jim Jordan, Bob Latta, Tom McClintock, Hal Rogers, Steve Scalise, Pete Sessions, Adrian Smith, Joe Wilson and Rob Wittman.

Five of them voted yes that day: Robert Aderholt, Shelley Moore Capito, Mike Rogers of Alabama, Glenn Thompson and Mike Turner.

Six were not there for the vote: Marsha Blackburn, Ken Calvert, John Carter, Frank Lucas, Mike Simpson and Mike Rogers (MI).

That is the answer to the procedural defense. When the bill was finally small enough and slow enough to pass, a majority of this group voted against that one as well.

Mike Rogers (MI) is now the Republican candidate for Senate in Michigan. Days before this anniversary he posted a 9/11 tribute to a Monroe fire captain who developed cancer after driving to Ground Zero.

Three of them now hold the gavels

This is not a story about backbenchers from a Congress that ended fifteen years ago. Most of these members never left, and the ones who stayed rose.

Steve Scalise is House Majority Leader, the second most powerful member of the chamber, and decides what reaches the floor.

Susan Collins chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, which writes the federal spending bills.

Brett Guthrie chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee — the committee with jurisdiction over the World Trade Center Health Program, because the program lives inside the Public Health Service Act.

That last one matters more than it sounds. Andrew Garbarino's bill to fix the program's broken funding formula, the 9/11 Responder and Survivor Health Funding Correction Act, was referred to Guthrie's committee on February 18, 2025. It never moved out of that committee. The fix reached the president's desk anyway, folded into the appropriations package the House passed on January 22, 2026 and signed into law twelve days after that — nearly a year after the bill landed in Guthrie's committee, and through Collins's.

Others on the list hold gavels of their own. Jim Jordan chairs the Judiciary Committee. Mike Rogers of Alabama chairs Armed Services. Hal Rogers is Dean of the House, a title he holds on an alphabetical tiebreak with Chris Smith of New Jersey — the two of them were sworn in on the same day in 1981.

The program they voted against is in all fifty states

The most common thing said about the 2010 votes at the time was that this was a New York problem and New York should pay for it.

That was wrong then and it is measurably wrong now. The World Trade Center Health Program had 145,275 members enrolled as of June 30, 2026 — responders and survivors from the World Trade Center, and 1,481 of them from the Pentagon and from the field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Advocates for the program told Congress last year that they live in all 50 states and in 434 of the 435 congressional districts, including the districts of the members who voted no.

The program also covers people who were children in downtown Manhattan schools that morning. Those children are adults now.

And when it was gutted last year, New York fought it alone

In February 2025, the Trump administration and Elon Musk's DOGE began cutting the program's staff. It happened four separate times in under three months. At one point the program could not legally certify new cancers or enroll new patients at all, and roughly 1,200 monthly certifications went unprocessed while three FDNY responders with cancer waited — one of them with pancreatic cancer.

We documented that whole collapse in our piece on Andrew Garbarino, the New York Republican who fought each round of it and then voted to make DOGE's cuts to other programs permanent law.

What rolled each round back was public pressure and letters to the administration, and those letters were organized by members from New York and New Jersey — Garbarino, Nick LaLota, Chuck Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand, Andy Kim. Not by the House Majority Leader, and not by the chairman of the committee the program answers to.

Twelve more voted no in 2019

By 2019 the politics had changed. The bill to make the victim compensation fund permanent passed the House 402 to 12 on July 12 and the Senate 97 to 2 eleven days later.

None of the 26 voted no that time. Twenty-three of them voted yes, Mike Rogers of Alabama did not vote, and Pete Sessions and Mike Rogers (MI) were out of Congress when it came up.

The twelve who voted no were a different set — eleven Republicans and one independent — and four of them have report cards on this site: Andy Biggs, Michael Cloud, Paul Gosar and Andy Harris. Ralph Norman and John Rose, who also voted no, are no longer running.

What the record shows

Twenty-six Republicans with a report card on this site voted against guaranteed medical care for the people who cleaned up Ground Zero. Twenty-three of them voted no in July 2010, all 24 House members among them voted no again in September, and two senators voted to keep the bill from reaching the floor in December. When the bill came back cut from $7.4 billion to $4.3 billion, 13 of them voted against that version too. Twenty-five of the 26 are still in Congress. Steve Scalise sets the House floor schedule, Susan Collins writes the spending bills, and Brett Guthrie chairs the committee that let the program's funding fix sit for nearly a year without a vote.

Source

The claim that prompted this post is a September 10, 2026 post on X by @HQNewsNow listing 42 Republicans who voted against the 9/11 Health and Compensation Act. Every name was checked against the roll-call records of the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives and the United States Senate. The vote history is also catalogued by 9/11 Health Watch. Photo: Andrea Booher / FEMA, September 19, 2001, public domain.