Capt. David Nadeau of the Monroe Charter Township Fire Department got in a car on the evening of September 11, 2001 and drove from Monroe to Ground Zero. Twenty-five years later, he has cancer.
On Wednesday, September 9, Mike Rogers (MI) posted a video about him.
"As a result of his heroism, 25 years later — he has cancer," Rogers wrote. "Nobody deserves this."
What the video did not mention is that when Congress wrote the law that treats responders exactly like Capt. Nadeau, Rogers voted no. Twice. And he told a congressional committee why: guaranteeing that care, he said, would put the country's finances at risk.
What the law does
The James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act is named for a New York police detective who worked the pile at Ground Zero and died in 2006. The law created what is now the World Trade Center Health Program, which monitors and treats the responders, survivors, cleanup workers and area residents who got sick from what they breathed after the towers came down. It also reopened the fund that compensates them.
It is the reason a firefighter from Michigan who drove to New York that night has a federal program to turn to.
Rogers fought it.
During a House Energy and Commerce Committee debate in 2010, he objected to making the health program a guarantee rather than something Congress would have to renew. The Detroit Metro Times quotes him saying:
"By making this a new mandatory program, you jeopardize the financial health of the United States of America."
Then he voted no
He did not stop at the objection. The House record is public and it is not ambiguous.
On July 29, 2010, the bill came to the floor under a procedure that required a two-thirds majority. It got 255 votes to 159 — a clear majority, but not two-thirds, so it failed. Rogers voted nay.
On September 29, 2010, the bill came back under ordinary rules and passed, 268 to 160. Rogers voted no again.
When the Senate sent back an amended version on December 22, 2010, the House agreed to it 206 to 60 and sent it to President Obama, who signed it into law on January 2, 2011. Rogers did not vote — nor did 167 other members, three days before Christmas.
Plenty of Republicans voted against that bill and said afterward that they supported helping sick responders but objected to how it was paid for. Rogers said something narrower and more damaging: that a guaranteed health program for the people who were poisoned at Ground Zero was itself a threat to the country's finances.
The money argument he only makes about sick people
The World Trade Center Health Program has served nearly 155,000 responders and survivors. It cost about $4.2 billion over ten years.
Rogers has not raised the same concern about President Trump's war in Iran, which has cost taxpayers more than $37.5 billion since it began on February 28, according to the Associated Press.
That is roughly nine times what the health program cost over a decade, spent in about six months, without objection from a candidate who called a program for cancer-stricken firefighters a danger to the national balance sheet.
His campaign declined to comment on the votes. The record of them was handed to the Metro Times by American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic-aligned opposition research group; the paper says it verified the votes and the remarks itself, and the clerk's roll calls are public.
This is not the first time the record has not matched the ad
Rogers has spent this campaign presenting a version of himself that his own record keeps contradicting.
He told donors in a fundraising email that he had seen Osama bin Laden's body "with my own eyes." He was in Washington. What he saw was a photograph.
He has campaigned as a health care moderate while telling a private audience he liked the idea of charging people $50 for the cancer screenings and preventive care that insurance now has to cover for free.
He spent months urging Michigan to compete aggressively for data centers, then called for a one-year moratorium on new ones once the opposition got loud.
And he has campaigned on rooting out "waste, fraud and abuse" while his campaign and allied committees accepted more than $234,000 from three donors connected to fraud cases.
Why he brought up 9/11 in the first place
The tribute video did not appear in a vacuum. Rogers has made September 11 a weapon in his race against Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed, who is Muslim.
The day after El-Sayed won the primary, Rogers claimed his opponent "believes America deserved 9/11." El-Sayed never said it. The remark came from a left-wing streamer who campaigned with him and later apologized for it, and El-Sayed has said plainly, "America didn't deserve 9/11." PolitiFact rated Rogers' claim Pants on Fire, and FactCheck.org found his campaign produced no evidence for it.
So the sequence is this. Rogers invented a 9/11 smear about his Muslim opponent. Then, as the anniversary approached, he posted a tribute to a real firefighter with real cancer. And the law that exists to treat responders like that firefighter is one he voted against twice, on the grounds that it cost too much.
The bottom line
Mike Rogers (MI) voted against the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act on July 29 and September 29, 2010, and did not vote on the final version in December, after telling a House committee that guaranteed care for people sickened at Ground Zero would "jeopardize the financial health of the United States of America." That program has since served nearly 155,000 responders and survivors for about $4.2 billion over ten years — roughly a ninth of what Trump's war in Iran has cost in about six months. Twenty-five years on, he is running a video about a Monroe fire captain with exactly the kind of cancer that program was created to treat.
Source
Before Mike Rogers invoked 9/11 against Abdul El-Sayed, he voted against care for sick responders — Steve Neavling, Detroit Metro Times, September 11, 2026. Photo: Rogers' Facebook page, via Detroit Metro Times.
