‘They should have had access’ to funds from day one: Schumer vows to fight for 9/11 victims compensation

The nearly 6,000 spouses and children of Sept. 11, 2001 victims have the support of U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, as a piece of legislation that would reverse an exclusion that barred them from compensation heads to the Senate for a vote.

Direct family members of first responders who perished on Sept. 11 were wrongfully barred from receiving money owed to them from the United States Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism Fund (USVSST) and have been tirelessly advocating to right the wrong.

Originally introduced by Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-Staten Island/South Brooklyn) in August, the Fairness for 9/11 Families Act was reintroduced by Rep. Jerry Nadler and passed through the House of Representatives last week.

Malliotakis, at the Postcards Memorial in St. George on Thursday, celebrated the passage while calling on the Senate and Majority Leader Schumer to pass the legislation.

Schumer said he’s ready to fight to ensure its passage.

“I fought long and hard with 9/11 families and allies in the Senate and House to pass the United States Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism Fund Clarification Act in 2019 that fixed the mistake of excluding certain 9/11 families from the United States Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism Fund,” Schumer told the Advance/SILive.com.

“Now, this catch-up payment rectifies that original error and provides 9/11 spouses and children – as the victims of the worst foreign terror attack in American history – the funds they should have had access to from day one,” he continued.

Janlyn Scauso, widow of Dennis Scauso, FDNY Hazardous Materials CO#1, said the exclusion of compensation “further shattered already broken families.”

Created in 2015, the USVSST is meant to provide compensation to American hostages and their families, as well as families of those who died on Sept.11. However, because some families received money from the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund (VCF), they were precluded from receiving additional funds from the USVSST.

The exclusion from the USVSST lead to non-direct family members being eligible for compensation from the USVSST, where they often received a substantial amount more than direct family members, who were not eligible for payments from the September 11th Victim Compensation fund.

Congress corrected this injustice in 2019, through the United States Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism Fund Clarification Act.

In 2020, Congress tasked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) with calculating a lump sum catch-up payment that would bring the direct family members who had been wrongly excluded from the VSSTF into parity with those people included in the fund when it was first created. The GAO estimated lump sum catch-up payments to 5,364 victims, spouses, and dependents would total approximately $2.7 billion.

The Fairness for 9/11 Families Act fully funds the payments and would retroactively disperse two payments already issued by the fund to non-direct family members. Between 2017 and 2020, $3.3 billion in payments were dispersed.

“The exclusion of these widows and children from the USVSST was an injustice that Congress should have never allowed to happen. For nearly six months my office has worked with victims’ groups and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to correct this, and I’m proud to see the language I introduced in August passed through the House last week,” Malliotakis said.

“Yes, we’re here to celebrate the passage of this bill, but we still need it to pass the Senate. We’re calling on the Senate to pass this bill after so many years; it’s the right thing to do to support our 9/11 families,” she continued.