A claims process that has not kept its promise

The Camp Lejeune Justice Act, enacted in August 2022 as Section 804 of the Honoring Our PACT Act, gave hundreds of thousands of people a way to seek compensation for one of the worst documented instances of drinking-water contamination in US history. Four years on, the law’s substantive premise has held up. Its delivery has not.

Roughly $421 million has been paid across Camp Lejeune settlements since early 2025 (Department of Justice). But fewer than 1% of the more than 400,000 administrative claims filed have been resolved, the first trials have yet to produce a verdict, and the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of total exposure runs near $21 billion. This is a brief about the gap between those numbers — and why it has been so hard to close.

The contamination

For roughly three decades, two of the water treatment plants serving Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina drew on contaminated wells. The Hadnot Point and Tarawa Terrace systems were tainted by volatile organic compounds — principally trichloroethylene (TCE), a metal degreaser, and tetrachloroethylene or PCE, a dry-cleaning solvent — along with benzene, vinyl chloride, and dozens of other chemicals. The sources included on-base leaks and spills and an off-base dry cleaner.

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), the federal health agency that has studied the site, dates the contamination to the early 1950s; the most contaminated wells were not shut down until 1985. ATSDR’s assessment is that exposures from the 1950s through February 1985 likely increased the risk of several cancers — including kidney cancer, leukemia, and multiple myeloma — as well as adverse birth outcomes and other health effects, among the Marines, civilian workers, and family members who lived and worked on the base (ATSDR).

Because the harm fell on a federal installation, the people exposed faced a long-standing legal wall: federal sovereign immunity, layered with a North Carolina statute of repose that courts had used to bar claims arising from decades-old conduct. For years, that combination meant no court could hear the cases at all.

What the 2022 law changed

The Camp Lejeune Justice Act removed that wall, narrowly and for a defined population. It allows anyone who lived, worked, or was otherwise present at Camp Lejeune for at least 30 days between August 1, 1953, and December 31, 1987 — and who later developed a qualifying illness — to bring a claim against the United States. That covers veterans, reservists and National Guard members, civilian employees, and family members, including those exposed in utero.

The statute set up a two-step process. A claimant must first file an administrative claim with the Department of the Navy. Only if the Navy denies the claim, or fails to act on it within six months, can the claimant file suit. All lawsuits are funneled to a single venue: the US District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. The filing window for new claims closed in August 2024.

How settlements are supposed to work

To move cases without a trial for each one, the Department of Justice and the Navy rolled out an Elective Option in 2023 — a standardized, tiered settlement framework (Department of Justice). It sorts qualifying illnesses into two tiers based on the strength of the scientific link, and sets a fixed payment within each tier according to how long the person was exposed.

• Tier 1 covers conditions ATSDR has tied most firmly to the contamination — bladder, kidney, and liver cancer, leukemia, and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Offers run from $150,000 for 30 to 364 days of exposure up to $450,000 for more than five years.
• Tier 2 covers conditions with a weaker but recognized link — including multiple myeloma, Parkinson’s disease, end-stage renal disease, and systemic scleroderma. Offers run from $100,000 to $400,000 on the same exposure scale.
• A claim involving a death adds $100,000.

Accepting an Elective Option offer is final: it forecloses any further suit over the contamination. Declining preserves the right to litigate in federal court — but that route is far slower.

For claims that do not settle, the court is using bellwether trials: a small set of representative cases tried first, to establish how juries value different injuries and to create benchmarks for the rest. The first “Track 1” group of bellwether cases covers bladder cancer, kidney cancer, leukemia, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and Parkinson’s disease. Federal judges have indicated the first trials should go forward in 2026, after repeated delays in 2025; as of this writing no jury verdict has yet been returned (Public Radio East).

Why it has been so slow

The arithmetic is stark. More than 400,000 administrative claims were filed; only a few thousand settlements have been approved. Several factors explain the bottleneck.

The government contests causation. Many of the illnesses were diagnosed decades after exposure. The Justice Department has filed extensive motions questioning whether specific cancers can be traced to the water, and litigation has stalled while the court works through challenges to expert testimony.

Documentation is demanding. Even under the Elective Option, a claimant must prove presence at the base during the covered years and a qualifying diagnosis. Records from the 1950s through 1980s are often incomplete, and assembling them — service records, residency proof, medical histories — takes time many claimants do not have.

Many offers are declined as too low. For claimants whose medical costs have run past $1 million, an Elective Option offer capped well below that can look inadequate, pushing the case back into the slower trial track.

The forum is concentrated. Channeling every suit through one federal district court was meant to create consistency, but it also concentrated an enormous caseload — split among four judges — into a single docket.

The result is a process that has paid out real money to thousands of people while leaving the overwhelming majority of claimants waiting. The CBO’s roughly $21 billion exposure estimate (Bloomberg Law), set against the $421 million paid so far, is a measure of how much of this remains unresolved. For an aging claimant population, the timeline is not abstract: some will not live to see their claims decided.

What to ask your representatives

• Will they support legislation to speed Camp Lejeune claims — including measures to allow jury trials and streamline the administrative stage?
• Will they press the Navy and the Justice Department to commit to firm timelines and report regularly on claims processed, offers made, and offers accepted?
• Will they ensure the Eastern District of North Carolina has the judicial and administrative resources to clear the docket without sacrificing fairness?
• How will they make sure the money to pay valid claims is available, given that settlements draw on the federal Judgment Fund rather than a dedicated account?