The U.S. Supreme Court Monday agreed to hear a case involving a Washington state law that created a presumption of compensability for certain conditions suffered by federal workers at the Hanford nuclear reservation.

Gov. Jay Inslee in 2018 signed H.B. 1723, which created a presumption that various respiratory illnesses and cancers suffered by workers at the decommissioned nuclear production facility in Hanford, Washington, are compensable under presumption.

Approximately 10,000 federal contractor employees are eligible for workers comp benefits in Washington for injuries and illnesses suffered at the site, where the U.S. Department of Energy is overseeing cleanup from the production of weapons-grade plutonium for the nation’s nuclear arsenal during World War II and the Cold War.

The federal government has fought the state law, arguing that it is a “discriminatory treatment of the federal government and of the firms that employ the federal contract workers” and that it “violates the intergovernmental-immunity principle of the Supremacy Clause” of the Constitution, according to documents in United States v. The State of Washington.

A federal court granted summary judgment dismissing a lawsuit filed by the Trump administration, and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in August 2020 affirmed that decision.

The U.S. Department of Justice, in a September 2021 petition for writ of certiorari under the Biden administration, argued that the ruling was “profoundly wrong.”

“The statute applies exclusively to ‘United States Department of Energy Hanford site workers’ — contract workers who perform services, ‘directly or indirectly for the United States,’” its petition reads. “It excludes portions of the Hanford site that are owned by the state or leased to private entities. And by eliminating the usual requirement that applicants for workers’ compensation benefits establish a causal link between their medical conditions and their employment, H.B. 1723 greatly expands benefits eligibility for a specific class of federal contract workers.”

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