Abigail Jackson: Communications director, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.)

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) may not often be found at the center of bipartisan negotiations.

But this spring, he helped shepherd a major bipartisan achievement through, co-sponsoring a bill to reauthorize and expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) that passed the Senate in a filibuster-proof 69-30 vote.

And his communications director, Abigail Jackson, was a key part in getting the measure through.

The 1990 law, which expired earlier this year, financially compensates Americans exposed to nuclear radiation by the federal government during World War II and its aftermath. Hawley’s bill, co-sponsored with Sens. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) and Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), would extend the law and expand its geographical coverage.

Jackson, who joined Hawley’s office as press secretary in 2021 before taking her current position in 2023, said there were a number of moving parts to messaging around the bill.

“The biggest hurdle we had to get over at the beginning was helping people understand what RECA was,” she said. “A lot of people on the Hill hadn’t even heard of this program or weren’t familiar with it. It wasn’t a phrase that was just thrown around and everyone immediately knew what it was.”

Also key to the communications side of things was centering the voices of people who would benefit from the bill, and would suffer from its expiration, from community activists in St. Louis to members of the Navajo Nation who live downwind of former test sites.

The role of a communications staffer, she said, is “about figuring out how to get them in front of the press and just to share their stories and creating opportunities for them to be able to talk about their experiences.”

There was also a bit of good timing, she added: the release last summer of Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-winning biopic “Oppenheimer,” which ensured that wartime nuclear testing was already part of the cultural conversation while they were whipping support for the bill.

“That provided us kind of a natural hook to talk about, hey, everyone’s talking about Oppenheimer, but what about all of these other people who are bearing the consequences of what you’ve learned about there?” Jackson said.