The advocacy campaign that eventually produced the bill’s passage in December 2010 — in the lame-duck session after the 2010 midterm elections, with less than two weeks remaining in the session — involved first responders making the case directly to Congress. Men and women who had worked the site, many of them visibly ill, traveled to Washington to testify and to meet with legislators. Television journalist Jon Stewart, who had been covering the bill’s failure on The Daily Show, used the final weeks of the session to direct his audience’s attention to the impasse and to the apparent contradiction between the rhetorical celebration of 9/11 first responders and the practical failure to fund their healthcare.
The passage of the original Zadroga Act was followed, several years later, by the fight over its reauthorization. The initial authorization was for five years; the reauthorization was required to extend the program’s funding. The reauthorization fight involved some of the same dynamics as the original passage — cost concerns, procedural delays, the need for continued advocacy from workers whose conditions were still evolving — and the documentary work that had by then been produced about the health crisis was part of the evidence base that advocates brought to the argument.
Buscemi was not the face of this advocacy. The faces were the firefighters and first responders themselves. But the work of documenting the health crisis — the documentary that he executive-produced, the ongoing attention he brought to the subject in interviews — was part of the broader effort to maintain public awareness of an issue that the political system kept attempting to treat as resolved.