A federal cancer benefit was just expanded for firefighters. Whether it covers industrial firefighters is being decided right now and there’s a brief window to influence the outcome.
On December 19, 2025, the Honoring Our Fallen Heroes Act became law. It expanded the federal Public Safety Officers’ Benefits (PSOB) program to recognize occupational cancer as a line-of-duty condition. Families of firefighters who die or become permanently disabled from a covered cancer can apply for benefits of roughly $461,656, plus educational assistance for surviving spouses and children.
It covers career, volunteer, and federal firefighters. What it doesn’t do clearly is cover privately employed and industrial firefighters.
The reason is a definition. PSOB rests on a description of “public safety officer” written into federal law in 1976 — one grounded in government employment. The new Act extended benefits through PSOB without changing that underlying language. So industrial firefighters at refineries, chemical plants, fuel terminals, and manufacturing sites sit in an unresolved gap.
Here’s why the timing matters. The Bureau of Justice Assistance must now write the rules that determine how these benefits apply, including how “firefighter” is defined in practice. Those regulations are expected within 9 to 12 months of enactment. If the definition is written broadly enough to include industrial firefighters who meet recognized training standards, the gap closes. If it defaults to the narrow 1976 language, industrial firefighters are locked out, and reopening the question would mean going back to Congress.
The science isn’t the obstacle. In 2023, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified occupational firefighting exposure as carcinogenic to humans, and they explicitly extended that finding to all firefighting settings, including industrial. The obstacle is statutory language, and language can be changed, especially during rulemaking.
What industrial firefighters can do right now
Enroll in the National Firefighter Registry for Cancer
It’s voluntary, and industrial firefighters are badly underrepresented. Every enrollment makes us more visible in the data that drives policy.
Watch for the Rulemaking
When the proposed regulations are published on regulations.gov, there will be a public comment period. Comments from actual industrial firefighters carry weight no policy paper can match.
Document your Exposures
Every incident, every time.
And ask your employer directly about cancer and line-of-duty coverage. To understand the full picture, work through the interactive policy briefing — The Protection Gap — which walks through the science, the law, a real-world scenario, and the path to reform: trainteachlead.com/industrial-firefighter-gap/
The window is open. It won’t stay open long. This is the moment to be in the room.
My peer-reviewed analysis of this issue appears in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (2026): PubMed 42115819.
My dataset showing the gaps in protection for industrial and volunteer firefighters is available on Zenodo:
- Zielinski, A. (2026). State and Territorial Firefighter Cancer Presumption and Benefit Structures in the United States (2026 Dataset) (1.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18521370