More than three years after lawmakers gave the go-ahead to people sickened by decades of toxic drinking water aboard Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville to sue the federal government for illnesses caused by the contamination, thousands are still waiting for their cases to move forward.
Marvin Cox served in the United States Marine Corps from 1981 to 1985. His last duty station was Camp Lejeune. He has since been diagnosed with cancer and was unable to get his care and treatment covered by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
“So of course, I was there during the time that the water contamination happened,” he said, “The interesting part is that the VA has acknowledged that I was exposed to contaminated water. I meet the time requirement and they said I was in a toxic exposure risk activity. However, since colon cancer is not on their presumptive list, they will not offer any compensation.”
Read more: Camp Lejeune Justice Act Series
The drinking water at Camp Lejeune was found to be contaminated by industrial solvents and other chemicals from the 1950s through the 80s, and the and the federal government and the U.S. military kept the contamination under wraps for years. The CDC determined more than a million people may have been exposed.
The Camp Lejeune Justice Act of 2022, part of the PACT Act, allowed veterans and others exposed to contaminated water at the base between 1953-1987 to file lawsuits against the U.S. Department of Justice and the Department of the Navy for related health issues, seeking damages for illnesses like cancers, kidney disease, and more
Another bill was introduced early last summer that would make adjustments to the original legislation. The Ensuring Justice for Camp Lejeune Victims Act would allow cases to be heard in more federal courts, it would limit attorney fees, and make clear that those sickened by the water have the right to a jury trial and not just a bench trial decided by a federal judge.
Cox, age 62, doesn’t believe the legislation will ever be acted upon. He said, “I'm not expecting Congress to do anything. It's a divided Congress, and of course they'll say, ‘Well, it passed under the Biden administration, so of course, if anything passed under the Biden administration, we're not going to move forward with this.’”
The Plaintiff’s Legal Group – the group of attorneys taking the lead in representing those that have filed claims – filed a motion in November, stating that the government filed more than 30 challenges to the admissibility of expert testimony in an attempt to exclude every expert witness and dismiss all Track 1 bellwether cases.
Cox said the government agencies that are being sued have been consistently dragging their feet on moving the cases forward and are not communicating with the victims of the contaminated water exposure.
“The DOJ is fighting everything and the Department of the Navy has like over 400,000 claim files that they have really not touched,” Cox said. “They're really supposed to give us an acknowledgement after six months that they received our claim, and I can tell you I've heard nothing from the Department of the Navy as it relates to the administrative claim that I filed.”
In mid-December, the judges rejected the government’s attempt to block seven Daubert motions from the plaintiffs, including evidence from the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. That evidence uses computer models to reconstruct how and when drinking water at Camp Lejeune was contaminated, especially during the 1950s to 1980s when actual water testing was limited.
The judges said the government’s effort to exclude this evidence was inconsistent, especially since the government itself had previously relied on ATSDR’s work to link contaminated water to disease.
The court found the ATSDR’s research crucial for proving causation and criticized the government for trying to undermine its own scientific findings with weak arguments about minor technicalities.
“We see that as a win for plaintiffs, so I think we'll end up going to trial,” Cox said, but added, “When that's gonna happen, I'm not sure.”
U.S. Magistrate James Gates is one of the judges presiding over the Camp Lejeune water litigation. He ordered the lawyers in October to develop a settlement framework by the end of the year. However, it’s now 2026 and that settlement framework has not been completed.
Cox is also fighting with the Department of Veterans Affairs over his colon cancer diagnosis and has filed an appeal of a determination that his medical costs would not be covered.
“The Camp Lejeune Justice Act has a tier one system where they're showing colon cancer as being strong evidence that it's in the contaminated water, but the VA does not. So, you got two federal groups and you got two different systems operating. So, the efficiency at the VA is very lacking,” he said.
Cox is also calling on the VA to update the list of adverse health conditions that are presumed to have been cause by the toxic water at Camp Lejeune; he said, “The presumptive list was last updated in 2017, so you're talking about 8 years, and you know that the scientific evidence has changed over that time.”
