While the Department of Justice Civil Division announced last week that hundreds of settlements have recently been approved for victims of the toxic water aboard Camp Lejeune, and the associate attorney representing the federal government said he’s proud of the work done to speed up the compensation process, two of the most prominent advocates for those sickened say not all is as rosy as it may seem.
Jerry Ensminger and Mike Partain are among the most prominent national advocates for victims of the toxic water contamination at Camp Lejeune, and have led the research and legislative efforts that eventually resulted in the Camp Lejeune Justice Act of 2022.
Ensminger is a retired Marine Corps Master Sergeant who served for 24 years and was stationed at Camp Lejeune. His daughter, Janey, was conceived and born on the base and died of leukemia at age nine in 1985. After learning about the contamination in 1997, he became the "relentless voice" of the movement, testifying before Congress several times.
A former history teacher and the son and grandson of Marine officers, Partain was born at the Camp Lejeune base hospital in 1968. At age 39, he was diagnosed with male breast cancer and eventually identified a cluster of more than 125 men with similar diagnoses who lived or served at the base.
Partain joined Ensminger in 2007, using his background as a historian to research and document "informational black holes" in Marine Corps records to prove the extent of the contamination.
The CDC has estimated that between 500,000 and one million people were exposed to the contaminated water for more than 30 years, through 1987 when the last of several contaminated wells were closed.
Read more: Camp Lejeune Justice Act Series September 2025
Last week, the Department of Justice Civil Division announced that 649 Elective Option – or settlement - offers have been approved in the past three weeks, totaling $175 million, under the Camp Lejeune Justice Act. Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said there have been just over 2,500 approved settlement offers since 2023 – totaling about $708 million…and that he’s proud of the work done to speed up the approval process in the past year.
However, Ensminger said, “Being an associate attorney general and making the statement that he was so sorry that so many of these veterans had to wait so long to get any semblance of a settlement, nothing could be further from ... (it's) just an out-and-out lie. I mean, it was his own Department of Justice the environmental branch that has been filing motion after motion, hundreds of motions on this case to slow it down to a slow crawl.”
There are 408,000 claims filed with the Department of the Navy, and Partain said only about .4 percent have been settled. “Since the Navy began the elective option in 2023, so roughly 3 years, the Navy has made a total of 2,353 offers in three years. That's about 2.5 offers per day. And this includes these accelerated numbers that they're lauding about in the press," Partain explained, "And of those offers, 1,605 offers were accepted and the Navy has paid 1,554 claims as of February of … 2026. So just a month ago. Some progress. I mean, with this math, if you do the math, it'll be about 429 years before the Navy gets through all these claims.”
Federal Judge James C. Dever III stated in early proceedings that if the more than one million potential Camp Lejeune Justice Act claims were tried individually, it would take "the life of the entire Roman Empire, 1,923 years" to resolve them.
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Woodward also called the EO “an off-ramp to litigation.” He said it creates a faster and easier way for those with qualifying illnesses to settle their claims and avoid the cost and time-consuming nature of litigation. Partain said the pitfalls with settlements are not insignificant.
“The elective option, it's to be frank, it's pennies on the dollar as far as what the claims are worth or anything like that," he said, "I mean, for example, if I even qualify for an elective option, it'd be $150,000 because they say that I was only exposed one year, regardless of the fact that one year was the time that I was conceived, carried, and then delivered as a baby at Camp Lejeune, the most vulnerable time of my life. And also, just my medicals alone that my health insurance had to pay because, as a dependent, the government didn't pay anything. And I was diagnosed before the bills were even passed. My chemotherapy alone was like $140,000 a session. I had eight sessions plus the mastectomy plus all the … follow-up care. My claims, you know, just the medical bills and my claim alone are about $1,000,000.”
Payments to an individual claimant under the EO range from $100,000 to $550,000 and are available regardless of whether they were present in a part of the base that received contaminated water.
Partain said, “This article makes an appearance that we're being taken care of. And, you know, Jerry's been in this fight since he first found out in 1997 - for 29 years. This April, I would have been diagnosed with male breast cancer 19 years. And we've been we've been at this trying to hold the government accountable, hold the United States Marine Corps accountable. And here we are, decades down the road, without a resolution.”
One of the big courtroom battles between government and plaintiff lawyers has been “offsets.” They don’t apply to the EO settlements, but are mandatory reductions of a court-awarded settlement by the value of federal benefits already provided –like care at the V.A. or through Medicare or Medicaid. A major point of contention this year is whether offsets should also apply to future benefits a plaintiff is expected to receive, rather than just payments already made.
“I could theoretically go to the V.A. and they would provide medical care to me as a last resort, meaning if I have other sources like insurance, they would pay first. Well, the government's trying to say, because that law is there, we are entitled to any future medicals. Well, I honestly, I don't want to treat at a V.A. facility. If I've got medical care and medical insurance, which I do now, I want to treat where I want to go, not where the defendant who poisoned me in the firstplace tells me where to go," Partain said.
"These settlements that people are taking are actually pennies on the dollar of what they would potentially get if their case went through the court system," Ensminger added. “The court is obligated to accept and go through all these motions that are being filed by the Department of Justice. And they have to accept them, and they have to sort through them and rule on them. And it's just dragged this thing to a slow crawl. Mr. Woodward's statement in that press release, it just infuriated me when I saw it because it's within his own Department of Justice that's creating these long delays that these veterans should have been taken care of a long time ago.”
Partain said it's the federal government, not the judges, the victims, or their lawyers that are causing justice to continue to be delayed. “Once again," he said, "If you peel back the curtain and look what's going on behind the scenes, it's not the court. It's not the plaintiff's lawyers. It's the Department of Justice and Department of the Navy standing behind there pulling the levers to be where we're at right now, to the delays.”
It’s been nearly a year since North Carolina Congresswoman Deborah Ross introduced that would make adjustments to the Camp Lejeune Justice Act – The Ensuring Justice for Camp Lejeune Victims Act. The first fix the proposal makes is to change the way cases can be heard, opening them up to more federal courts and not just the Eastern District of North Carolina. It limits attorneys’ fees, outlines what is acceptable evidence, and clarifies that those sickened by the water have the right to a jury trial and not just a bench trial decided by a federal judge. It was cosponsored by Congressmen Dr. Greg Murphy and Don Davis and many other North Carolina lawmakers and was said to have strong bipartisan support in both chambers…but it hasn’t moved forward. Partain said, “If the intent of the Department of Justice was to follow the will of Congress, then the cancers that are known to be and strongly tied to trichloroethylene, tetrachloroethylene, benzene, vinyl chloride, and dichloroethylene -- settle those.”
Partain and Ensminger maintain a Facebook support group page, Camp Lejeune Toxic Water Survivors. One overwhelming theme is that most survivors feel like the process is so drawn out because the government is waiting for them to die.
“Jerry's been at this 29 years. I mean, his little girl, Janey, was exposed in utero like myself. I was born aboard the base, and I'm one of the younger litigants. Obviously I've got gray, no hair, kind of look like when I was a baby, except for I have a beard now. And it's 58 years down the road since when I was exposed," Partain said. "So, our group is an aging group. My mom is going to be 84 in March. And, the government, that's been their tactics since day one. 'Delay, deny, and wait ‘til they die.'”
The page is frequently populated with questions from people who hadn’t been diagnosed before the CLJA window closed, or didn’t know about it in time to file. Under the legislation, Ensminger said there is no current recourse for them. “And especially if the health effect that these people come down with after the deadline can be tied to their exposures. I don't know what to say about that. It's just a ... it's a shame.”
In 1963, the Department of the Navy released a major update to a Bureau of Medicine and Surgery Instruction, setting strict standards for water inspections across all naval installations. The stated intent was to eliminate health hazards by mandating rigorous sanitary surveys and monitoring of water sources to protect the health of all service members and their families. Both men say that if the military had followed its own rules, the contamination would have been caught more quickly.
“When you're using words like shall, I mean, that's one of the strongest words in the English language. You shall conduct these inspections of the water systems, including the source, which in the case of Camp Lejeune is the wells. They cannot show any kind of records that these inspections were even done," Ensminger said. Partain added, “No evidence at all in any of the thousands and thousands of pages of documents. There's no evidence that they even bothered to do these inspections.”
Adam Bain, the attorney at the environmental branch at the DOJ, claimed several years ago that those instructions were not regulations but "suggestive guidance." Ensminger said when there's wording that says, "'You shall,' that in a military directive is not suggestive.” Partain used the movie A Few Good Men as an example. "Jack Nicholson said, ‘We follow orders or people die.’ These were orders, they were not followed, and people were exposed. If they had followed orders, that would have prevented a lot of the exposures at Camp Lejeune or mitigated a lot of the exposures at Camp Lejeune, including my own and Jerry's.”
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Ensminger also pointed out that Pentagon estimates provided to lawmakers show the first week of the conflict in Iran, referred to as "Operation Epic Fury,” cost more than $11.3 billion in its first six days – yet the U.S. government claims it cannot afford to compensate the people that it harmed aboard Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune.
The Department of the Navy estimated that the face value of administrative claims submitted as of early this year stands at $335 trillion. Partain questions that math – and said, “Coincidently, that number seems to coincide with the total global debt for every country on this planet when you ask AI.” The Congressional Budget Office previously estimated the total cost to the government would be closer to $163 billion over 10 years.
