"The next thing that has to happen is that there has to be official recognition that that chronic exposure for first responders caused sickness and death," Nadler said. "And that hasn’t happened yet."

He went on to say that "the average cost of an apartment that was found to be contaminated was estimated at between $10-20,000. Per apartment. Now, you may have thousands of apartments -- thousands of work spaces. We don’t know. So, it's possible it's several billion dollars. Possibly a lot less. We just don’t know until we do the assessment."

"Now that’s a lot of money," he added. "Almost three days of the Iraq War. It puts it in perspective. To save our people from future illnesses and sickness, we can’t afford this kind of money, but we piss it away in three days in Iraq."