America still lives with 9/11

Twenty-five years later, we still grapple with the wars, laws, security measures, and health consequences that followed

8:46 a.m. Sept. 11, 2026

DUANE CROSS
MCO Publisher•Editor

There are dates you have to look up. Sept. 11, 2001, is not one of them for anybody old enough to remember.

Folks can still tell you where they were when they heard. Some were already at work. Others were getting children to school or driving somewhere with the radio on. Plenty remember standing in front of a television trying to make sense of the first report that a plane had hit the World Trade Center.

For a few minutes, an accident still seemed possible. Then United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower.

American Airlines Flight 11 had struck the North Tower at 8:46 that morning. The second plane came 17 minutes later. American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37, and United Airlines Flight 93 went down near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 10:03 after passengers and crew members fought the hijackers.

The South Tower fell at 9:59. The North Tower followed at 10:28. By the end of the morning, 2,977 people had been killed.

That number has been repeated so often that it risks becoming just that – a number.

Sept. 11 sent the United States into wars that stretched across two decades. Washington rebuilt part of the federal government. Congress changed laws governing air travel, intelligence and national security, then years later passed new ones for veterans and first responders who were still paying for what happened.

Some of those changes are so familiar now that younger Americans have never known the country without them.

For thousands of families, none of it ever felt entirely over.

Before the arguments came back

For a little while, the country got mighty small. Flags showed up on front porches and storefront windows. Blood donation centers filled as people looked for some way to help. Firefighters heading toward New York were welcomed in places where nobody knew their names.

On Capitol Hill, Republicans and Democrats stood together on the steps of the Capitol and sang God Bless America. Three days after the attacks, President George W. Bush climbed onto the rubble at Ground Zero and spoke through a bullhorn to rescue workers below.

It is easy now to forget how unusual that stretch was. Americans were angry, and there was plenty of fear underneath it because nobody knew whether another attack was coming. For a time, whatever folks had been arguing about on Monday seemed a long way off by Tuesday afternoon.

The decisions made in those first weeks would last much longer.

A war with no clock on it

Congress moved quickly. On Sept. 14, lawmakers approved the Authorization for Use of Military Force, and Bush signed it four days later.

The law gave the president broad authority to use force against those responsible for Sept. 11 and anyone who had harbored them. Congress put no expiration date on it.

American forces entered Afghanistan less than three weeks later. For military families, the years began to stack up. One deployment ended, and another set of orders eventually came. Reserve and National Guard units that had seemed close to civilian life found themselves halfway around the world.

In March 2003, the United States invaded Iraq.

Iraq had not carried out the Sept. 11 attacks, and the 9/11 Commission later found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's government had cooperated with al-Qaeda in carrying them out. Still, the invasion came out of the national-security climate that followed 9/11, when fear of another attack changed how Washington judged threats and how quickly it was willing to act.

Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan in 2011. Afghanistan went on another decade.

By the time the last American military aircraft left Kabul in August 2021, the broader post-9/11 wars had taken the lives of more than 7,000 U.S. service members across Afghanistan, Iraq and other theaters. Millions had served, and plenty had gone more than once.

Brown University's Costs of War project puts the federal cost at roughly $8 trillion when war spending and long-term veterans' obligations are counted.

Coming home did not necessarily close the account. Thousands of veterans returned from Iraq and Afghanistan after breathing smoke from burn pits used to dispose of fuel, chemicals and other waste. Many spent years trying to prove that illnesses showing up later were connected to where they had served.

Congress passed the PACT Act in 2022, expanding Department of Veterans Affairs health care and benefits for veterans exposed to toxic substances. The law added more than 20 presumptive conditions tied to burn pits and other exposures. ... The shooting can stop long before the doctor's appointments do.

One piece of the original war framework is still there, too. Congress repealed the 2002 Iraq war authorization in December 2025, but the authorization passed after Sept. 11 remains law.

Twenty-five years after Congress acted while Ground Zero was still burning, an American president can still use that authority.

The old normal disappeared quietly

The war was far away. Other changes showed up right down the road.

Anyone who flew before 2001 remembers an airport that would feel almost loose by today's standards. Family members could often walk to the gate, and passenger screening was largely handled by private contractors.

Congress created the Transportation Security Administration in November 2001 and put airport screening in federal hands. Cockpit doors were strengthened. Checked baggage came under tighter scrutiny. Later attempted attacks led to even more rules at the checkpoint. The airport people knew before Sept. 11 never really came back.

Now travelers reach the front of the line and do what has become routine. Younger Americans have no reason to find any of it unusual. They never knew the old way.

Washington itself was being rebuilt at the same time. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 created the Department of Homeland Security by gathering 22 agencies and offices under a new Cabinet department. Emergency management and transportation security were folded into the structure, along with immigration and border responsibilities.

Then came the harder problem: what the government knew before Sept. 11 and why it had failed to act on it.

The 9/11 Commission found that pieces of intelligence about al-Qaeda and some of the future hijackers had existed in different corners of government before the attacks. The failure ran deeper than one missed memo. Agencies were not built to share what they knew quickly enough, and nobody had a clear view across the whole intelligence community.

Congress responded with the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. It created the Director of National Intelligence and put the National Counterterrorism Center on permanent footing.

A year later came the REAL ID Act. Congress set federal security standards for state-issued driver's licenses and identification cards. Enforcement was delayed repeatedly before finally beginning at TSA checkpoints in May 2025.

The star on a REAL ID license traces back to that same post-9/11 push for tighter security.

Washington reached farther

The most controversial congressional response came almost immediately. Bush signed the USA PATRIOT Act 45 days after the attacks. It broadened federal investigative authority and made it easier for law-enforcement and intelligence agencies to share information.

Congress was voting in a country still wondering whether another attack might already be on the way. Anthrax letters were moving through the mail. Fear was fresh, and there was broad appetite for giving the government more room to hunt for threats.

Congress made most of the PATRIOT Act provisions originally scheduled to expire permanent in 2006. Other authorities were allowed to lapse years later, including the much-debated Section 215 business-record provision.

But the government that emerged from Sept. 11 was more comfortable moving information between national-security and criminal investigators than the government that existed before it. Terrorist watch lists became part of travel. Surveillance powers prompted years of fights over privacy and how far federal authority ought to reach.

Some Americans saw those tools as common sense after a catastrophic intelligence failure. Others worried that powers granted during an emergency would be mighty hard to take back.

Unity had its limits

Muslim Americans were frightened on Sept. 11, too. They watched the same towers fall and worried about family. Some lost people they knew.

Before long, another worry arrived. The FBI recorded 481 anti-Muslim hate-crime incidents in 2001, compared with 28 the year before. Arab Americans and Sikhs were targeted as well, often by people who made little distinction between religion and nationality.

Six days after the attacks, Bush visited the Islamic Center of Washington and made clear that the terrorists did not speak for Islam. A quarter-century later, the suspicion has not disappeared. In polling released ahead of this anniversary, 51% of Americans said Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence. Six months after the attacks, the figure was 25%.

The country that pulled close after Sept. 11 also had to reckon with how quickly fear could turn toward somebody living next door.

Ground Zero was not finished

For the firefighters and other responders who worked at Ground Zero, the morning stretched into years. They spent days breathing dust from the collapsed towers. Volunteers joined the recovery, and people who lived or worked nearby breathed the same air.

At first, they searched for survivors. As hope faded, the work changed. Years later, cancers and respiratory diseases began showing up among people who had worked the site.

Congress created the World Trade Center Health Program through the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act. The program is authorized through 2090 and serves nearly 150,000 people across the country.

The New York City Fire Department has lived with that toll as plainly as anybody. The department lost 343 members on Sept. 11. Since then, more than 400 additional FDNY members have died from World Trade Center-related illnesses. A recent department health report found more than 10,000 members certified with at least one 9/11-related physical condition, including thousands with cancer certifications.

Somebody could walk away from Ground Zero in 2001 thinking he had made it through, only to learn years later that Sept. 11 had followed him home.

Paul Bardo knew something about walking away.

He had been there before

Bardo wasn't supposed to be working that Tuesday. The New York City firefighter had the day off and was jogging near the water in Brooklyn when he saw the second plane hit the World Trade Center. It wasn't his first emergency there.

Bardo had responded when a truck bomb exploded beneath the World Trade Center in 1993, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000. According to the National Archives, the bombing led him to start reading more about terrorism and the vulnerabilities that came with it.

Eight years later, another attack unfolded in front of him. Bardo headed to Brooklyn Engine Company 240 and went with other firefighters to Manhattan. They searched buildings for survivors and later for bodies. In one building, Bardo and the others checked the basement and got out. About half an hour later, the building collapsed.

He stayed at Ground Zero for 24 hours, went home for a little sleep, and returned. He kept coming back for weeks.

Three days after the attacks, Bardo stood among the firefighters gathered around Bush when the president spoke through a bullhorn. He remembered the president being there but did not remember anyone taking his picture.

White House photographer Paul Morse did. The photograph eventually wound up in the government's collection and appeared in television documentaries. The Bardo family knew it existed but did not have a good copy. When it showed up on television, friends snapped pictures of the screen for them.

That was about as close as they got until September 2019, when the National Archives posted the photograph on Instagram. Michael Bardo saw it and recognized his father. Michael had been 7 when the towers fell. His second-grade school sent everybody home that day, and what stayed with him was the quiet. Years later, he called it “the quietest day.”

By 2020, he had gone through the New York City Fire Department's testing and screening process and was waiting for a chance to join. Paul had retired by then and had never gone back to Ground Zero.

For years, the family had lived with a fuzzy copy. Then Michael found the clear one online.

His dad was right there in the middle.

Now the story belongs to them, too

The people who remember Sept. 11 firsthand are getting older. A Pew Research Center survey released ahead of the anniversary found that 83% of adults born before 2001 remember exactly where they were or what they were doing when they heard about the attacks. Among people who were at least 10 that morning, the figure rises to 93%.

At the other end, 10% of American adults were born after Sept. 11. Among today's 18- to 24-year-olds, 60% told Pew they first learned about the attacks in school.

One generation watched the towers fall without knowing what would happen next. The younger one sees the footage already knowing how it ends.

They did not watch TSA arrive at the airport. Homeland Security was already in Washington by the time they were old enough to know what it was. American troops were already fighting overseas.

For them, the challenge is not simply learning what happened on Sept. 11. It is understanding what America looked like on Sept. 10.

The names will be read again this Sept. 11. Families will return to the memorial in New York, while ceremonies will be held at the Pentagon and near Shanksville.

For those who remember, the day often comes back through something small. Maybe it is where they were sitting when somebody called. Maybe it is what the room sounded like when the second plane hit.

Younger Americans have to borrow those memories. They inherited the country that came afterward. What families pass down is often simpler – a story told at the table, an old uniform tucked away somewhere, maybe a photograph.

Sometimes it comes in a textbook.

Sometimes it's your dad in the middle of the picture.