NEW YORK — They didn’t forget. The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill Friday to save a cash-strapped compensation fund for 9/11 victims and first-responders.

Lawmakers voted 402-12 to approve the Never Forget the Heroes Act, which would preserve the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund for seven more decades. The measure now goes to the Senate, where Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has agreed to call it for a vote before Congress takes its August recess, according to the Associated Press.

“After 9/11, we vowed to never forget. With that promise, we committed to making sure these heroes never have to go without the support they need and never have to wonder if support will be there for them and their families,” U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a Manhattan Democrat who was the bill’s lead sponsor, said in a statement.

Maloney’s bill would keep the Victim Compensation Fund running through the 2090 fiscal year, giving victims and their families until October 2089 to file claims. The fund is currently slated to expire in 2020. The measure would also make claimants whole if their payments were reduced because of insufficient funding.

Friday’s vote followed an aggressive push by New York lawmakers and advocates to aid sickened 9/11 first-responders with the fund on the brink of running out of money.

It also came about two weeks after the death of Luis Alvarez, a former NYPD detective who testified before Congress on the bill just last month. Alvarez got cancer after spending three months searching for survivors in the rubble of the World Trade Center in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks there.

Lawmakers have sought to reauthorize the fund after it announced that it would cut payments by as much as 70 percent with a recent spike in claims and money running out.

A House committee passed the bill in June after the comedian Jon Stewart excoriated lawmakers for their inaction to help first-responders.

Noting that the bill now has 72 Senate cosponsors, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand called on McConnell to keep his word and pass the measure in the next two weeks.

“It would be unconscionable for the Senate to ask 9/11 responders to spend any more of their precious time walking the halls of Congress and fighting to make the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund permanent,” said Gillibrand, a Democrat who is also running for president, in a statement. “This needs to get done now.”