President Donald Trump unveiled a new barrage of executive orders last week aimed at revitalizing the nation’s “beautiful clean coal” industry. But in reality, it’s already clear that his empty words will do no such thing.
Flanked by burly white men outfitted in coal miners’ garb, the former reality TV star and failed real estate tycoon rhapsodized about his muddled plans to supercharge coal’s use and production, including scrapping environmental regulations that “undermine” its production and ensuring federal policy doesn’t “discriminate” against the fossil fuel industry.
The astonishing impracticality of this plan did not appear in any way to be a factor in Trump’s decision, which was still applauded by people who should know better (even if they’d never admit it) like coal industry honchos and U.S. Sen. Shelley Capito (R-W.Va). As much as Trump likes to posture toward saving the coal industry, his administration’s actions this April have made it clear that they — and he — don’t actually care about coal miners themselves.
The very same day as Trump’s big coal announcement, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) published a notice on its website informing stakeholders that the agency would be pausing the enforcement of its rule titled, “Lowering Miners’ Exposure to Respirable Crystalline Silica and Improving Respiratory Protection.” The rule would have cut the allowable exposure level of deadly silica dust—20 times more toxic than coal dust and a major cause of black lung disease among coal miners — in half.
The rule was planned to take effect on April 14 after decades of lobbying from coal miners, public health experts and worker advocates. When it was published in 2024, the Department of Labor estimated the new rule would result in more than 1,000 fewer deaths and 3,746 fewer cases of silica-related illnesses.
Trump’s attack on the regulations surrounding coal miners’ safety hasn’t stopped there. Through its proxies at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Trump administration has also announced the closure of 33 MSHA field offices in 19 states. As the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center noted in a March 2025 report, over the past decade, the agency already lost 50% of its enforcement staff for coal mines and 27% of its total staff. Those office closures will mean fewer inspectors and mine inspections, and fewer eyes on coal operators.
“There are real consequences to these cuts and closures, and they are going to be intensely felt in coal country,” Quenton King, Federal Resource Outreach Manager at Appalachian Voices, said in a press release. “When black lung rates get higher, there won’t be a mystery — it will be as a result of these actions to let coal operators do whatever they want while miners pay the price.”
Elon Musk’s DOGE has also gutted the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), which is part of the new regime headed by Trump appointee Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the administration may even be trying to eliminate the agency entirely.
NIOSH was created in 1970 as a part of the Occupational Safety and Health Act to develop and establish recommended safety and health standards for the country’s workforce, particularly those who work in hazardous conditions like chemical workers, firefighters, hospital and healthcare workers — and coal miners. NIOSH doesn’t just make recommendations; it also conducts extremely important research into toxic exposures, heat stress, workplace violence and pandemics, and has been at the forefront of tracking and combating the black lung epidemic.
These senseless cuts by the Trump administration have already hit coal country hard. Earlier this month, more than 200 workers at a NIOSH facility in Morgantown, WV, lost their jobs after being told their services were not needed, according to reporting by West Virginia Watch. When news of the NIOSH closings broke on April 1, the United Mine Workers of America sent out a press release decrying the cuts and asking, “Is there now a war on coal miners?”
As part of DOGE’s assault on NIOSH, the Coal Workers’ Health Surveillance Program (CWHSP), which provided free periodic black lung screenings to affected coal miners and tracked their results, is dead. As Noémi Hall, an epidemiologist with the Coal Workers’ Health Surveillance Program, told In These Times, the program’s closure will also affect those who have already been diagnosed. “Without NIOSH-certified B Reader [physicians] to review and classify X-rays for coal miners, the whole system for compensation for black lung breaks down,” she explained.
The loss is incalculable.
“There is no one else in the government that does occupational safety and health,” Cathy Tinney-Zara, president of Local 3430 of the American Federation of Government Employees told West Virginia Watch. “We do the research to make everyone’s job safer.”
The data collected and analyzed by the CWHSP and NIOSH has been critical in illuminating the extent of the ongoing black lung crisis, and without their work, it’s doubtful the new silica rule would have made it this far.
Now, the silica rule’s implementation has been pushed back to August, and while a four-month pause may not seem like the end of the world, it could very well be a matter of life and death for the thousands of underground coal miners still breathing in such dangerous material each and every day.
As I reported for In These Times in 2023, black lung has not only become more prevalent among the veteran coal miners of Appalachia, but it has been impacting younger miners and those who have spent less time underground at a significantly more rapid pace — and much more severely.
In the coal-dependent states of Central Appalachia, black lung afflicts more than 1 in 5 coal miners who have been working underground for 20 to 24 years, a drastic increase from about 1 in 30 a decade ago. One in 20 of the region’s coal miners have the most severe and totally disabling form of black lung, and rates are also increasing among those who have worked underground for 15 to 19 years and includes younger workers in their early 30s. The new silica rule was intended to address this crisis, and delaying its implementation further — or eliminating it all together — is only going to hurt more coal miners.
Infuriatingly, Trump’s MSHA — currently being run by a skeleton crew—cited “unforeseen NIOSH restructuring” as a reason to delay the implementation of the new silica rule.
“If that’s really the issue, then there is a simple solution that provides miners the protection they deserve — reinstate NIOSH and allow MSHA to begin enforcing this critical rule,” former Assistant Secretary of Labor for Mine Safety and Health Chris Williamson, a fierce proponent of the rule, told In These Times last week.
“This unilateral decision, without any opportunity for input from miners or stakeholders, to not enforce a rule that had already been in effect for more than 9 months already rests on shaky legal grounds,” he added. “It would not surprise me if miners and others exercise their rights to challenge [the administration’s] decision through the courts.”
Williamson’s comments have already proved prescient. Today, the UMWA and the United Steelworkers, who collectively represent thousands of miners at coal, metal, and non-metal mines who would be affected by the silica rule, filed a new lawsuit against Trump’s MSHA. Earlier this month, industry group the National Sand, Stone and Gravel Association (NSSGA) (with support from the National Mining Association) filed a suit trying to overturn the silica rule entirely; the next day, MSHA announced its “temporary pause.” Now, the unions are asking to intervene in the case and act as the rule’s defenders because they feel the agency tasked with protecting miners’ health and safety is “losing the stomach” to fight for its own rule.
Their lawsuit starkly outlines the stakes of delaying the rule, emphasizing that the “loss of the protections of the silica rule will mean debilitating respiratory illness, including silicosis and coal worker’s pneumoconiosis, as well as premature deaths and lifelong disability.”
The term “black lung” generally refers to coal miners’ pneumoconiosis, a progressive and incurable disease that can shorten life expectancy by more than 12 years, and leaves them struggling to breathe.
But more colloquially, black lung can also refer to a constellation of other debilitating pulmonary ailments, including silicosis, chronic bronchitis, lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. All can be caused by chronic exposure to respirable coal mine dust, which, in the mines of Central Appalachia, is increasingly cut with particles of crystalline silica. As centuries of mining have thinned out the region’s once-rich coal seams, miners are required to cut through more and more layers of rock to get to the black gold deep within.
That rock is loaded with quartz, which, when cut, releases plumes of silica dust into their cramped underground workspaces. Advances in mining technology have also enabled workers to produce more coal more quickly than their forebears did, which in turn has enabled profit-driven mine owners to push workers to labor ever faster (and to cut corners on safety when the mine inspectors aren’t looking).
It’s not news to workers or to the U.S. government that silica dust exposure can cause great harm to the human body; after all, in 1938, U.S. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins appeared in a “Stop Silicosis” video emphasizing the need to protect workers from silica dust.
Other manufacturing industries like construction, oil and gas, stone countertop fabrication, quarrying, and working with pottery, brick, concrete and ceramics, means foundries have long been familiar with silica’s risks, and so has OSHA. To date, OSHA has successfully issued two respirable crystalline silica standards — one for the construction industry, which took effect in 2017, and the other for the general industry and maritime workers, which came in 2018. The 2024 rule, if it had been put into effect this week, would have finally added coal miners to the list of workers who are protected from these horrific preventable diseases by mandated silica exposure limits.
MSHA insists that the pause on enforcing this badly needed rule is temporary and will only be delayed until August 18, 2025. Given Republicans’ strident opposition to the rule and ongoing attempts by coal industry interest groups like the National Sand, Stone and Gravel Association to water down or block its provisions altogether by claiming that increasing safety measures will cause “irreparable harm” to mining companies, it’s anybody’s guess whether the Trump administration will ever actually enforce it. Based on what we’ve seen from Republicans so far, though, that prognosis looks awfully grim.
As Williamson, the former assistant secretary told me, “It shouldn’t be so hard for the government to be able to do something good for workers.”
But thanks to the Trump administration’s feckless business-first, workers-last approach, the nation’s coal miners have once again been left in the dust.
Kim Kelly is a freelance journalist and author based in Philadelphia, PA. She is a labor writer for In These Times, a labor columnist at Teen Vogue and Fast Company, and regularly contributes to many other publications. Her first book, FIGHT LIKE HELL: The Untold History of American Labor, is now available from One Signal/Simon & Schuster. Follow her on Twitter at @grimkim and subscribe to her newsletter, Salvo, here.
