"America’s beautiful coal industry”?--Kingsport Times News

Southwest Virginia
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WASHINGTON, D.C. – Virginia’s U.S. senators are blasting Trump administration cuts to agencies and programs that were supposed to oversee coal miners’ health and safety.

The cuts – to the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health and the Coal Workers Health Surveillance Program – preceded Donald Trump’s Wednesday executive order titled, “Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry and Amending Executive Order 14241.”

Trump’s order and associated proclamations made no mention of coal miners safety or health but included calls to:

  • exempt coal plants from meeting federal pollution standards

  • opening federal lands to coal mining leases

  • making coal a national critical mineral

“It’s one challenge after the next,” U.S. Democratic Virginia Senator Tim Kaine said Friday about the administration Department of Government Efficiency’s move to cut approximately 900 NIOSH staffers a week earlier.

“That whole division just got fired,” Kaine’s Democratic colleague, Senator Mark Warner said in a press conference Thursday. “You have the hypocrisy of Trump saying on one hand he wants to help revive coal, but on the other hand literally taking away health care protections and safety of the miners who work underground.”

“You just can’t have it both ways and, unfortunately, that seems to be what (Trump) is trying to do when you put miners at risk,” Warner added.

NIOSH – a division of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – was responsible for a range of workplace safety and health monitoring and regulation tasks until the personnel cuts.

The institute also operated the Coal Workers Health Surveillance Program, an outgrowth of the federal 1969 Coal Mine Health and Safety Act designed to monitor coal miners’ health through free, regular X-rays at mine sites, collection of miners’ health data, overseeing free pulmonary exams and involvement in the federal black lung benefits claim process.

NIOSH also oversaw the Part 90 program, where miners with signs of coal and rock dust exposure in their lungs could request their reassignment to work in less dusty areas of mine operations.

Scott Laney, a researcher with CWHSP who was placed on administrative leave in early April along with the other affected NIOSH employees, said the shutdown also places at risk more than 750,000 X-ray films, another 10 years’ worth of .digital X-rays and “mounds” of pulmonary exams.

Laney said Wednesday that the NIOSH cuts also removed employees responsible for making those records available to miners, retired miners and widows as they pursue black lung benefits claims. Staff assigned to conduct the Part 90 program also are no longer present, he added.

“We need to get on that immediately,” Kaine said of the records’ maintenance. “There’s no good reason for that. I’m going to get with my team to put together a demand letter to the agency that those records be maintained.”

Vonda Robinson

Kaine joined fellow Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders and Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman Tuesday in a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. That letter demanded details on the NIOSH personnel cuts and how they will affect the CWHSP.

“Never has there been a more critical time to do this work,” stated the letter. “A 2023 study conducted jointly by researchers at NIOSH and at the University of Illinois Chicago found that coal miners in central Appalachia—Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky—were eight times more likely to die from respiratory diseases like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and black lung than American men who are not miners.”

“ Our constituents are getting more severe disease at younger ages in recent decades, and we might never had known that without the expertise of NIOSH’s work on coal miner health,” the letter to Kennedy added. “We require more than a fact sheet indicating these duties will be reorganized into an Administration for a Healthy America given the extensive cuts to personnel.”

Laney and Kaine both said that the NIOSH cuts also have delayed implementation of the “silica rule” – a Mine Safety and Health Administration regulation approved in 2024 that puts limits on all miners’ exposure to rock dust in underground and surface mines.

NIOSH’s research efforts – in cooperation with black lung clinics across Central Appalachia and other coal mining states in north central and western states – identified silica dust and a growing health threat to miners as coal production depended more on thinner seams that required digging and blasting through rock strata.

Administration delay on the silica rule had shifted from April to August, but Kaine questioned whether the delay will become longer or permanent.

“If the delay was just a matter of four months, and I wish it was otherwise, we could live with that,” Kaine said, adding that other presidential administrations have gone through periods of adjustment in their early months.

“If it’s an early signal that the regulation is going to be endlessly delayed, scrapped or changed,” Kaine added, “that’s another issue we’ve got to be worried about.”

Kaine joined fellow Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders and Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman Friday in questions on another Trump/DOGE action – the proposed closure of 35 Mine Safety and Health Administration field offices.

The senators, in the letter to U.S. Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer, demanded that she explain how MSHA will comply with federal law requiring a minimum of four inspections each year of each mine operation.

The letter also demanded Chavez-DeRemer explain how MSHA and the Department of Labor will comply with enforcement of the silica rule given the field office closures.

Ninth District Republican Congressman Griffith, in weekly newsletters and columns since Trump’s inauguration, has stated his support for Trump-DOGE cuts. On Friday, he said he supports NIOSH programs “that help coal miners and their families.”

“My office has directed multiple inquiries to Department of Health and Human Services officials regarding the agency’s restructuring to gather more information about how the restructuring affects NIOSH’s programs related to black lung,” said Griffith. “As my office monitors the latest developments with regards to the restructuring of HHS, I will keep a close eye on what happens to these programs. Moreover, I will continue to advocate for the coal miners of Southwest Virginia as more details come about.”

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