Coal Miners’ Safety Agency Gutted While Trump Touts Boosting Coal Production

Samuel Messidor

At the beginning of April, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) revealed it will layoff nearly all of its workforce—dropping from 1000 to 125 staff—effectively shuttering the two main NIOSH offices in Pittsburgh, PA and Morgantown, WV that research mine safety and help impose safety standards and equipment. NIOSH oversees miners’ safety research and treatment as an out-sized part of its mandate, but also researches and creates safety standards around chemicals, particulates, and more in multiple industries.

Regulating agencies such as NIOSH serve to stabilize the profits of the ruling class and maintain control in the hands of a handful of monopolists; at the same time, NIOSH and other regulations have been won by the working class through hard and violent struggle to secure their rights. The slashing of regulations by the Trump administration is part of a broader attack from the ruling class aimed at austerity and the expansion of private monopoly capital.

The gutting of NIOSH comes just after Trump signed four executive orders to increase coal production by removing environmental protections and opening federal lands to extraction by the coal companies, limiting states’ abilities to have mining rules stricter than the federal government, and boosting the coal-powered section of the electrical grid—in short, chopping up and serving state monopoly capital to private monopoly capital.

Mining is one of the most dangerous industries in the country, and it is getting more dangerous. Historically, driven by the extreme exploitation and danger of the work, early miners’ unions were militant, and would carry out armed strikes. As recently as 2023, miners in Alabama ended a heroically-long strike after 23 months on the picket line.

Black lung diseases affect 1 in 5 career coal miners according to NIOSH, and rates are up to their highest in 25 years. According to the agency, this is because of declining coal production—what seams remain require blasting deeper through silica-rich rock to reach, meaning the fewer remaining workers are exposed to harsher conditions.

With the cuts, NIOSH’s early detection medical programs for black lung have been suspended, basically canceling this hard-won free healthcare for coal miners. So has the coal miners’ job relocation program run through the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), since relocation requires confirmation of black lung from the cut detection program.

Monopoly media cites 6-figure salaries for mine workers, but simultaneously admits that miners are drained of their life-force by the job. The job relocation program provides a lifeline for some workers, providing equal salary desk jobs for those with black lung so they do not have to choose between working to death or early disability. In the cold calculus of capital, working harder, faster, and more dangerous jobs, even for relatively higher pay, still results in low wages spread across one’s life because that life is cut short as workers convert their blood into coal for the profit of the ruling class. With these cuts, the blood will flow freer.

MSHA has paused its enforcement of the Silica Rule meant to combat the rising rates of black lung, citing the NIOSH cuts. The Silica Rule would have reduced the legally-allowed exposure rates of the deadly particles and required miners to wear improved respirators. Mining capitalists had already convinced a federal judge to issue a stay against the rule before the layoffs, so it is facing blockage from the courts on one hand and the administration on the other.

Meanwhile, MSHA has closed over 30 mine inspection offices nationwide under orders from DOGE, leaving the capitalists plenty of space—hundreds of miles in some cases—between them and the nearest safety inspector.

Photo: Surface coal mining in Wyoming. Source: Yiscm_3b

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