Coal miners backed Trump. He’s dismantled their safety net

After decades of mining coal deep below the mountains of West Virginia, David Bounds now struggles to carry a gallon of milk to the breakfast table without gasping for breath. The black lung disease that forced him to retire eventually may kill him, Bounds believes. He’s proud of being a coal miner. But he doesn’t want anyone else to face his fate – or the myriad other dangers miners confront on the job. “It’s getting worse, and worse, and worse as I go along. I don’t want to see nobody in that shape, if it can be prevented,” he told CNN. So Bounds has watched in dismay as the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have slashed protections for coal miners. A CNN investigation has found that in just five months, President Donald Trump dismantled the safety net that has for years protected miners from lung disease, aided those already afflicted and kept miners safe on the job. Since January, “impact” inspections targeting mines with immediate dangers or the most troubling records of health and safety violations have dropped by 75 percent from the same period a year ago, according to data from the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). They are at their lowest level for any year with data available since such “impact” inspections began in 2010. Those inspections “are geared to save miners’ lives,” said Joe Main, the former head of MSHA under President Barack Obama. “If you take that component out, then you’ve placed more risk on the potential for mine disasters in the United States. It’s that simple.” As Trump has tapped a former mining industry executive to lead MSHA, the agency has halted enforcement of a rule miners sought for decades to protect them against the silica dust that ravages their lungs – citing “unforeseen” restructuring at government offices charged with protecting miners. As part of Musk’s DOGE efforts to reduce government, the mine agency rescinded job offers, froze hiring and reduced its ranks through deferred resignations. DOGE also ordered the closure of about three dozen of MSHA’s offices around the country. Though most of those orders were rescinded last week, at least four offices are still slated to shut down, according to a memo obtained by CNN. That includes one in Pineville, West Virginia, created after 29 coal miners died in an explosion in 2010 at the Upper Big Branch mine. The administration also gutted the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), firing most of its staff in April and May, and shuttering regional offices in coal country, putting in limbo black lung and silicosis programs. While a judge recently ordered some NIOSH staffers to be reinstated, epidemiologists and other researchers told CNN that many remain on administrative leave and expect to lose their jobs. The president’s proposed budget for fiscal 2026 would further cut MSHA’s budget by 10%, eliminating 47 positions and a grant program that trains miners to better identify, avoid and prevent unsafe working conditions in mines. A spokesperson for the Department of Labor said MSHA inspectors were exempted from the deferred resignation program, that overall inspection numbers “are similar to historical trends” and the agency “is confident that it will achieve its statutory yearly inspection obligations.” A Health and Human Services spokesperson said the “Trump Administration is committed to supporting coal miners” and added that “NIOSH’s essential services will continue as HHS streamlines its operations.” Trump has argued that he can reinvigorate the coal industry by cutting red tape and “removing Federal regulatory barriers that undermine coal production.” He’s signed executive orders intended to boost the coal industry and ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to end federal limits on coal- and gas-fired power-plant pollution that’s been tied to climate change. “We’re ending Joe Biden’s war on beautiful, clean coal once and for all,” Trump said at an April 8 signing ceremony for his executive orders. “And we’re going to put the miners back to work.” But many in mine country fear that Trump – who won 70 percent of West Virginia’s vote in 2024, with equally strong support among the mining regions across Appalachia – is boosting the coal industry at the expense of the miners who actually carry out the dirty, dangerous work. “People are going to die because of this,” said Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America. He said, of Trump, “Look, we’re the biggest cheerleader he could possibly have in creating new jobs, because Appalachia is in desperate need of jobs. We don’t fault the president on that end. But you can’t bring people back and kill them. I mean, how much sense does that make?” A frowny-face emoji Miners have long faced grave health threats. Between 1900 and 1960, cave-ins, explosions, other disasters and mining accidents killed nearly 100,000 coal miners on the job. It’s unclear exactly how many more miners died in those years from black lung. In 1969, a year after an explosion killed 78 West Virginia miners, Congress passed the landmark Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act, which created what became MSHA. The act also established health standards; set fines and criminal penalties for repeated willful safety violations; set strict inspection schedules; and required compensation for miners who developed black lung disease. From when it began tracking black lung in 1970 to 2016, the Centers for Disease Control reported that the condition was the underlying or contributing cause of death for more than 75,000 miners. Since 1997, research into preventing black lung disease and other mining dangers has been conducted by NIOSH, an institute responsible for studying worker risks across many industries. At the institute’s offices in Morgantown, West Virginia, epidemiologists and researchers in the Coal Workers’ Health Surveillance Program have long provided free health checks for miners, and documented diagnoses of black lung so affected miners can legally demand to be moved to mine jobs that reduce their exposure to coal and silica dust. Those programs have recently grown in importance, as thinning coal seams force mining operations to dig through thicker layers of sandstone – a process that creates more silica dust, which has led to a steep rise in irreversible lung damage. About one in five of the 4,000 to 6,000 miners the program screens each year have developed black lung disease, researchers testified. That’s one reason researchers and miners’ advocates have pushed for the new silica dust regulations, which would have cut allowable exposure in half. But after Trump won election back to the White House, buoyed by his strong support in coal country, his administration moved quickly to walk back many of those programs. In April, MSHA suspended the new silica-dust rule until mid-August and declined to argue against a mining industry court request to stay the rule, which a court granted. Around the same time, two thirds of the institute’s staff were laid off under orders from DOGE and HHS – including all the members of the surveillance program in Morgantown. “We found out through a Signal chat,” said Anthony Scott Laney, an epidemiologist who has worked at the program since 2008. “They were having a meeting of the CDC division directors. Someone at the meeting sent out a Signal message that said, ‘Oh no, sorry NIOSH,’ with a frowny-face emoji.” Some lawmakers, including West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican, lobbied to reverse the cuts. On May 13, a federal judge in West Virginia, in a lawsuit brought by a miner with black lung, ordered the “full restoration” of the NIOSH Respiratory Health Division, including the Coal Workers’ Health Surveillance Program. At a House budget hearing the next day, HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. told lawmakers that the surveillance and black lung programs would be fully reinstated. Even with the firings of the respiratory workers in Morgantown rescinded, other parts of the institute that contribute to miner safety remain closed, said Cathy Tinney-Zara, president of the union chapter that represents the scientists and staff in Morgantown. “What wasn’t rescinded was the group of persons who do the laboratory work. If new exposures for workers are found, that’s where the lab division looks at that and studies it and gives documentation as to ‘this level of particulates does this type of damage,’” she said. Laney said shuttered labs in Morgantown and Pittsburgh were vital to the respiratory division’s work. “How do you do a black lung program if you don’t have laboratories?” he asked. And other pieces of the institute that work on miner safety issues, in Morgantown and elsewhere, still face deep cuts. “I have been on admin leave since April, but effectively I have lost my job,” said Catherine Blackwood, who studies occupational allergies and microbial triggers of disease. “We’ve received next to no communication from leadership.” “I don’t think the president or Secretary Kennedy understand the long-term impacts of gutting NIOSH,” she said. “It will impact every single worker in the United States.” Brendan Demich came from a long line of coal miners – including an uncle buried in rubble at one mine and a grandfather with black lung – to work at a Pittsburgh mine research division of NIOSH. Now, his whole team has been cut. “If they had come to any of our facilities, asked any questions to NIOSH leadership, asked any questions to people on the ground, there’s no way that these cuts would be going through, as we protect everybody from coal miners to construction workers to tradesmen,” said Demich. “It boggled my mind that somebody decided that work is not important.” Jennica Bellanca, a NIOSH engineer in Pittsburgh who worked on improving responses to mine emergencies, is one of many union members who have filed grievances to challenge their terminations. She said she fears that without NIOSH, research on how to improve the safety of miners simply won’t get done. ‘It is killing them.’ MSHA has long scheduled quarterly inspections at sub-surface mines and semi-annual inspections at surface mines. But after the Upper Big Branch mine disaster in 2010, the agency also began conducting “impact inspections” at mines that repeatedly violate health and safety standards, or to address specific risks raised by miners or operators. Main, the former MSHA head, said those inspections have helped prevent any major coal-mining disasters over the past 15 years. Under Trump, though, such inspections have plummeted. In the first five months of this year, the mining administration conducted one-fourth as many impact inspections as over the same period last year: 18 impact inspections, down from 72, issuing 274 citations for violations, down from 1,141. That is the fewest impact inspections MSHA has completed in the first five months of any year with available data since the inspection program began. (In 2021 and 2022, the agency stopped releasing inspection data during the Covid-19 pandemic.) “I can tell you what’s going on: They are too short of inspectors to carry them out. That’s my gut feeling,” said Main. He said it worries him. “When you start messing with these things that we know work, we know protect miners,” the risk increases, he said. “If there is a lack of inspections to fine them and catch them and get them fixed, miners are going to pay the price.” A Department of Labor spokesperson said that MSHA has “additional inspectors in the training pipeline,” and noted that its overall inspection numbers through May 20 were higher than in 2024. Some shortcomings at the mining agency predate Trump’s administration. An inspector general report released toward the end of the Biden administration cited shortcomings at MSHA with completing inspections, writing violations and other issues as one of the top “performance challenges” facing the Department of Labor. But Carey Clarkson, the West Virginia-based vice president of a union that represents MSHA workers, said he worries that, with the changes under the Trump administration, “the safety aspect is gone.” He said the new administration rescinded job offers to about 90 people in the process of being hired at MSHA, including roughly 50 inspectors who were “justified and severely needed.” He said about 170 people, more than 11% of the workforce, left in DOGE’s deferred resignation program. “The mission was not taken into account. It was ‘we need to get rid of bodies, we don’t care from what areas, we don’t care what it affects,’” he said. To lead MSHA, Trump has appointed Wayne Palmer, a former executive at the Essential Minerals Association, a trade group that has supported a legal challenge against the since-suspended silica rule. Palmer has repeatedly jumped between government and private sector jobs in Washington, DC. In addition to lobbying on behalf of mining interests, he previously registered to lobby for health care clients, as well as a foundation criticized by some US lawmakers and watchdog groups as linked to the Chinese Communist Party’s broader effort to influence the United States. That foundation has described itself as an independent group. Asked about his work for that foundation, a Department of Labor spokesperson said about a decade ago Palmer organized trips for bipartisan delegations of state and local US officials and assisted in organizing events but did not speak at them. Palmer also served as a senior official at MSHA in Trump’s first administration. At that time, a report by the Department of Labor’s inspector general found the mine-safety agency did too little to protect miners from silica dust, sticking to outdated standards even as the number of miners developing black lung soared. “Every single day the silica dust rule is delayed is a day our miners are contracting black lung, and it is killing them,” said Erin Bates, a spokeswoman for the United Mine Workers of America, which fought against the pause. Rebecca Shelton, director of policy for Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, a nonprofit law firm that works on mine safety issues, called getting the silica rule in place foundational for protecting miners. “But if you don’t have MSHA inspectors,” she added, “it doesn’t matter how good your rule is, because you can’t enforce it.” Hoping for change At his home in Oak Hill, in the heart of West Virginia’s coal country, Bounds sits hooked up to the oxygen machine that helps him breathe. “With the black lung, it thickens your wall, and it’s hard to get that breath in there,” he explained. He said most of the damage to his lungs comes from decades of exposure to coal dust. “We’d go down to Myrtle Beach for a vacation, lay on the beach, and spit up coal dust. Even after being down there for a week, you’re still spitting up coal dust. You know there’s a lot of dust down in your system when you do that a week later.” But, as NIOSH researchers have determined, Bounds said the silica dust now affecting younger miners is worse – damaging lungs more quickly and severely. It’s one reason Bounds joined the fight for the rule to reduce silica exposure and celebrated when the new rule was approved. “We was tickled with that,” he said. “It was a big thing for us.” “Now, it’s come down to the same thing it was before. ‘We’ll take care of it in the fall, we’ll do it in spring, we’ll do it in fall.’” He pauses. “I just gotta get a little bit of wind. I’m talking too much.” Bounds, who said he did not cast a vote for a presidential candidate in the last election, said he doesn’t think Trump and others in Washington understand the effect the program and inspection cutbacks will have on miners. Coal miners “depend on NIOSH. They depend on mine inspectors. They depend on things being right,” he says. “Mine operators get rich, but the… coal miner himself is getting sicker and sicker. And they want to go the wrong route. They’re trying to go a wrong route by cutting the people that’s there to help us.” Anna-Maja Rappard contributed to this report.