The Trump administration wants you in the mines

President Donald Trump’s administration wants you to get a job—in the mines. 

The Department of Labor posted a link on X on Monday advertising job openings for coal miners nearly a week after Trump signed an executive order clearing the way for more “beautiful, clean coal” production on public lands. 

Naturally, this didn’t sit well with the public, given common knowledge of how mining jobs significantly impact human health. 

“Make Black Lung great again,” one user replied on X.

“why do you think Americans want to work in coal mines again?” another wrote. “are you fvcking crazy?”

Of course, for Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, this is just another day in the books. Her previous contributions to American workers include advocating to cut programs aimed at fighting child labor. And her department’s X post happily advertised that people could “jump start” their careers by diving into the mines.

While coal made up for less than a fifth of America’s energy production in 2023, it’s not just the push for environmentally taxing fossil fuels that has people up in arms. Rather, the Trump administration’s latest moves have sparked massive safety concerns for current and future miners. 

Seemingly thanks to Trump’s race to make fossil-fuel billionaires happy, the government’s Mine Safety and Health Administration announced on April 8—the same day that Trump signed the order—that it would temporarily pause a long-in-the-works safety rule to increase miners’ protections from silica dust. Instead of going into effect on April 14, miners will now have to wait until at least August before they see better protections against illnesses like black lung. 

The agency cited “unforeseen [National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health] restructuring” and “other technical reasons.” 

Historically, miners are subjected to a number of life-threatening safety hazards on the job including pneumoconiosis, which can come from inhaling silica on the job. 

“While we’re appreciative of the executive action, there are a lot of things that are being pulled back that are going to protect the health and safety of our miners, which is our main priority,” Erin Bates, a spokesperson for the United Mine Workers of America labor union, told Daily Kos. “Every single day this rule is delayed is another day that our nation’s miners are exposed to silica dust, which leads to and has been proven to lead to a number of lung diseases.”

Not only is the administration pushing for newbies to jump head first into a dangerous work environment, but thanks to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. and the Trump administration’s vicious firings of federal workers, there are fewer people to monitor miners’ health. 

Two-thirds of NIOSH, a key agency protecting and monitoring miners’ health, is expected to vanish in the coming weeks. Among many other duties, NIOSH runs the Coal Workers’ Health Surveillance Program, which provides a type of free health care to miners and helps to monitor their ongoing lung health.

A NIOSH facility in Morgantown, West Virginia, was among the hardest hit from these cuts, with the Trump administration laying off nearly 200 workers. 

According to MSHA’s spokesperson, Morgantown helped lead respiratory research.

“Without those resources, it’s going to be harder to monitor and control the dust levels in those mines, leaving a high risk for Black Lung,” Bates told Daily Kos.

Trump’s push for more coal and energy production may tie into his race against China regarding artificial intelligence. Last week, AI industry leaders met before Congress last week to beg for more energy, with one former Google CEO saying, “We need energy in all forms. … Renewable, nonrenewable, whatever. It needs to be there, and it needs to be there quickly.”

And Trump’s coal-focused executive order specifically mentioned AI, saying that domestic coal “will be critical to meeting the rise in electricity demand due to … the construction of artificial intelligence data processing centers.”

In other words, the cost of big business is high, and it’s possible that the president is trying to boost big industry—workers’ health be damned. 

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