Trump Making Black Lung Great Again
The miners themselves aren't so sure!
Donald Trump won every single county in West Virginia. He won the whole state by almost 42 points, with 69 percent. Now, he’s giving the people of West Virginia something back.
Unfortunately for them, that something is “more black lung disease.”
Because for all the talk about “beautiful, clean coal,” and executive orders meant to “Reinvigorate America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry,” for as fond as he is of standing in front of large groups of miners like they’re a gospel choir and he’s Madonna in the “Like a Prayer” video, Donald Trump is doing a hell of a lot to make mining even more dangerous than it already is.
Specifically, he’s gutted the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), which protects miners from black lung, while the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) has paused its “Lowering Miners’ Exposure to Respirable Crystalline Silica and Improving Respiratory Protection” final rule, which is a very big deal because the silica is twenty times worse than regular coal dust and can cause black lung to progress much faster.
Oh, and the MSHA itself has been DOGE’d, with 34 field offices in 19 states targeted for closure. The Coal Workers' Health Surveillance Program? That’s been paused as well. So there is absolutely no one doing x-rays and monitoring coal miners for signs of black lung right now.
This is all happening at a time, mind you, when black lung is already making a comeback with younger miners. Most of the large coal seams have already been fully mined out, so now, in order to get the coal Trump loves so dearly, they have to mine through rocks in order to get to the smaller seams deeper underground.
An ABC News report that aired yesterday morning discussed the issue with several miners who say they would prefer to live and not die from black lung, and who are upset about the recent developments … and, yet, are quite sure that Trump will have this figured out in no time.
Via ABC:
“You are suffocating. You are suffocating. And that's what's going to kill you,” [John] Robinson told [ABC News’s Jay] O'Brien. “I got a wife and two kids and two grandbabies, you know, and I want to live.” […]
“You don't take care of the miners, you ain't going to mine coal,” another miner told O'Brien. “The machine don't run by itself, you know what I'm saying?”
“There is no block of coal worth any man's life,” said another miner. […]
“If they'll give Trump time and let him work out his — he's got a plan,” Robinson told O'Brien. “I mean, he knows what he's doing. He's a smart man.”
The labor unions that represent their interests, however, seem a tad less confident — the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) and the AFL-CIO’s United Steelworkers filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration earlier this month.
The ABC report also included interviews with several health experts, including former and soon-to-be-former federal employees from the various agencies getting decimated, all of whom are very concerned for the health of the miners going forward.
Via ABC:
Sources said hundreds of unread X-rays conducted as part of the Coal Workers' Health Surveillance Program, the NIOSH program that screens and monitors the respiratory health of miners, remain in limbo, with no doctors to analyze the results and report them to patients.
“[Those miners] will go on continuing to be exposed at the rates that they are,” [Dr. Scott Laney, a NIOSH epidemiologist on administrative leave said]. “Their disease will progress more quickly than it ever should have.” […]
“Nobody else in the federal government does the work that we do to protect U.S. workers,” Hall said. “Nobody else, you know, specifically at CDC, nobody else at NIH, nobody else in the United States does what we do. When we are gone, when our work is gone, our research is gone — nobody steps up to take our place.”
Amanda Lawson, who works at a health center in West Virginia, told ABC News that last week three miners came in and had horrible X-rays. She says she's already feeling the effects of the NIOSH cuts.
“There's nobody to send them to get them some protection and get them moved out of the dust,” Lawson said. Without NIOSH's right-to-transfer program, those miners will remain working in the mines, rather than being transferred to safer working conditions.
A spokesperson for the Trump administration told ABC that everything is just fine and the black lung surveillance program can just be folded into Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Administration for a Healthy America (or AHA!).
The administration did announce yesterday that they had brought back some of the laid-off workers in charge of coal miners’ health, as well as some of those in charge of firefighters’ health (after laying off pretty much everyone in charge of investigating firefighter deaths and keeping firefighters healthy) and of providing health services to 9/11 survivors, but only on a temporary basis, until June 2, when their terminations will become official.
Two of the NIOSH employees called back from administrative leave told Politico that the workers had been told they were just being brought back to “close out” their work.
“Everyone is very suspicious that this is just being done to create the appearance that HHS is addressing concerns,” said one. “But programs will still be effectively eliminated in June.”
From the miners who are now more likely to get black lung to the firefighters who lost their health agencies, the farmers in crisis, the truckers who are about to have nothing to truck thanks to the Trump tariffs, the people in Arkansas denied the critical disaster aid former Trump press secretary and current Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders begged him for, it seems that a very large portion of the people hurt most by Trump’s policies are his own voters.
I suppose the bright side of this (for them) is that the vast majority of Trump supporters will just continue believing he’ll do right by them eventually, or believe that their own suffering is a “necessary sacrifice” to help usher in some magical golden age just out of reach, no matter how badly he screws them.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
The opioid epidemic in West Virginia its roots in the exploitation of miners, who for generations were fed a steady diet of painkillers and sent back into the mines, as opposed to treating underlying conditions caused by their backbreaking work. There's a legacy of covering over serious workplace health and safety issues with cheap drugs, which rarely gets discussed outside of public health circles. The White House might as well start singing the praises of "Clean Tobacco" next in its ongoing efforts to bring America's economy back to its nativist roots.
Oh well, it was worth it to get back to the "Good Old Days™" when they could violently suppress racial minorities, wasn't it? Coal is still not coming back because it's just inherently more expensive and inefficient. But this is a great paean to that time when you were sure that, as bad as things were for you, at least you weren't Black.
You buy the ticket, you take the ride.