April 18, 2025 - Mine safety is under attack. In the past several weeks, Elon Musk announced the termination of leases for 29 Mine Safety and Health Administration field offices and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shuttered the program that offers free, confidential black lung screenings to miners. It is difficult to understand, but the “Wall of Receipts” on Musk’s DOGE website lists the termination of 29 leases for Mine Safety and Health Administration offices across the country — including five in Eastern Kentucky and three in Western Kentucky. Even more concerning, there has been hardly any communication about what the lease terminations mean or what will happen to the inspectors who work out of those offices. 

The prospect of shutting down mine safety offices in Kentucky coal country — while refusing to communicate about what that will mean for mine safety — is cruel and callous. It makes no sense at all. Certainly, no Kentuckian who voted last November was voting for that. Mine safety inspectors have a difficult job. These must cover a lot of ground (and a lot of underground) to keep mine workers safe. Inspectors are trained to spot potential electrical malfunctions, mechanical issues, methane buildups, high silica concentrations, trip-and-fall hazards in an environment where falling down can have dire consequences, the handling and storage of flammable materials, and much more. They are critical government employees who help protect coal miners from serious hazards on a daily basis. Mines are inherently dangerous places, but miners have the same right as other Americans to have workplaces that are as safe as possible. 

The Mine Safety and Health Administration is the organization responsible for ensuring that right. These lease terminations directly undercut the safety of workers in Kentucky’s coal industry. Under federal law, deep mines must be inspected quarterly and surface mines at least twice a year. If these offices are closed, the closest MSHA office to eastern Kentucky would be in Lexington. If inspectors have to travel from the Lexington office to far-flung mines across Eastern Kentucky, keeping up that inspection schedule will become next to impossible. If enough inspectors are caught up in Musk’s haphazard purge of federal employees, it will become impossible. MInes will become even more dangerous. There will be more accidents and deaths. 

More miners will contract debilitating and deadly cases of black lung. Lives are literally at stake. Added to this, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. has cut the staff of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health by two-thirds — that agency’s functions include screening coal workers for black lung, developing protective respirators, and research that helped to identify the current epidemic of black lung, and that evaluates the effectiveness of strategies to combat it. Another blow came late last week, when a federal court in St. Louis blocked the implementation of a rule intended to protect miners from breathing in too much silica dust, a carcinogen and the primary culprit in the most severe form of black lung. 

The rule, developed by former Assistant Secretary of Labor Chris Williamson, the grandson of a coal-miner with black lung, would have lowered the allowable levels of respirable silica dust by half, but for now this requirement cannot be enforced. None of this should be partisan. No matter who you voted for, I hope we can all agree that working people should be as safe as possible while on the job. After a flurry of media coverage on Musk’s move to terminate MSHA office leases, U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers told reporters he had reached out to the agency for more details, but he hasn’t spoken up since. 

Kentucky residents who care about the welfare of working miners should contact Rogers and ask what he found out, and what he plans to do to keep regional MSHA offices open, and to keep miners safe. While they’re at it, Kentuckians may also want to ask Rogers why in July of last year he voted in favor of a bill that would block MSHA’s ability to enforce regulations protecting coal miners from breathing in silica dust. It appears Rogers’ primary concern is with coal industry profits, not workers There is nothing efficient about shuttering mine safety field offices, or otherwise attacking the protections, services, infrastructure and personnel that keep miners safe. Rogers should advocate for his constituents and make sure that these lease cancellations are reversed, that NIOSH programs are reopened, that the jobs of safety inspectors are preserved and that the lives and health of Kentucky’s coal miners are protected to the absolute best of the U.S. government’s ability.