By Valerie Volcovici
OAK HILL, West Virginia (Reuters) -Josh Cochran worked deep in the coal mines of West Virginia since he was 22 years old, pulling a six-figure salary that allowed him to buy a home with his wife Stephanie and hunt and fish in his spare time.
That ended two years ago when, at the age of 43, he was diagnosed with advanced black lung disease. He’s now waiting for a lung transplant, breathes with the help of an oxygen tank, and needs help from his wife to do basic tasks around the house.
His saving grace, he says, is that he can still earn a living. A federal program run by the Mine Safety and Health Administration and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health called Part 90 meant he was relocated from underground when he got his diagnosis to a desk job dispatching coal trucks to the same company, retaining his pay.
“Part 90 – that’s only the thing you got,” he told Reuters while signing a stack of documents needed for the transplant, a simple task that left him winded. “You can come out from underground, make what you made, and then they can’t just get rid of you.”
That program, which relocates coal miners diagnosed with black lung to safer jobs at the same pay – along with a handful of others intended to protect the nation’s coal miners from the resurgence of black lung – is grinding to a halt due to mass layoffs and office closures imposed by President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, according to Reuters reporting.
Reuters interviews with more than a dozen people involved in medical programs serving the coal industry, and a review of internal documents from NIOSH, show that at least three such federal programs have stopped their work in recent weeks.
A decades-old program operated by NIOSH to detect lung disease in coal miners, for example, has been suspended. Related programs to provide x-rays and lung tests at mine sites have also shut down and it is now unclear who will enforce safety regulations like new limits on silica dust exposure after nearly half of the offices of MSHA were slated to have their leases terminated.
The details about the black lung programs halted by the government’s mass layoffs and funding cuts have not previously been reported.
“It’s going to be devastating to miners,” said Anita Wolfe, a 40-year NIOSH veteran who remains in touch with the agency. “Nobody is going to be monitoring the mines.”
The cuts come as Trump voices support for the domestic coal industry, a group that historically has supported the president.
At a White House ceremony flanked by coal workers in hard hats earlier this month, Trump signed executive orders meant to boost the industry, including by prolonging the life of aging coal-fired power plants.
“For too long, coal has been a dirty word that most are afraid to speak about,” said Jeff Crowe, who Trump identified as a West Virginia miner. Crowe is the superintendent of American Consolidated Natural Resources, successor to Murray Energy.
“We’re going to put the miners back to work,” Trump said during the ceremony. “They are great people, with great families, and come from areas of the country that we love and we really respect.”
Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIOSH, said that streamlining government will better position HHS to carry out its Congressionally mandated work protecting Americans.
Representatives for MSHA and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Black lung has been on the rise over the last two decades, and has increasingly been reported by young workers in their 30s and 40s despite declining coal production.
NIOSH estimates that 20% of coal miners in Central Appalachia now suffer from some form of black lung disease, the highest rate that has been detected in 25 years, as workers in the aging mines blast through rock to reach diminishing coal seams. Around 43,000 people are employed by the coal industry, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
MORE MINING, MORE RISK
Around 875 of NIOSH’s roughly 1,000-strong workforce across the country were terminated amid sweeping job cuts announced by HHS this month, according to three sources who worked for NIOSH.
That’s put the department’s flagship black lung program, the Coal Workers’ Health Surveillance Program, on hold, according to an internal NIOSH email dated April 4.
“We will continue to process everything we currently have for as long as we can. We have no further information about the future of CWHSP at this time,” the email says.
The CWHSP’s regular black lung screenings, which deploy mobile trailers to coal mines to test coal miners on site have ended too, because there’s no money to fuel the vehicles or epidemiologists to review the on-site x-rays or lung tests, according to sources familiar with the program.
For many miners, this program is the sole provider of medical checkups, according to NIOSH veteran Wolfe.
The loss of staff at NIOSH has also crippled black lung-afflicted miners’ ability to get relocated with pay as part of the Part 90 program.
Miners can only become eligible for the Part 90 benefit by submitting lung x-rays to NIOSH that show black lung. But all NIOSH epidemiologists in West Virginia required to review the x-rays were laid off, according to Scott Laney, who lost his job as an epidemiologist.
Laney told Reuters he and his fellow laid-off team have been working in an informal “war room” in his living room to try to draw attention to the issue among Washington lawmakers.
“I want to make sure that if there are more men who are going into the mines as a result of an executive order, or whatever the mechanism, they should be protected when they do their work,” he said.
Sam Petsonk, a West Virginia attorney who represents black lung patients, said relocating sick miners is crucial because the risks of continuing to work in dust-heavy areas while ill are so severe.
“It gets to the point that days and months matter for this program,” he said.
SILICA THREAT
Last year, MSHA finalized a new regulation that would cut by half the permissible exposure limit to crystalline silica for miners and other workers – an attempt to combat the rising rates of black lung.
Enforcing that rule, which comes into force in August after being pushed back from April by the Trump administration, may prove difficult given the staff cuts and planned office closures at MSHA, said Chris Williamson, a former Assistant Secretary of Labor for Mine Safety and Health under the Biden administration.
He told Reuters that before he left MSHA in January, there were 20 mine inspector positions unfilled. A pipeline of 90 people that had already secured MSHA inspector job offers, meanwhile, had their offers rescinded after Trump took office, and around 120 other people took buyouts.
Mine inspectors are meant to uphold safety standards that reduce injuries, deaths and illnesses at the mines.
That loss of staff and resources raises the likelihood that black lung could become even more pervasive among Appalachian coal miners – particularly if mining activity increases, said Drew Harris, a black lung specialist in southern Virginia.
“As someone who sees hundreds of miners with this devastating disease it’s hard for me to swallow cutting back on the resources meant to prevent it,” he said.
Kevin Weikle, a 35-year-old miner in West Virginia who was diagnosed with advanced black lung disease during a screening in 2023, said the cuts make no sense at a time the administration wants to see coal output rise and will set back safety standards by decades.
“Don’t get me wrong, I mean, I’m Republican,” Weikle said. “But I think there are smarter ways to produce more coal and not gut safety.”
(Reporting by Valerie Volcovici; Editing by Richard Valdmanis and Anna Driver)
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