By Kennedy Maize
President Trump last week issued four of his many, often meaningless, executive orders, these aimed at rejuvenating the declining U.S. coal industry. He said his goal is “reinvigorating America’s beautiful, clean coal industry.”
Taken together, it seems that Trump drew his policy initiatives entirely from his Office of Management and Budget and its inspiration, the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025.” It does not appear he consulted the energy experts in his own cabinet, as the assumptions behind the executive orders is that government policy, not changing market conditions, have put coal used to generate electricity into a tailspin.
The first, over-arching order, declares coal essential to U.S. economic and national security. The order states, “It is a national priority to support the domestic coal industry by removing Federal regulatory barriers that undermine coal production, encouraging the utilization of coal to meet growing domestic energy demands, increasing American coal exports, and ensuring that Federal policy does not discriminate against coal production or coal-fired electricity generation.”
This order focuses on coal supply (under the apparent belief that somehow the industry doesn’t have adequate resources already available). It calls on the interior department and the agriculture department (the forest service) to “prioritize coal leasing and related activities….for the public lands with coal resources …. including by utilizing such emergency authorities as are available to them and identifying opportunities to provide for expedited environmental reviews, consistent with applicable law.”
The next order focuses on Environmental Protection Agency rules that the administration believes burden coal. It states, “The Federal Government plays a pivotal role in ensuring that the Nation’s power supply remains secure and reliable. Forcing energy producers to comply with unattainable emissions controls jeopardizes this mission.” It orders EPA to deep six the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) rule.
The third order attempts to override state government actions the administration believes discriminate against coal, with an unstated reference to the U.S. Constitution’s “dormant Commerce Clause.” The order says that when states “target or discriminate against out-of-State energy producers by imposing significant barriers to interstate and international trade, American energy suffers, and the equality of each State enshrined by the Constitution is undermined.”
This order specifically targets New York, Vermont, and California. The Empire State, Trump complains, “enacted a ‘climate change’ extortion law that seeks to retroactively impose billions in fines (erroneously labelled ‘compensatory payments’) on traditional energy producers for their purported past contributions to greenhouse gas emissions not only in New York but also anywhere in the United States and the world.”
Vermont, according to the order, “similarly extorts energy producers for alleged past contributions to greenhouse gas emissions anywhere in the United States or the globe.” California “punishes carbon use by adopting impossible caps on the amount of carbon businesses may use, all but forcing businesses to pay large sums to “trade” carbon credits to meet California’s radical requirements.”
All three states voted against Trump in the 2024 election. This order is likely to prompt the same response that Maine Democratic Gov. Janet Mills gave Trump in another context: “See you in court.”
The final coal-related executive order addresses the U.S. high-voltage electric transmission grid. It orders the Department of Energy to “develop a uniform methodology for analyzing current and anticipated reserve margins for all regions of the bulk power system regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and shall utilize this methodology to identify current and anticipated regions with reserve margins below acceptable thresholds as identified by the Secretary of Energy.”
The order then goes into a fantasy of federal overreach: The energy secretary can order private-sector owners of power plants to keep plants “from leaving the bulk-power system or converting the source of fuel of such generation resource if such conversion would result in a net reduction in accredited generating capacity.” Expropriation, baby?
Trump’s coal executive orders prompted pushback from energy experts outside the administration. Rob Gramlich, long-time Washington energy policy and politics player, commented on Twitter that the orders “don’t seem to realize that natural gas killed coal and if they aren’t banning fracking, none of this matters. Nothing here seems to change the economics, and it’s the economics that have held coal-fired power production down. DOE has no authority to prevent coal plant retirements or force an owner to lose money by running the plant.”
Gramlich added, “We have seen no evidence that any company is considering building a new coal plant or that supply chains or manufacturing could support it. I don’t think these orders change the facts that coal-fired power plants are old, expensive to run, and unlikely to operate very often or for many more years.”
As Trump was pondering and fulminating about coal, his administration was DOGEing the federal agencies in the Department of Labor and Department of Health and Human Services that oversee the health and safety of the workers in the nation’s coal mines.
DOL’s Mine Safety and Health Administration, at Elon Musk’s direction, is targeting 34 MSHA offices in 19 states for shut down. The closures include MSHA’s office at Mount Pleasant, Pa., some 50 miles south of Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported, “Year after year, the local office of the Mine Safety and Health Administration — the most active mine safety center in the nation — launched inquiries into deaths and devastating injuries in some of the largest underground caverns in the country.”
At HHS, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which researches coal miners’ black lung disease, is facing 873 layoffs. Of those firings, 200 are concentrated in the Morgantown, W.Va., and Pittsburgh offices. The Morgantown office houses the respiration research division. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., plans to remove the eviscerated NIOSH from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and into a new Administration for a Healthy America.
United Mine Workers of America President Cecil Roberts commented, “The announced significant downsizing of offices in Morgantown, W.Va., and Pittsburgh, Pa., are particularly devastating to the coal industry, which relies on the research done there to improve its safety practices.”
Anti-Trump billionaire businessman Mark Cuban commented on Bluesky, “USA to coal miners – Drop Dead. Literally. And take your towns with you.”
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