{"id":12853,"date":"2025-12-05T07:27:51","date_gmt":"2025-12-05T12:27:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jordanbarab.com\/confinedspace\/?p=12853"},"modified":"2025-12-26T14:23:29","modified_gmt":"2025-12-26T19:23:29","slug":"death-by-deregulation-msha-to-roll-back-miners-silica-protections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jordanbarab.com\/confinedspace\/2025\/12\/05\/death-by-deregulation-msha-to-roll-back-miners-silica-protections\/","title":{"rendered":"Death by Deregulation: MSHA May Roll Back Miners’ Silica Protections"},"content":{"rendered":"

O<\/span>n April 18, 2024 the Biden administration issued a long awaited new silica rule<\/a> to protect coal miners — more than 50 years after NIOSH recommended<\/a> new exposure limits.<\/p>\n

But this victory for the nation’s coal miners was short-lived. Before the new rule could come into effect in April 2025, the Trump administration postponed enforcement for four months, then for another two months.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, as part of its deregulatory agenda, the administration announced that the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) would “reconsider” the rule with the intention of making changes — likely those requested by mine operators and Congressional Republicans.<\/p>\n

The new silica rule would have lowered the Permissible Exposure Limit (PEL) for respirable crystalline silica to 50 micrograms per cubic meter of air \u2013 half the previous limit, and included requirements for controlling and monitoring exposures to respirable crystalline silica.<\/p>\n

The new MSHA rule also required mine operators to offer free medical monitoring for miners to detect black lung and other respiratory diseases earlier. \u00a0The new PEL matches the silica limits established by OSHA in 2016 to protect construction workers and other general industry employees who were exposed to silica.<\/p>\n

Corporate and Congressional Opposition<\/h2>\n

Last April, days before mine operators would be required to comply with the new standard, MSHA announced<\/a>\u00a0a four-month \u201ctemporary enforcement pause\u201d of its final silica rule. That \u201cpause\u201d\u00a0 was scheduled to end August 18.\u00a0 The reason:\u00a0 the \u201crestructuring\u201d of the NIOSH\u2019s Pittsburgh Mining Research Division and the National Personal Protective Technology Laboratory may impact the supply of approved and certified respirators and personal dust monitors. According to MSHA, \u201cgiven the unforeseen NIOSH restructuring, and other technical reasons, MSHA offers this four-month temporary pause to provide time for operators to secure necessary equipment and otherwise come into compliance.\u201d<\/p>\n

This \u201cunforeseen\u201d restructuring, of course, was the result of the virtual\u00a0shuttering of NIOSH<\/a>\u00a0just weeks before by DOGE and the Trump administration.<\/p>\n

At the end of July, Committee Chair Tim Walberg (R-MI) and six other Committee Republicans sent a letter<\/a>\u00a0to MSHA\u2019s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy, James McHugh, expressing their support for \u201cefforts to give businesses and workers relief from the overly burdensome regulations promulgated by the Biden-Harris administration,\u201d and reminding McHugh that MSHA\u2019s silica standard \u201cfalls squarely within the purview of President Trump\u2019s deregulatory EOs [Executive Orders]\u201d that \u201crequire agencies to rescind or revise regulations that impose significant costs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then as the initial 4-month “pause” came to an end, MSHA announced a further delay due to negotiations resulting from legal challenges by the the mining, sand and gravel industries.<\/p>\n

Despite the whining from coal operators, the Charleston Gazette-Mail estimates<\/a> that compliance with the new rule would have cost large coal operators a tiny fraction of their profits.<\/p>\n

Tulsa, Oklahoma-based parent company Alliance Resource Partners L.P.\u2019s total revenue for2024 was $4.89 billion, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing. That means the first-year silica rule compliance costs projected by Alliance Coal \u2014 Alliance Resource Partners\u2019 mining operations holding company \u2014 would comprise just 0.39% of its parent company\u2019s 2024 revenue.
\nAlliance Resource Partners sold 33.3 million tons of coal in 2024, meaning its rule compliance costs would amount to $0.57 per ton sold.<\/p>\n

The likely rollback of the rule has upset miners and advocates for coal miners<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Gary Hairston, a retired West Virginia miner who is also the National Black Lung Association president, said the rule itself was a big win, but the waiting game to see it in action has been frustrating.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t understand why the companies don\u2019t want to enforce it,” Hairston said. “I know all they think about is money, but you want to take care of the person that\u2019s working for you because it means less people going back into the coal mines.\u201d<\/p>\n

Quenton King, government affairs specialist for miner and environmental advocacy group Appalachian Voices, said in a statement that \u201cEvery delay in reducing the amount of silica dust miners are exposed to means more miners becoming sick and dying,\u201d<\/p>\n

Legal experts question whether the Mine Safety and Health Act allows MSHA to weaking existing standards. Section 101(a)(9) of the Mine Safety and Health Act states that “No mandatory health or safety standard promulgated under this title shall reduce the protection afforded miners by an existing mandatory health or safety standard. Mining attorney Sam Petsonk said that\u00a0“If the agency is rewriting this rule, it better be only for the purpose of strengthening and broadening the rule.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Growing Epidemic of Lung Disease<\/h2>\n

Because coal seams have become narrower and harder to mine, miners need to cut through more rock containing cancer-causing silica<\/p>\n

Mine workers and researchers have attributed central Appalachia\u2019s sharp increase in black lung incidence among increasingly younger miners cutting into more surrounding rock as coal seams thin, yielding greater exposure to silica dust.<\/p>\n

NIOSH researchers found in a 2018-published study of lung exams collected from 1970 to2017 that 20.6% of miners with careers of 25 years or more in West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia had black lung \u2014 a pronounced increase following a national low point in the late1990s.<\/p>\n

The data spanning July 2019 through June 2023 show 83.4% of miners with large opacities on chest X-rays seen at federally supported black lung clinics were in those three states, with West Virginia having a persistently high concentration of such miners.<\/p>\n

Aside from the rollbacks in regulatory protections for miners’ health, the agency has been crippled by tight budgets<\/a> and lack of resources. Even though coal production is falling in the United States, the resources of MSHA have been falling faster:<\/p>\n

MSHA\u2019s estimated 1,729 full-time equivalent positions and $387.8 million for appropriation for fiscal year 2024 were 25% and 24.2%, respectively, below their estimated fiscal year 2008amounts when adjusting for inflation, according to MSHA budget plans for those years. Those declines were much steeper than a concurrent 14.7% decline in the nation\u2019s mines, meaning the MSHA\u2019s resources decreased faster than the mines it was created to regulate.<\/p>\n

Over and above the additional preventable deaths that this action will cause, more miners have been killed this year than last year. Thirty workers under MSHA\u2019s jurisdiction have already been killed on the job in the first 100 months of this year<\/a>, compared with 28 in 2024<\/a>.<\/strong>\u00a0 We don\u2019t know how many miners will be diagnosed or die from Black Lung this year, or how many more will die because of the ongoing delays in enforcement of MSHA\u2019s silica standard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On April 18, 2024 the Biden administration issued a long awaited new silica rule to protect coal miners — more than 50 years after NIOSH recommended new exposure limits. But this victory for the nation’s coal miners was short-lived. Before the new rule could come into effect in April 2025, the Trump administration postponed enforcement […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12857,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[72,71,12,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mine-safety","category-msha","category-silica","category-trump"],"yoast_head":"\nDeath by Deregulation: MSHA May Roll Back Miners' Silica Protections - Confined Space<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Trump administration announces that it will reconsider -- and likely weaken -- the new silica standard issued in 2024\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jordanbarab.com\/confinedspace\/2025\/12\/05\/death-by-deregulation-msha-to-roll-back-miners-silica-protections\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Death by Deregulation: MSHA May Roll Back Miners' Silica Protections - 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