For some coal miners, pausing the black lung programs at the National Institute For Occupational Safety and Health created an immediate problem, because without a stamp of approval from the institute, coal miners can’t access federal “Part 90” benefits that allow them to get reassigned to jobs with less dust exposure.
Black lung has no cure, but avoiding dust can stop the disease from getting worse. With the pause, X-rays and medical records now sat in folders, unexamined.
So [Anita] Wolfe and others began campaigning, collaborating with public health workers and miners to try to get the NIOSH workers back. Wolfe enlisted the support of West Virginia Republican Sen. Shelley Capito, who successfully petitioned to get black lung workers off administrative leave in the short term. Still, that was just a temporary fix.
Sam Petsonk, a lawyer, and Harry Wiley, a coal miner, decided to sue the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIOSH.
A few days later, the judge ruled in Wiley’s favor. Staff at the mobile clinic and the broader National Institute For Occupational Safety and Health Respiratory Health Division got their jobs back for now, although the program is still working to get back up and running. Staff at the institute’s National Personal Protective Technology Lab were also called back; they certify a variety of respirators that help keep miners and other workers safe.
But other institute researchers working to prevent mining-related lung diseases heard nothing.
While researchers in the Respiratory Health Division focus primarily on tracking disease and helping individual miners, researchers at NIOSH’s Pittsburgh and Spokane Mining Research Divisions focus on innovation, developing new tools to prevent disease in the first place.
The judge’s preliminary injunction said the law requires that kind of research. But the injunction did not explicitly put Pittsburgh and Spokane researchers back to work.
The Department of Health and Human Services did un-fire their boss, a statutorily required associate director overseeing the Office of Mine Safety and Health Research. But it did not bring back the hundreds of researchers who report to that administrator.
“He’s new. He hasn’t even met us yet!” said Cassandra Hoebbel, a NIOSH researcher in Pittsburgh and a union steward for the Association of Federal Government Employees.
“A lot of people contacted me and were like, ‘Oh my God, you got your job restored!’” she said. “It’s like, no they’ve only restored a tiny part of it.”
Hoebbel said that mine health and safety research at the institute has been mostly on pause since January due to the Trump administration’s restrictions on funding and travel. For almost five months, researchers have been unable to visit mines to measure dust levels, test new equipment or improve software tools.
That’s a long-term loss for miner health, but it’s a short-term loss as well: NIOSH field work often leads to quick-fix changes by the mine operators the researchers collaborate with. Now, those improvements aren’t happening. External grants for technology development and commercialization were also “terminated for convenience.”
That’s despite the fact that, after a long decline, lung diseases in miners are again on the rise: Black lung cases have been increasing for two decades, according to a 2018 NIOSH study, and severe cases have caught back up to their all-time high. And it’s not just black lung. A 2023 study found that coal miners are dying of a variety of lung diseases at higher rates than in the past. Some are also dying younger.
“It used to be that people said black lung was an old man’s disease, and that’s not true. We just buried a thirtysomething miner,” Wolfe said.
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