The High Price of Libertarian Government: How Closing Coal Regulator Offices Endangers Miners
As Musk's DOGE slashes coal safety offices to 'trim government fat,' miners face the deadly reality of libertarian theory: billionaires' efficiency dreams written in working-class blood.
In the cool spring air of southern West Virginia, the 15th anniversary of the Upper Big Branch mine disaster passed with quiet ritual. Twenty-nine miners died that day in April 2010 when coal dust ignited deep beneath the Appalachian mountains. Stanley "Goose" Stewart, who survived the blast, remembers the "hurricane force winds" that tore through the tunnels as he covered the bodies of fallen co-workers with blankets before reaching the surface. For many in coal country, the disaster reinforced a bitter truth: in the calculus of American capitalism, their lives have value only in relation to the wealth they extract from the earth.
Now, as the Department of Government Efficiency—known by the oddly playful acronym DOGE—prepares to shut down three dozen Mine Safety and Health Administration offices across coal country, Stewart watches with mounting alarm. "I wouldn't recommend anybody get in the mining industry right now because of what's going on with Trump and Musk," he tells reporters. His concern isn't partisan posturing but hard-earned wisdom from someone who has witnessed what happens when profit supersedes safety in America's mines.
The DOGE initiative, conceived by President Donald Trump and headed by billionaire Elon Musk, embodies libertarian ideology —a worldview that treats government as an inefficiency rather than a necessary protection against the market drive for profit. With projected savings of just $18 million—almost comically small in the context of the federal budget—the plan would shutter MSHA offices in states already struggling with economic decline and public health crises. Kentucky alone would lose seven offices, leaving just two in the state with the fifth-highest coal production nationwide.
These closures aren't merely isolated cost-cutting measures but the latest manifestation of a decades-long libertarian project to dismantle the already thin American regulatory state, regardless of human cost. Relatedly, for example, I read the other morning in the Washington Post that the USDA will lower the standards in the poultry industry for surveilling raw chicken and turkey for salmonella. This approach has consistently privileged corporate balance sheets over community well-being, treating regulatory agencies as obstacles rather than protectors and putting profit over people.
The Price Paid in Blood and Suffering
"The agency's work is critical for keeping miners safe," United Mine Workers of America President Cecil Roberts said responding to the announced closures. Before 1969, he noted, "there was no law protecting miners at work, and thousands died in mines every year.” The historical record confirms this. Between the late 19th century and the passage of the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act in 1969, mining accidents claimed tens of thousands of lives. MSHA's establishment in 1978, which transferred enforcement from the Interior Department to Labor, marked a turning point in miner safety.
MSHA's mandate requires quarterly inspections of underground mines and biannual checks of surface operations. Inspectors examine ventilation systems, impoundment dams, roof bolts, and equipment safety. Jack Spadaro, a veteran mine safety investigator who worked for MSHA, dismisses the proposed closures as "a stupid proposal made by stupid people who obviously have no concept or knowledge about mine safety.”
Robert Cash, a 55-year-old roof bolt operator from Foster, West Virginia, expresses what many miners feel. "It's just a big scare around here," he says. "If we have a disaster and they've closed down an MSHA office close to us, what's the response time to get someone out there to start the investigation?"
His question exposes the fundamental flaw in libertarian approaches to governance, which focus on minimizing the state’s roll in limiting business in their profit making endeavors. An inspector based hours away simply cannot provide the same oversight as one stationed nearby. As territories expand, thoroughness inevitably suffers—a dangerous pattern that repeats whenever regulations are scaled back for "efficiency."
The Human Toll of Libertarian Governance
Back in 2023, I wrote about a related mines-profit-death problem in Appalachia. A cluster of the most severe form of black lung disease was identified along the Virginia-Kentucky border. Researchers from the University of Illinois Chicago and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health called it "the largest cluster of progressive massive fibrosis ever recorded.”
The timing wasn't coincidental, I argued. Black lung cases began rising in 2006—the same year the Bush administration cultivated a "cooperative relationship" between mine operators and safety regulators. The disease continued its upward trajectory through Trump's deregulatory push. Coal miners in Appalachia are now eight times more likely than other men to die from respiratory diseases.
Current U.S. standards allow coal miners to be exposed to double the silica dust levels permitted for other workers. Combined with Appalachia's deeper coal seams, which require miners to cut through more rock generating more silica dust, this regulatory gap has created perfect conditions for a public health catastrophe. A more aggressive regulatory regime might have reduced these exposure levels years ago. Instead, MSHA is only now "in the process of tightening those rules.”
This cycle—deregulation, preventable harm, belated recognition—stems from an ideology that treats government oversight with inherent suspicion. It represents not merely government failure but the failure of libertarian worldview itself—a perspective that cannot account for the human costs of unfettered market activity because it treats bodies as fuel for market production.
The True Economics of Deregulation
DOGE's website proudly announces $660 million in savings from terminating 748 federal office leases. These figures create compelling press releases but present a misleading picture of deregulation's economic consequences.
Such calculations omit the costs transferred from corporate balance sheets to individuals, communities, and taxpayers. When mines become less safe, miners and their families bear the burden through injuries, illness, and death. Communities suffer through diminished productivity and increased healthcare demands. Taxpayers ultimately foot the bill through disability payments, healthcare costs, and environmental remediation.
Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear captured this perfectly: "My concern is that what Elon Musk is trying to do is break government, not fix it." His statement cuts to the heart of the matter—the DOGE initiative isn't about improving efficiency but systematically dismantling government's capacity to counterbalance corporate power.
The broader context is even more damning. According to the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, in fiscal year 2009, West Virginians paid a net $42.2 million to support coal companies. This figure "fails to capture the significant legacy costs resulting from past coal industry activity that have yet to be funded. These costs, which include damages to roads and bridges and funding needs for reclaiming all abandoned mine land and bond forfeiture coal mine sites in the state, amount to nearly $5 billion.”
These externalized costs have accumulated for generations, ever since land agents swept through Appalachia convincing mountain people to sell mineral rights for pittances. Nick Mullins' ancestor received just 12 rifles and 13 hogs for land that has produced billions of dollars worth of coal. The region has operated under what amounts to an extractive colonial economy.
Central Appalachia exposes the fundamental paradox of libertarian economic theory. On paper, the region specialized in mining high-quality coal according to principles of comparative advantage. Yet the result has been persistent poverty, environmental devastation, and declining health. As economist Cesar A. Hidalgo's research shows, regions producing relatively few things constrain people's opportunities to develop new skills, leading to greater inequality and slower growth.
The Politics of Regulatory Capture
These MSHA closures cannot be separated from the political economy of coal. In West Virginia, politics and the coal industry have long been intertwined. Governor Jim Justice (now Senator Justice), who inherited his family's coal fortune, appointed former coal executive Austin Caperton to head the state's Department of Environmental Protection. This revolving door isn't a bug but a feature of libertarian governance—one that assumes business and public interests naturally align in the imagined harmony of competitive markets.
Under George W. Bush, Steven Griles, a former coal lobbyist who represented the National Mining Association, became deputy secretary of the Interior Department. There, he helped redefine "fill material" in the Clean Water Act to include mining waste, easing permit requirements for mountaintop removal. He later resigned after an inspector general found he had continued meeting with former clients.
Trump followed suit, appointing Steven Gardner, a longtime coal industry consultant and mountaintop removal proponent, to head the Office of Surface Mining. Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, served as acting EPA director.
This regulatory capture is the logical outcome of a worldview that treats government regulation as inherently harmful to market function. By staffing agencies with skeptics who’ve led the industries they intend to ‘regulate,’ the government's ability to check private power gets systematically undermined and laborers get chewed up and spat out by individual companies competing in the market.
The Brutal Calculus of Libertarian Values
The $18 million saved by shuttering these offices reveals what libertarian philosophy values most. It tells us that in America's current moral economy, a miner's life is worth less than the cost of maintaining the offices that might protect it. It confirms that dollars matter more than breath.
For all its rhetorical celebration of the individual, libertarianism in practice treats some individuals—namely those with capital—as more worthy of freedom than others. It cannot account for how power and resources are unequally distributed before anyone steps into the marketplace. This blindness isn't incidental to libertarian thought but central to it, allowing its adherents to mistake privilege for merit and regulation for tyranny.
The MSHA closures aren't merely a policy decision. They're a moral statement about whose lives we value and whose freedom counts.