• Federal cuts have targeted Kentucky’s mine safety offices, terminating leases at six locations around the state.
• If lease terminations result in fewer mine safety officials based in Kentucky coalfields, advocates say miners’ health and safety will suffer.
• The only Kentucky location for the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, in Lexington, also had its lease terminated, according to federal data.

The federal government has terminated leases for 29 Mine Safety and Health Administration offices across the country, according to the Department of Government Efficiency — including a majority of the agency’s field offices in Kentucky.

About one-third of the affected offices are in Appalachia. Leases were terminated for six MSHA field offices in Kentucky, more than any other state.

If all the targeted offices close, it would leave only a few MSHA field offices in place to police more than 100 Kentucky coal mines, where millions of tons are produced every year. Only a handful of states produce more coal than Kentucky, even as the commonwealth’s coal industry has waned.

It’s unclear where staff based in these field offices will work in lieu of shuttered office spaces — or how much the agency’s presence in Kentucky and Appalachia has been reduced amid wide-reaching federal layoffs and pressure to resign.

DOGE’s hundreds of federal lease terminations across the nation come after President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to “take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis.”

If lease terminations result in fewer mine safety regulators based in Appalachian coal country, advocates say it will come at the expense of miners’ health and safety.

“It’s callous, it’s cruel, and it will endanger and destroy the lives of coal miners,” said Willie Dodson, coal impacts program manager for Appalachian Voices.

“MSHA needs more inspectors, MSHA needs more resources,” he said. “And what this administration is doing is quite recklessly and thoughtlessly going in the exact opposite direction.”

Federal mine safety offices on DOGE’s chopping block

Leases for MSHA offices in Barbourville, Prestonsburg, Hazard and Harlan were terminated in Eastern Kentucky, in addition to offices in Beaver Dam and Madisonville in the west.

The six lease terminations yielded $2.3 million in savings, according to DOGE, although the department’s past claims of savings have been marred by errors.

The downsizing appears to leave just a few MSHA offices in Kentucky. The agency has offices in Lexington, Pikeville and Sturgis, according to its website, and DOGE has not announced lease terminations for these locations.

MSHA did not offer specifics on how the cuts would affect the agency’s oversight role in Kentucky and Appalachian coal mines, and referred The Courier Journal to the General Services Administration. The GSA, which manages the federal government’s office space and other logistical needs, said it is “reviewing all options to optimize our footprint and building utilization.”

“A component of our space consolidation plan will be the termination of many soft term leases,” a GSA spokesperson said. “To the extent these terminations affect public facing facilities and/or existing tenants, we are working with our agency partners to secure suitable alternative space. In many cases this will allow us to increase space utilization and obtain improved terms.”

Fewer field offices could hamper efficient coverage of the region by inspectors, who are required to make regular visits to mining operations. Winding roads through Appalachian topography could mean more hours of drive time for mine inspectors if they’re reassigned to centralized offices.

“MSHA is required to regularly inspect all underground mines in Kentucky at least quarterly and surface mines twice a year,” Rebecca Shelton, policy director at Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, said in a statement. “We’re concerned that closing all of these offices would make this work impossible, so much additional travel would be required.”

“It’s clearly not about efficiency,” Dodson said. “It’s an incredibly inefficient move.”

If mine safety regulators lack staff or resources to provide proper oversight of mining operations, “I figure we’ll see a lot more young men get sick,” said Gary Hairston, president of the National Black Lung Association and a former coal miner in West Virginia.

Black lung disease, or coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, causes inflammation and scarring of the lungs. Rates of black lung disease have increased over recent decades — and in Kentucky and other parts of central Appalachia, one in five coal miners suffer from it, according to recent research.

Despite the coal industry’s decline in recent decades, about 2,000 people still work in Kentucky’s eastern coalfield, and an additional 1,300 people work in the western coalfield, according to state employment data from late 2024. Another 700 people work in preparation plants or office jobs in Kentucky’s coal industry.

“If the mine safety enforcement arm of the government is weakened, thousands of miners will be at grave risk because many of them will be required to work in much more dangerous conditions,” Shelton said. “History tells us that coal companies can never be trusted to self-regulate.”

The Kentucky Coal Association, an industry trade group, did not immediately respond to The Courier Journal’s request for comment Friday.

Kentucky’s Division of Mine Safety maintains its own branch offices in some of the towns where MSHA office leases were terminated. The division did not immediately answer questions about whether federal staff could share the state’s office space, or what a withdrawal of federal presence would mean for the state’s role in mine safety.

Fears of weakened mine safety oversight from the federal level come as Kentucky lawmakers consider loosening state protections for miners. House Bill 196 would “reduce the number of emergency medical or mine emergency technicians required to be on shift” at mines, rolling back standards set years ago in response to the death of a miner in Harlan County.

Uncertainty for mine reclamation offices

In addition to uncertainty around mine safety field offices, DOGE data also appears to list two lease terminations for the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, the agency overseeing cleanup of millions of acres of former mine lands. (Instead of OSMRE, the DOGE database lists leases for the “Office of Surface Mining and Regulation Enforcement,” a nonexistent agency.)

One of the offices is in Lexington, and the other is in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The agency said its offices “remain open,” and did not offer further information on its long-term plans in the affected areas.

“OSMRE offices remain open and continue to provide services,” the agency said in a statement. “The Department of the Interior is working with GSA to ensure facilities or alternative options will be available for the continued delivery of Interior services as we embrace new opportunities for optimization and innovation in workforce management.”

The Lexington office is OSMRE’s only current location in Kentucky, according to the agency’s website. The next closest OSMRE office with an intact lease is in Wise, Virginia, across the Kentucky border from Whitesburg.

OSMRE’s mine land reclamation efforts saw a major boost from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and Kentucky has received millions of dollars from the program annually to address its many acres of former mine lands and clean up remaining hazards.

Proper oversight of mine land reclamation is also a factor in Kentucky’s efforts to reduce death and destruction during extreme flooding. Strip-mined land, where vegetation has been eradicated, absorbs far less stormwater and can funnel more runoff into nearby communities.

Eastern Kentucky saw deadly flooding this year, and in the wake of devastating floods in the region in July 2022, Kentuckians For The Commonwealth called on OSMRE and the Department of the Interior to investigate “the extent to which the cumulative impact of surface mining, past and ongoing, exacerbated the devastating toll of lives, homes, businesses and property lost during the flood.”

Connor Giffin is an environmental reporter for The Courier Journal. Reach him directly at cgiffin@gannett.com or on X @byconnorgiffin.