The Black Lung Trust Fund: A Coal Tax That Never Quite ...

There is a federal fund that taxes coal to pay coal miners, and it has run short almost every single year it has existed. Since 1979 it has borrowed from the Treasury to make its payments, and by the end of fiscal 2021 it owed the general fund about 4.6 billion dollars. You could read that as a failing program. You could also read it as exactly what a payer of last resort is supposed to do: keep paying disabled miners even when the tax that funds it cannot keep up, because the disease it exists to cover is not going away. In fact, by the best current evidence, black lung is coming back. The Black Lung Disability Trust Fund is one of those pieces of public-money plumbing that looks like a loss on every line and still does the humane thing it was built to do, and the tension between those two readings is the whole story.

What it is, and who actually runs it

The Trust Fund is administered by the Department of Labor, specifically the Office of Workers' Compensation Programs and its Division of Coal Mine Workers' Compensation, under Part C of the Black Lung Benefits Act, according to the Congressional Research Service. It pays a modest monthly cash benefit plus medical coverage to coal miners who are totally disabled by pneumoconiosis, the scarring lung disease that inhaled coal and rock dust produces, and to their surviving dependents.

The key thing to understand, and the thing that explains why the fund is always in the red, is that it is not the primary payer. Under the law the responsible coal-mine operator pays first, through insurance or approved self-insurance. The Trust Fund steps in only when no responsible operator can be assigned, when the operator has ceased to exist, or when the operator fails to pay within 30 days of an eligibility determination, again per the Congressional Research Service. It is, in other words, the backstop. Most of the black lung benefit system is meant to be financed by the companies whose mines caused the harm. The fund catches the miners those companies leave behind.

Where the money comes from

The Trust Fund's own revenue is a coal excise tax. It is levied at 1 dollar and 10 cents per ton on coal from underground mines and 55 cents per ton on surface-mined coal, in each case capped at 4.4 percent of the coal's sales price, as the Congressional Research Service documents. The tax applies only to coal sold or used domestically. Exported coal is not taxed at all, which matters when you notice that revenue keeps lagging behind production.

That rate has a history of nearly falling off a cliff. The 1 dollar and 10 cent and 55 cent figures are the higher rates first set in the mid-1980s, and for years they survived only on repeated one-year extensions. Without an extension the tax was scheduled to revert to its original 1977 statutory levels of 50 cents per ton underground and 25 cents per ton surface, capped at 2 percent of sales price, a cut the Government Accountability Office pegged at about 55 percent. That reduced rate actually took effect briefly when Congress let the higher rate lapse for calendar year 2020, before short-term extensions restored it.

The pattern finally ended in an unlikely place. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, the climate law built largely to phase down fossil fuels, permanently extended the higher coal excise tax rates, ending the annual scramble. The Congressional Research Service notes the law made those rates, "which had previously been subject to periodic reductions, permanent." The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that making the higher tax permanent would reduce the federal deficit by roughly 1.16 billion dollars over ten years, a figure reported by the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense citing the committee's score. Treat that number as well corroborated but secondhand: it comes through an advocacy organization quoting the committee rather than from a committee document directly. Either way, the same law meant to wind coal down is what gave coal miners' benefits their first stable revenue floor in years.

Why it is always in the red

Stable does not mean sufficient. The coal excise tax has never covered the fund's outlays. The Government Accountability Office documents that expenditures have consistently exceeded revenue, and that the fund has borrowed from the Treasury general fund in nearly every year since 1979, its first full fiscal year. There is no statutory ceiling on how much it may borrow. Cumulative debt reached about 4.6 billion dollars at the end of fiscal 2021, including roughly 2.2 billion dollars borrowed during that year alone, per the Congressional Research Service; the Government Accountability Office phrases the single-year figure as about 2.3 billion, a rounding difference.

This is not the first time the numbers piled up. Congress forgave about 6.5 billion dollars of accumulated Trust Fund debt through the Energy Improvement and Extension Act of 2008, according to the Government Accountability Office. That was debt forgiveness, a restructuring of what the fund owed the Treasury, not a cash bailout of miner benefits, and it did not fix the underlying gap. The fund returned to deficit borrowing within a couple of years.

The sharpest fairness problem is not the arithmetic but who gets stuck with the bill. When coal operators go bankrupt, their black lung liabilities do not disappear; they land on the Trust Fund. The Government Accountability Office estimated that coal-operator bankruptcies from 2014 through 2016 shifted about 865 million dollars in benefit responsibility onto the fund, concentrated in a few firms. Alpha Natural Resources alone accounted for an estimated 494 million dollars of that, and had posted only about 12 million dollars in collateral, roughly 2.4 percent of its estimated liability. The agency warned repeatedly that the Department of Labor let self-insured operators secure their obligations with collateral far below what they actually owed. When a company's promise to a disabled miner is backed by pennies on the dollar and the company then fails, the promise quietly converts into taxpayer-backed Treasury borrowing.

How bad could it get? A 2018 Government Accountability Office simulation projected the fund's borrowing could rise to more than 15 billion dollars by 2050. That number deserves a caveat. It was a modeled projection, not a balance, and its moderate scenario assumed the scheduled 2019 rate cut actually happened. The Inflation Reduction Act later cancelled that cut, so the real long-run trajectory is likely less severe than the 15 billion figure suggests. It is best read now as an outdated worst case rather than a forecast.

Meanwhile the revenue base keeps shrinking. Collections have run in the low hundreds of millions: in fiscal 2021 the tax raised about 189 million dollars from underground coal and 135 million from surface coal, roughly 324 million dollars combined, per the Congressional Research Service, down from something closer to 450 million a year in the late 2010s. That earlier figure is approximate, but the direction is not in doubt. Revenue tracks coal production, and coal production is falling.

Why demand is rising anyway

Here is the mismatch that makes this fund different from an ordinary underfunded account. The tax base is shrinking at exactly the moment the disease is resurging, and resurging in younger workers than the old model assumed.

A large mortality study by researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health examined 235,550 United States coal miners who died between 1979 and 2017. It found that Central Appalachian miners born in 1940 or later had more than eight times the odds of dying from nonmalignant respiratory disease, the category that includes black lung, compared with the general population. Modern miners, in other words, are faring worse than their predecessors, not better.

The clinical picture matches. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in January 2024 identified 1,177 cases of progressive massive fibrosis, the most severe and irreversible form of black lung, across 15 federally funded Black Lung Clinics in 11 states. About 1,008 of them, roughly 86 percent, were miners living in Central Appalachia, meaning Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. That same study documented the disease reaching people it once spared: it counted 70 miners younger than 50 and 79 who had worked fewer than 15 years underground. An earlier research letter in the same journal in 2018 had already flagged the trend, reporting 416 cases from three clinics in Virginia, described at the time as the largest cluster of the disease ever reported. Researchers attribute the resurgence largely to silica dust, kicked up as miners cut through rock to reach the thin coal seams that remain in the region. This is a dust disease, caused by what miners breathe, not a lifestyle one.

The regulatory response has stalled. The Mine Safety and Health Administration issued a final rule in April 2024 cutting the permissible exposure limit for respirable crystalline silica to 50 micrograms per cubic meter over an eight-hour shift, with an action level of 25 micrograms, effective June 17, 2024, and coal operators given about a year to comply. But just before the coal compliance date, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit stayed enforcement on April 11, 2025, as documented by the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-aligned think tank. The stay is indefinite, pending review of the merits, and as of this writing in mid-2026 the coal silica rule is still not being enforced. The single most direct tool for slowing the disease that drives the fund's outlays is sitting on hold.

Ratio-adjusted for the miners

Now change the measure. Adjust for what this fund actually is, a safety net of last resort for people whose lungs are permanently scarred by a job they can no longer do, and the ledger reads differently.

The benefits are modest. In 2023 the monthly payment ran from 737 dollars and 90 cents for a totally disabled miner with no dependents to 1,475 dollars and 80 cents for a miner with three or more dependents, tied to a percentage of the federal pay scale, with medical care provided at no cost. This is not a generous program. It is a floor under people who have run out of other options, paid precisely in the cases where the responsible employer has vanished or gone bankrupt and the alternative is nothing.

The dollars are small in federal terms, a few hundred million a year in benefits against a disease burden that is real and rising. And the structure has a certain rough justice to it: the coal excise tax means the industry that created the harm funds most of the remedy, even as that industry contracts. The chronic borrowing looks like failure on a spreadsheet, but a spreadsheet that balanced would mean either a tax high enough to accelerate coal's decline or benefits low enough to abandon disabled miners. The fund's permanent deficit is, in a sense, the cost of splitting that difference.

The ledger reading

The Black Lung Disability Trust Fund can be honestly described as a program that has failed to balance for its entire existence and honestly described as one that does its job, because those are answers to two different questions. Measured as a self-sustaining account, it is a chronic borrower with no ceiling, propped up by a 2008 debt forgiveness and steadily absorbing liabilities that bankrupt operators promised to cover and did not. Measured as a backstop for miners with an incurable occupational disease, it pays what it is supposed to pay, funded largely by the coal it taxes, in a period when the disease is spreading to younger workers and the rule meant to slow it is frozen in court.

What makes the tension unlikely to resolve is that the two curves point in opposite directions. Coal tonnage and employment fall, shrinking the tax base, while progressive massive fibrosis climbs in Central Appalachia, raising the claims. A fund designed to be financed by a declining industry, covering a disease that is not declining, is going to keep borrowing. The 2022 permanence of the higher tax rate slowed the bleeding without stopping it. Whether that counts as waste or as one of the cheaper promises the government keeps is, as usual with public money, a judgment you have mostly made before you reach the bottom line.

Fact-check notes and sources

Administration by the Department of Labor's Office of Workers' Compensation Programs under Part C of the Black Lung Benefits Act; payer-of-last-resort structure (operator pays first; the fund pays only when no operator can be assigned, the operator has ceased to exist, or fails to pay within 30 days): the Congressional Research Service report R45261. The Department of Labor's own program page was unreachable at the time of writing, so administration details are cited to the Congressional Research Service.
Coal excise tax at 1 dollar 10 cents per ton underground and 55 cents per ton surface, capped at 4.4 percent of sales price, on domestically used coal; the 2023 monthly benefit range of 737 dollars 90 cents to 1,475 dollars 80 cents; the roughly 4.6 billion dollar cumulative debt at the end of fiscal 2021 including about 2.2 billion borrowed that year; and the fiscal 2021 collections of about 189 million (underground) and 135 million (surface): the Congressional Research Service report R45261. The roughly 450-million-a-year figure for the late 2010s is approximate.
The scheduled reversion to 50 cents and 25 cents per ton at a 2 percent cap, an about 55 percent cut; borrowing from the Treasury in nearly every year since 1979 with no statutory ceiling; the about 6.5 billion dollar 2008 debt forgiveness under the Energy Improvement and Extension Act; and the simulation projecting debt above 15 billion dollars by 2050: the Government Accountability Office, GAO-18-351. The 15-billion figure is a modeled projection whose scenario assumed the 2019 rate cut that the Inflation Reduction Act later cancelled, so it overstates the current outlook and is flagged as an outdated worst case.
The roughly 865 million dollars in benefit liability shifted to the fund by 2014 to 2016 operator bankruptcies, concentrated in a few firms (Alpha Natural Resources at an estimated 494 million with only about 12 million in posted collateral), and the broader warning that self-insurers posted collateral far below their liabilities: the Government Accountability Office, GAO-20-21.
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 permanently extending the higher tax rates: the Congressional Research Service report R45261. The roughly 1.16 billion dollar, ten-year deficit-reduction estimate: attributed to the Joint Committee on Taxation but sourced here through Taxpayers for Common Sense, an advocacy group; treat the exact figure as secondhand pending a primary committee document.
The 235,550-miner mortality study and the more-than-eightfold respiratory-death odds for Central Appalachian miners born in 1940 or later: the peer-reviewed analysis with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, via PubMed Central. The 1,177 progressive massive fibrosis cases across 15 clinics with about 86 percent in Central Appalachia, including 70 miners under 50 and 79 with fewer than 15 years underground: the January 2024 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, via PubMed Central. The 416-case cluster described as the largest reported: the separate 2018 JAMA research letter. The under-50 and under-15-year figures belong to the 2024 study, not the 2018 cluster.
The 2024 silica rule (a 50-microgram exposure limit, a 25-microgram action level, effective June 17, 2024): the Mine Safety and Health Administration. The April 11, 2025 Eighth Circuit stay leaving the coal silica rule unenforced as of mid-2026: the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-aligned research organization; the litigation's status should be re-verified at any later reading.

This post is informational and journalistic, describing a public program and public records. It is not legal, financial, medical, or policy advice. Figures are drawn from government reports, peer-reviewed research, and public law, with approximate, projected, and secondhand figures noted as such; where advocacy or think-tank sources are cited, they are labeled.

The Black Lung Trust Fund: A Coal Tax That Never Quite Covers the Miners It Pays