The Secretary of Labor, through MSHA, may award grants to State, Tribal, and Territorial Governments (including the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands) to assist them in developing and enforcing State mining laws and regulations, improve State workers’ compensation and mining occupational disease laws and programs, and improve safety and health conditions in the nation’s mines through Federal-State coordination and cooperation.
MSHA encourages State training programs to prioritize health and safety training for new and small mining operations. MSHA also encourages grant recipients to address, in their training and education programs, contract employee safety and occupational health hazards, powered haulage and mobile equipment safety, mine emergency preparedness, mine rescue, electrical safety, training for new and inexperienced miners, managers and supervisors performing mining tasks, and falls from heights.
Applicants are encouraged, where applicable, to support the President’s goals of increasing the discovery and mining of critical minerals, by developing or creating training and compliance assistance programs to assist operators extracting critical minerals, including coal.
The President has declared a National Energy Emergency to discover and mine critical minerals. Executive Order (EO) 14156, Declaring a National Energy Emergency (2025). To increase the response, on March 20, 2025, the President also directed the appropriate federal agencies to take immediate actions to increase mineral production. EO 14241, Immediate Measures To Increase American Mineral Production (2025). In response, the mining industry may experience increases in the reopening of idled mines and developing new mines in the search for these critical minerals. With these increases, new and innovative programs to train new miners or retrain miners for extracting specific critical minerals are vital. The Department of Energy (DOE) published a list of critical materials for energy, Federal Register :: Notice of Final Determination on 2023 DOE Critical Materials List. On May 29, 2025, DOE added metallurgical coal used for steelmaking to the Critical Material list, 90 Federal Register 22711 (2025). The Department of Interior, U.S. Geological Survey, in consultation with other federal agencies published the list of critical minerals, What are Critical Minerals? | U.S. Geological Survey (usgs.gov). Moreover, on April 8, 2025, the President amended EO 14241 and declared coal a critical mineral. EO 14261, Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry and Amending EO 14241 (2025). On January 12, 2026, the President extended the National Energy Emergency declared in EO 14156 for another year. Notice of January 12, 2026, Continuation of the National Emergency with Respect to Energy, 91 Federal Register 1667-68 (2026).