Punching In: Federal Mine Safety Field Offices on DOGE’s Radar

Monday morning musings for workplace watchers.

Mine Safety Offices Let Go| Gold Card Promises Don’t Add Up

Tre’Vaughn Howard: Federal mine safety workers recently saw their offices go back on the market and haven’t been told where they might work in the future.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency touted the termination of leases for at least 29 US Mine Safety and Health Administration field offices last week.

It’s the latest move from the Trump administration’s push to downsize the federal government’s footprint. However, MSHA needs to maintain some buildings across the US because the geology of coal mines varies by region, said Philip Ingram, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees’ Birmingham, Ala., office.

Ingram says there hasn’t been guidance on what will happen next, whether they will move to another federal building in downtown Birmingham, or whether staff there will simply lose their jobs.

“The biggest issue right now is that nobody knows,” Ingram said. “We don’t get any information from management.”

The annual lease for the Birmingham office costs $474,000, according to DOGE. Its termination will result in nearly $1.7 million in savings to the government, according to the department’s wall of savings receipts.

MSHA declined to comment on how the closures will impact the agency’s enforcement and instead referred inquiries about federally managed buildings to the General Services Administration.

GSA says the termination of many short term leases is apart of its space consolidation plan in reviewing the federal government’s footprint and building utilization.

“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,” a GSA spokesperson said. “In many cases this will allow us to increase space utilization and obtain improved terms.”

The United Mine Workers of America say the office closures could impact worker safety.

“It is still not clear to us if all of these offices will actually close, or if the workers there are simply being shifted to other locations,” said Cecil E. Roberts, president of UMWA.

Employees at the Department of Labor who were terminated as part of the Trump administration’s widespread layoffs of probationary workers were reinstated on Friday, according to a union email obtained by Bloomberg Law.

DOL had laid off employees across at least six departments, including MSHA, according to Labor Department employees who had communicated with their fired colleagues.

MSHA inspectors hadn’t been spared in the administration’s push to downsize. Although the Trump administration’s orders to reduce the federal workforce broadly listed public safety as an exemption, there hadn’t been explicit exceptions for safety inspectors at the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration and MSHA.

MSHA spreads its employees across 15 district offices with at least 80 field offices throughout the country, according to the agency’s website.

Worker safety advocates fear the lack of explicit exemptions for safety inspectors could lead to history repeating itself. The district field office where the Upper Big Branch mine disaster occurred experienced a turnover of supervisors that brought in untrained acting personnel, all of which contributed to the inadequate review of inspection reports, according to an internal review by MSHA.

President Donald Trump during a joint session of Congress in the House Chamber on March 4, 2025.

Photographer: Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg

Andrew Kreighbaum: The president’s immigration math isn’t adding up.

Trump spent much of his recent address to Congress underscoring what he claimed was the “most sweeping” immigration crackdown in the country’s history. The only expansion to legal immigration he mentioned—his $5 million gold card proposal—will create jobs and balance the federal budget, he said.

Trump’s even previously suggested that the US could sell millions of the visas, generating enough may to pay down the deficit with trillions of dollars left over.

Setting aside whether the ultra-rich pool of potential visa holders outside the US comes even close to matching that number, the annual number of green cards available under statutory quotas is far more modest than the audience tuning into the March 4 speech might have realized. Just 226,000 family-based green cards are distributed each year along with 140,000 employment-based green cards. (The latter category is larger in some years if there are any leftover family-based visas.)

“The math doesn’t make sense,” said Tahmina Watson, an attorney at Watson Immigration Law.

Part of Watson’s practice includes the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program, a visa pathway Congress authorized more than three decades ago. Just over 7% of employment-based green cards each year can be claimed by EB-5 investors.

For many workers from India stuck in backlogs for decades to get traditional green cards, putting together the funding for an investor visa is their best option for permanent residency, she said. Supporters of EB-5 have argued that it can exist alongside a new visa option for immigrant investors. Still, even though the president can’t alter visa programs with the stroke of a pen, Watson said the anxiety among would-be EB-5 applicants now is “palpable.”

Despite the lack of detail on the president’s “gold card” proposal, Joey Barnett, a partner at Wolfsdorf Rosenthal LLP who specializes in EB-5 visas, said he’s heard some interest from immigrants in part because of the government’s high scrutiny of the source of EB-5 funds.

Others immigrant investors are even more anxious to file visa petitions because of fears the program could be affected, he said.

“It’s created a lot of uncertainty,” Barnett said. “What I’m telling folks is this an immigration proposal. You need Congress to pass it.”

We’re punching out. Daily Labor Report subscribers please check in for updates during the week, and feel free to reach out to us.