Trump Signs 'Breathlessly Stupid' Orders to Boost Polluting Coal Industry

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed multiple executive orders that aim to boost the coal industry, a move that critics denounced as "reckless" and "breathlessly stupid" even before the orders were officially unveiled.

Among the orders signed Tuesday, Trump directed U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum to acknowledge the end of a moratorium that had halted new coal leasing on public lands and to prioritize coal leasing and related activities, and also directed U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright to determine whether coal used in steel production can be considered a "critical material." According to Reuters, permitting this classification would pave the way for the administration to use emergency powers to boost production.

Trump also paused environmental regulation imposed under former President Joe Biden that applied to certain coal-burning power plants thereby purportedly "safeguarding the nation's energy grid and security, and saving coal plants from closure."

Additionally, one order directed the "Energy Department to develop a process for using emergency powers to prevent unprofitable coal plants from shutting down in order to avert power outages," according to The New York Times, a move that may face court challenges.

Jill Tauber, vice president of litigation for climate and energy at the green group Earthjustice, said Tuesday: "Coal is a disaster for our health, our wallets, and the planet. President Trump's efforts to rescue failing coal plants and open our lands to destructive mining is another in a series of actions that sacrifices American lives for fossil fuel industry profit. Instead of investing in pollution, we should be leading the way on clean energy."

"The only way to prop up coal is to deny reality, and the reality is that people no longer rely on coal because it's expensive, unreliable, and devastating to public health," said Julie McNamara, an associate policy director with the Union of Concerned Scientists, in a statement on Tuesday.

"Instead of supporting the economy-boosting clean energy transition that maintains widespread public support across the country, President Trump is relentlessly attempting to tear it down."

Trump has vowed to support what he calls "beautiful, clean coal," though the industry has been in decline for years. Coal-fired electricity generation has dropped from 38.5% of the country's generation mix in 2014 to 14.7% in 2024, according to a 2025 factbook from BloombergNEF and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. Coal is also the dirtiest fossil fuel.

The executive order builds on previous moves by the Trump administration. Last month, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced an effort to rollback a host of EPA regulations, including some that will impact coal producers.

On the first day of his second term, Trump declared a "national energy emergency" intended to help deliver on his campaign pledge to "drill, baby, drill." That emergency defined energy to include oil, natural gas, uranium, coal, biofuels, geothermal, flowing water, and critical minerals—but it omitted solar and wind.

Reporting earlier Tuesday indicated that Trump would sign an order invoking presidential emergency authority to force coal-fired power plants to stay open.

In a statement released in response to that reporting, Tyson Slocum, energy program director at the watchdog Public Citizen, said: "Reviving or extending coal to power data centers would force working families to subsidize polluting coal on behalf of Big Tech billionaires and despoil our nation's public lands."

"Coal kills. In the last two decades, nearly half a million Americans have died from exposure to coal pollution," said Ben Jealous, executive director of the environmental organization the Sierra Club in a statement on earlier on Tuesday, also in response to reports that executive orders were forthcoming.

In another move that generated swift criticism, Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday directing U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate state policies that are aimed at confronting the climate crisis and to take action to stop enforcement of those laws.

According to The Washington Post, it is unclear what authority would the agency would rely on. The order specifically calls out state climate superfund laws in New York and Vermont.

"President Trump's executive order weaponizes the Justice Department against states that dare to make polluters pay for climate damage," said Cassidy DiPaola, communications director of Make Polluters Pay—a campaign to build public support for climate litigation—in a statement on Wednesday.

"This is the fossil fuel industry's desperation on full display—they're so afraid of facing evidence of their deception in court that they've convinced the president to launch a federal assault on state sovereignty. We are watching corporate capture of government unfold in real time," DiPaola added.