Hearing on Mine Safety Presents Opportunity to Curb Big Government Regulatory Abuse

Washington, DC— Today, the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections of the U.S. House of Representatives Education and the Workforce Committee will hold a hearing entitled, “Examining Recent Regulatory and Enforcement Actions of the Mine Safety and Health Administration.”  Testifying at the hearing will be the Assistant Secretary of Labor for Mine Safety and Health, Joseph Main. 

The hearing is the first real opportunity in this Congress for Members to provide oversight and begin to take steps that will curb regulatory abuses that the Obama Administration’s Department of Labor and Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) have pursued.  Specifically, a variety of proposed rules that MSHA seeks to saddle the mining industry with threatens thousands of jobs, and thus the fragile economies of many states, without the promise of measured improvements in mine safety.

The pattern is similar to rogue actions at the Obama Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to enact caps on green house gas emissions, essentially ushering-in backdoor “cap and trade” policy, completely on its own and outside Congressional authority.   

FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe commented, “President Obama can’t get Congress to approve his draconian environmental agenda, so he is using agencies at his disposal to pass it by regulatory fiat.  While the restrictions on America’s energy sector that the MSHA and EPA seek to impose may please certain constituencies on the liberal left, they in fact are putting thousands of jobs at risk and threaten to drive energy prices through the roof without any real benefit to the environment or worker safety.”

FreedomWorks is working to raise awareness for the abuses at MSHA and EPA amongst conservative grassroots networks in key states including Indiana, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.  In these and other states, activists will be reaching out to targeted lawmakers in support of efforts to curb the big government regulatory abuse that the Obama Administration seems intent upon.