Amid last month’s headlines about departures from the Department of Energy, the exits of Brian Anderson and Briggs White received little attention. Yet their departures foreshadowed something larger: the quiet dismantling of federal support for the economic diversification of fossil fuel–dependent regions of the country.
Anderson and White led the Energy Communities Interagency Working Group, created by a 2021 executive order to coordinate the federal strategy to support coal–reliant regions through a global transition to cleaner energy. This Biden-era strategy recognized that communities where employment opportunities and tax bases depend on fossil fuels face serious risks — local levels of prosperity generally rise and fall with production levels — and they require support to build new engines of economic activity.
In contrast, President Donald Trump’s prescription for fossil fuel communities is to produce more fossil fuels. In addition to cutting clean energy incentives, the budget reconciliation bill passed by the House of Representatives last week seeks to directly support fossil fuel production by accelerating leasing and permitting, lowering royalty rates, and repealing the methane emissions fee.
History suggests that Trump’s ability to help fossil fuel communities by boosting production is limited — similar efforts in Trump’s first term failed to significantly alter the trajectory of coal, oil, or natural gas output. But the funding cuts codified in the current reconciliation bill could do real harm by dismantling federal programs that support economic diversification. Communities that depend on fossil fuel industries will be vulnerable to severe economic shocks when demand for their products eventually declines.
The canary in the coal mine closures
The need to help transitioning regions isn’t new, but federal support for struggling communities has long been stigmatized. In 1980, a federal commission urged policymakers to focus less on struggling places and more on helping individuals move to where opportunity existed. President Ronald Reagan used this report to justify cutting federal economic development programs, including proposing to eliminate the Appalachian Regional Commission. Congress did not fully abolish the ARC, but its budget was slashed nearly in half, leading to staff reductions and the phasing out of the programs designed to bolster the economy of the persistently struggling region.
In the decades that followed, manufacturing towns were largely left to fend for themselves as globalization accelerated. A study by MIT’s David Autor and colleagues showed that 86% of the manufacturing job losses from trade shocks in the early 2000s were still reflected in depressed local employment rates in 2019. Most workers didn’t find new jobs or migrate.
If the loss of dominant employers causes “miniature Great Depressions” in local economies across the country, then a rapid decline in fossil fuels spells acute risks for communities that depend on these industries for jobs and public revenues. We see this happening already in coal-reliant regions. In Boone County, West Virginia, coal production declined by over 80% from 2009 to 2019, causing the county’s gross domestic product to decline by over 60%. Three of Boone’s 10 elementary schools were forced to close.
President Trump entered office in 2017 pledging to “bring the coal industry back 100%” with a deregulatory strategy much like the one his administration is pursuing today. But during his first four-year term, domestic coal mining employment fell by 26%, and coal-fired power plant capacity declined by 13%, demonstrating the futility of doubling down on an economic model when macroeconomic forces are working against it.
The beginnings of a plan
These outcomes are not inevitable. Four-hundred miles west of Boone, the far more economically diverse Hopkins County, Kentucky was able to weather its own 75% decline in coal production without a comparable economic crash. In Germany’s Ruhr Valley, the German government paired a coal phase-out with over €100 billion in long-term investments — new universities, industrial incentives, environmental restoration, and worker retraining. While some towns in the region are still struggling, the Ruhr Valley’s shift from a coal powerhouse to a more diverse, knowledge-based economy shows that fossil fuel regions can reinvent themselves.
Recent policies in the U.S. began to take similar steps. As part of a broader federal place-based economic strategy, the American Rescue Plan dedicated hundreds of millions to rebuilding coal communities in 2021. Then came the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which included billions for cleaning up abandoned mines and orphaned oil wells and funding large-scale demonstration projects for carbon capture and hydrogen production. The Inflation Reduction Act added bonus tax credits and carve-outs to grant programs that target fossil fuel communities.
The now-defunct Energy Communities Interagency Working Group helped knit these efforts together. It served as a clearinghouse for funding opportunities, published “how-to” guides for local leaders, and deployed “rapid response teams” to coal regions.
To be sure, the strategy had limitations. Most programs focused narrowly on coal regions and clean energy solutions, and the IWG had minimal funding for its coordinating efforts. But the strategy shift marked real progress and has generated promising early signs, such as an iron air battery manufacturing facility at an old steel mill in Weirton, West Virginia, carbon capture projects in North Dakota and Texas, and “hydrogen hubs” in the Gulf Coast and Appalachia.
Reversing course
Under the Trump administration, that progress is at risk. Government efficiency initiatives have already led to the gutting of federal programs best positioned to support investments in fossil fuel communities, including the Loan Programs Office, the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations. and the Federal Thriving Communities Network Initiative.
Trump’s budget proposes severe cuts to the federal support for regional economic development, including eliminating the Economic Development Administration, the federal agency dedicated to helping communities strengthen their local economies.
The reconciliation bill passed by the House of Representatives is a step toward codifying those cuts — with reductions in non-defense discretionary annual spending of $163 billion (over 20%) — and it would also eliminate most of the tax credits and grant programs that encourage investments in energy infrastructure projects in fossil fuel communities. Certain policies that are especially well suited for fossil fuel communities, like incentives for enhanced geothermal energy, may be phased out before ever really getting off the ground.
Rolling back support for fossil fuel communities will curb these regions’ opportunities to build new engines of economic prosperity. Without credible, lasting commitments from the federal government, many fossil fuel communities have little choice but to stick to the economic model they know best, despite their vulnerability to the eventual end of fossil fuels.
