Obama Administration Pressured Contractors to Change Coal Mining Job Loss Numbers

New Obama Administration EPA regulations will force 32 coal plants to close their doors putting hundreds of Americans out of work.

The latest move by the EPA will force aggressive new regulations on 26 states. The new rules will kill thousands of jobs, cost billions of dollars and increase electricity rates for every family.

New EPA rules will force Western coal-fired power plants to install haze-reducing pollution-control equipment at a cost of $1.6 billion a year. Pictured is the Dave Johnston Power Plant in Glenrock, Wyoming. (IBD)

Worse yet, the Obama Administration is now trying to hide this from the American public. Officials have pressured contractors to fudge their numbers on job losses — And it was caught on tape.
The Free Beacon reported:

Obama administration officials may have pressured government contractors to change job loss estimates associated with coal regulations, audio recordings reveal.

The tapes show that unnamed officials with the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSM) asked government contractors to change their calculations of job losses associated with the Stream Protection Rule.

A preliminary draft of an environmental impact statement estimated that up to 7,000 coalminers could lose their jobs under the administration’s “preferred” regulation. After a leaked copy of the report went public, officials asked the contractors to compare job estimates to a model in which another regulation was enforced, rather than the real world numbers.

“It’s not the real world, this is rulemaking,” an OSM official tells a skeptical contractor on the recording.

“If we’re to assume [the 2008 rule] is enforced in the coal-producing states, this is a very small [impact],” the contractor replies. “But that, as you said, is not the real world, that’s pretending … I thought we were looking at what’s going to change in Kentucky, what’s going to change in Pennsylvania, what’s going to change in Ohio, what’s going to change in Wyoming.”

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Jim Hoft is the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016. In 2023, The Gateway Pundit received the Most Trusted Print Media Award at the American Liberty Awards.

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