Sponsors (6)
The bill strengthens and clarifies benefits, eligibility, and claims access for miners and survivors—raising benefits, improving diagnostic and legal support, and protecting the Trust Fund—while increasing federal and administrative costs, shifting financial burdens onto operators, and creating some legal and implementation trade-offs that could affect employers, agencies, and certain claimants.
Totally disabled coal miners and survivors will receive higher, inflation-protected benefits (including a set payment for 2026) so benefit payments keep pace with cost-of-living increases.
Stronger oversight of employer self-insurance and authority to recover certain claim-related costs will better protect the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund and taxpayers from shifted liabilities when companies default.
Claimants will face lower out-of-pocket costs for pursuing benefits because the fund will cover medical-evidence expenses and a new program will pay eligible claimants' attorneys' fees and unreimbursed medical costs.
Indexing benefits and raising payment rates will increase long‑term federal outlays from the Black Lung program or Trust Fund, potentially requiring higher taxes, additional appropriations, or reallocations of federal funds.
Stronger self-insurance requirements and allowing recovery of medical-evidence costs from operators will raise compliance and cash-flow burdens on coal companies—especially smaller operators—which could be passed to workers or affect employment and operator viability.
The many new and expanded administrative duties (physician lists, authorizations, rulemakings, forms/IT updates) and transitional reorganizations will create implementation costs and potential confusion for claimants, agencies, and partners.
Based on analysis of 9 sections of legislative text.
Creates an irrebuttable presumption for complicated pneumoconiosis, expands pulmonary evaluations and CT authority, tightens program administration, and modernizes statute language.
Official title: To ensure that claims for benefits under the Black Lung Benefits Act are processed in a fair and timely manner, to better protect miners from pneumoconiosis (commonly known as "black lung disease"), and for other purposes.
Introduced December 16, 2025 by Morgan McGarvey · Last progress December 16, 2025
Makes substantial changes to the federal black lung benefits system to expand and simplify access to benefits for coal miners and survivors. It creates an irrebuttable presumption that certain diagnostic findings of complicated pneumoconiosis (progressive massive fibrosis) mean total disability or death from the disease, requires expanded pulmonary evaluations and diagnostic CT authority, strengthens employer responsibility for benefit costs, updates benefit indexing and program language, and reorganizes program administration under a newly established Office of Workers' Compensation Programs in the Department of Labor. Also modernizes and clarifies statutory language (gender-neutral terms, updated tax-code cross-references), enumerates benefit categories more clearly, and transfers existing functions and personnel into the new Office headed by a Presidential appointee with Senate confirmation. The bill is focused on improving claimant access, tightening diagnostic standards for automatic benefits, and improving program administration and fiscal accountability.