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Climate
Trump Energy Department Blasted for 'Unhinged' Pro-Coal X Post
The audio of television host Wendy Williams saying that, while speaking about rapper Lil' Kim, often has been repurposed by social media users. However, the DOE's use of the phrase to glamorize coal sparked swift and intense backlash.
Much of the response came on X, with critics calling the post "some weird shit" and "literally unhinged."
"POV: It's 1885 and you work for the Department of Energy," wrote Jonas Nahm, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies who served on the Council of Economic Advisers under former President Joe Biden.
Democratic members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources replied: "She is inefficient. She is dirtier air. She is higher energy bills."
Multiple X users pointed to coal workers' pneumoconiosis, a condition that occurs when coal dust is inhaled—including California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom's press office, which wrote, "She's black lung."
The national Democratic Party account said, "In April, Trump cut a program that gave free black lung screenings to coal miners."
After U.S. District Judge Irene Berger—appointed by former President Barack Obama in West Virginia—issued a preliminary injunction against firings at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health's Coal Workers Health Surveillance Program, nearly 200 workers who screen coal miners for black lung were reinstated.
Since returning to office in January, Trump has taken various steps to attack the climate and benefit the fossil fuel industry, such as picking fracking CEO Chris Wright to lead DOE, signing coal-friendly executive orders in April and issuing proclamations that provide what the White House called "regulatory relief" for a range of facilities, including coal plants, earlier this month.
"Hard to fathom this coming from the DOE if there were any sane, reasonable, rational, or thoughtful government in control," Graham Lau, an astrobiologist and science communicator, said of the department's pro-coal X post. "The Trump administration wants us all choking, sick, misinformed, and working ourselves to death so that a few from the luxury class can be ever more wealthy. Coal is not the moment. Coal is not going to meet U.S. energy needs. Coal is not the way forward."
Climate and clean energy investor Ramez Naam wrote, "She is the past," and shared the graph below, which features data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration about coal consumption since 1960.
Ryan Katz-Rosene, an associate professor at Canada's University of Ottawa studying contentious climate debates, quipped, "Just the U.S. Department of Energy shilling for one of the most destructive industries known to humanity cool cool cool."
In the early 1900s, coal mining in the United States often killed more than 2,000 workers per year, according to the U.S. Department of Labor's Mine Safety and Health Administration. Over the past decade, it has killed roughly 10 people annually.
It's not just coal miners who are at risk. Research published in the journal Science two years ago found that "from 1999-2020, approximately 460,000 deaths in the Medicare population were attributable to coal electricity-generating emissions."
Genevieve Guenther, founding director of End Climate Silence, said Thursday: "The fact that they're coding coal as female is right in line with the fact that Trump is a rapist. They take everything they want, they think the planet is like a woman they can just exploit, and fuck whomever they hurt in the process."
Several women have accused the president of sexual assault, including journalist E. Jean Carroll, who said he raped her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the 1990s. Although Trump has denied the allegations, in 2023, a New York City jury found him civilly liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll.
DOGE Wasted Tens of Billions While Chainsawing the Government in the Name of 'Efficiency': Senate Report
Musk is already known to have wildly exaggerated the amount that his initiative was saving the public. Government spending in 2025 has been higher than previous years despite Musk's dramatic cuts.
Meanwhile, some analyses after the fact have estimated that the initiatives might actually cost taxpayers money in the long run by slashing funds for tax collection and other forms of spending that increase economic activity.
(Graphic: The Brookings Institute, Tracking Federal Expenditures in Real Time)
The staff report released by the office of Sen. Richard Blumenthal (Conn.)—the ranking Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI)—only focuses on waste by DOGE that can be quantified in the here-and-now. It finds that in just six months of operation, DOGE wasted more than $21 billion.
This comes at "the very same time," Blumenthal said, that "the Trump administration is cutting healthcare, nutrition assistance, and emergency services in the name of 'efficiency' and 'savings,'" via the recently passed "One Big Beautiful Bill Act," which itself is projected to add $3.4 trillion to the federal deficit over the next 10 years.
Blumenthal said his investigation shows that "DOGE was clearly never about efficiency or saving the American taxpayer money."
By far the largest source of waste it identifies comes from Musk's mass layoffs of nearly 200,000 federal employees. In January, he announced the "Deferred Resignation Program" (DRP), which he described as the "fork in the road."
In order to quickly thin the ranks of government, Musk offered federal employees the opportunity to retire early with their benefits and pay through September 30—a deal that around 200,000 took. The Senate report calculates that the government has spent $14.8 billion to pay these employees not to work for eight months.
Roughly another 100,000 employees were also involuntarily fired from their jobs, and had to receive severance pay that amounts to an additional $6.1 billion.
DOGE's funding freezes also resulted in massive waste: freezes on loans for energy utility projects meant that the government lost out on $263 million worth of interest payments and fees. Meanwhile, $110 million worth of food and medicine was left to spoil in warehouses due to the shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
While many of these costs are temporary, other studies looking at the long-term effects of DOGE have found that many of the programs it cut also brought in vastly more revenue than they cost to run.
For instance, according to Yale's Budget Lab, DOGE's firing of thousands of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employees could cost $395 billion in lost revenues over the next decade, and potentially as much as $2.4 trillion if the decrease in enforcement leads to more tax-dodging.
Musk also virtually eliminated the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which has returned over $26 billion to American consumers since its creation in 2011 while costing a fraction of that amount to run.
Cuts to public health research by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) may also lead to significant costs in the long run. An April study by the University of Maryland found that it could cost the U.S. 68,000 jobs and $16 billion in revenue annually.
Even the $125 million cut from USAID—which the White House has claimed results in "no return for the American people"—is projected to result in nearly $29 billion lost each year by U.S.-based organizations.
Meanwhile, the human costs to these cuts, especially to USAID, have been catastrophic, with hundreds of thousands already dead from preventable diseases in a matter of months, and potentially as many as 14 million by the end of the decade.
As economics writer Maia Mindel summarized in a post on X: "Okay, yeah, so DOGE was illegal and didn't cancel any big-ticket items and also it didn't increase government efficiency and it lied about all its accomplishments and also none of its staff were even remotely qualified. But at least a million Africans died. Take that, libs."
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