Trump invokes Defense Production Act to direct ~$700M to the coal industry

On June 4, 2026, the Trump administration moved to direct roughly $700 million in federal support to the U.S. coal industry, invoking the Defense Production Act (DPA) — a 1950 statute that grants the president emergency authority over industries deemed vital to national defense. According to a White House official who detailed the plan ahead of an afternoon Oval Office event the administration billed "Beautiful, Clean Coal," the package provides about $425 million in DPA funds to upgrade 13 existing coal-fired power plants across 10 states (West Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Indiana, Tennessee, Arkansas, Arizona, Oklahoma, North Dakota, and Wisconsin), roughly $185 million in Department of Energy grants to build two new coal plants in Alaska and West Virginia and to restart a plant in Maryland, and $75 million in DPA funds toward the long-proposed West Gateway coal export terminal in Oakland, California. The new Alaska and West Virginia plants would be the first new coal plants built in the United States since 2013.

The action builds on a Presidential Determination issued April 20, 2026 under Section 303 of the DPA, which declared coal supply chains and baseload power generation capacity "essential to national defense." The administration's stated justification is not a conventional defense emergency but rising electricity demand from artificial intelligence development and data centers, alongside a broader push to reverse decades of decline in coal — which generated more than half of U.S. electricity in 2000 but under one-fifth today.

Using a national-defense statute to channel roughly $700 million toward a specific industry whose stated rationale is commercial energy demand raises executive-overreach and appropriations concerns: directing substantive industrial spending through emergency DPA authority routes around Congress's constitutional power of the purse. The April 20 determination supplies the legal hook; whether the asserted defense rationale is genuine or pretextual is the open question. The initiative is one piece of the administration's wider fossil-fuel expansion agenda, which has included emergency orders keeping coal plants running past retirement and expanded coal leasing on federal lands.