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Black lung is back in coal country, and silica dust is a big reason why. As the thick coal seams run out, miners cut through more rock to reach thin ones, and the CDC's mine-safety researchers told Congress that the silica in that rock dust contributes to the disease.
The federal Mine Safety and Health Administration finally set a tighter limit on how much silica dust miners can breathe. Virginia Foxx, who then chaired the House committee that oversees the Labor Department, attacked it. She called it the Labor Department's "wrongheaded recklessness" and said its requirements were "completely unworkable in the field." While it was still a proposal, she leaned on an industry trade group's estimate that sampling alone would cost metal and nonmetal mines over $162 million.
At the same time, she owned a piece of a coal company. That's what a Daily Caller review of her financial disclosures laid out on October 7, 2026 — along with a second stake, in the company that took on the legal liabilities of one of the opioid makers North Carolina sued.
The coal stock
Foxx's 2023 financial disclosure reported between $50,001 and $100,000 in Alliance Resource Partners, a coal producer, plus up to $15,000 in payouts from it. She kept buying: her 2024 disclosure put the stake at between $100,001 and $250,000 at the end of the year the rule was finalized. By the Daily Caller's count on Capitol Trades, she has made 20 trades in the company totaling roughly $209,000 — 17 of them purchases.
Here's that company's safety record:
- Alliance and its subsidiaries have racked up more than 900 workplace safety penalties since 2000, according to Good Jobs First's Violation Tracker.
- At one Alliance mine alone — Mountain View in West Virginia — federal mine-safety regulators have issued 827 penalties since 2019, according to the Charleston Gazette-Mail.
Alliance Coal's PAC has also given to Foxx's campaign — $7,500 since 2018, including $2,500 on April 2, 2024, two weeks before she attacked the final rule.
So a member of Congress who owned coal stock and took coal PAC money used her committee gavel to attack a safety rule aimed at the industry she was invested in.
Then House Republicans went after enforcement
It didn't stop at a press release. In June 2024, the Associated Press reported, a House spending subcommittee approved a budget provision barring the Labor Department from using funding to enforce the silica rule. The head of the United Mine Workers of America called it "a direct attack on the health and safety of coal miners."
A rule nobody is allowed to enforce protects nobody. The people who pay for that are the miners breathing the dust.
This is the same fight playing out across coal country. Black lung has hit a near-50-year high in Appalachia's coalfields, including Morgan Griffith's district — and he answered by saying he'd "look forward to studying various proposals."
The opioid stock
Foxx's annual disclosures show she held between $15,001 and $50,000 in AbbVie, the drug company, at the end of 2024 and again at the end of 2025.
In 2020, AbbVie bought Allergan for $63 billion and took on its opioid liabilities. Two years later, Allergan agreed to a nationwide settlement that North Carolina helped negotiate, over claims it fueled the opioid crisis by "overstating the benefits of opioids, downplaying the risk of addiction, and failing to maintain effective controls to prevent opioid diversion." Allergan agreed to pay up to $2.37 billion to participating states and local governments, and to stop selling opioids for 10 years.
The opioid crisis hit children in Foxx's state especially hard. The Asheville Citizen-Times reported in 2018 that 16 Western North Carolina counties had seen foster care numbers climb steadily, that Buncombe County's foster care cases had almost doubled in seven years, and that 90 percent of foster children in McDowell County tested positive for two or more drugs. Buncombe's recently retired social services director called them a "lost generation."
Foxx has voted for some broad opioid bills. But the Daily Caller found no bill she has sponsored aimed specifically at the companies that made and pushed the pills. Over her career, the Daily Caller reports, citing OpenSecrets, she has taken more than $93,000 from the drug and health-products industry.
Her office did not comment in time for the Daily Caller's story.
She wrote herself a loophole, too
This is not the first time Foxx's portfolio has collided with her job. As chair of the House Rules Committee this year, she wrote the rule that welded voter ID onto the congressional stock-trading ban — and then voted for a ban that let her keep her coal stock.
What the filings show
Virginia Foxx held up to $250,000 in Alliance Resource Partners, a coal company with more than 900 safety penalties since 2000, while she attacked the federal rule limiting the silica dust that causes black lung and House Republicans moved to block its enforcement. She has also held up to $50,000 in AbbVie, which took on the opioid liabilities of Allergan — a company that agreed to pay up to $2.37 billion nationwide, in a settlement North Carolina helped lead, over claims it fueled the opioid crisis.
