"The Biden administration is preparing to dole out mine cleanup money to states and tribes under the recent bipartisan infrastructure law, but the president hasn’t appointed anyone to formally oversee the program.
Environmentalists provided a petition to the White House today urging President Joe Biden to nominate a director of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, an agency of the Interior Department tasked with overseeing the reclamation and restoration of former coal mine sites.
OSMRE is in charge of providing states and Navajo tribes tranches of an $11.3 billion abandoned mine cleanup funding program created under the infrastructure law, a massive windfall to spend on reducing the backlog of mine lands deserted before passage of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act in 1977."
