On November 9, 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed S. 717 into law as Public Law 95-164, amending the Coal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1969. The law took effect 120 days later and placed the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) under the Department of Labor, transferring oversight from the Interior Department. The restructuring was designed to strengthen federal enforcement of workplace protections in an industry where workers faced serious occupational hazards.
The legislation was drafted largely by Mike Goldberg of the Senate Labor Committee staff and James H. Rathlesberger, a special assistant in the Interior Department who had overseen MSHA before the transfer. The United Mine Workers and the Carter administration supported the bill, while the mining industry opposed it, creating a direct conflict between worker-safety regulation and the industry’s resistance to expanded federal oversight. The supplied source does not identify a particular mine disaster, enforcement case, executive, penalty, or financial loss, so the lasting consequence documented here is institutional: federal mine-safety administration was consolidated under Labor through a statute that remains part of Title 30 of the United States Code.
