Coal Discovers The Government’s Actual Customer-Service Email

Nearly half of America’s operating, grid-connected coal plants have received help from the Trump administration, according to a new Environmental Defense Fund analysis reported by the Guardian. EDF counted 90 of 184 plants getting support through funding, pollution exemptions or requirements to remain open beyond planned retirement dates.

So there is a functioning help desk in the federal government. It just helps if the customer is a power station.

Most people contact an agency and spend forty minutes proving they are not a robot. A coal company can apparently begin with the much more promising question of whether the administrator has fifteen minutes to discuss the rule it dislikes.

That is what NorthWestern Energy’s chief executive Brian Bird requested in a March 2025 email to the Department of Energy about a chat with EPA administrator Lee Zeldin. Bird said meeting the updated pollution standard would require a $500 million investment. NorthWestern received an exemption. The administration then repealed the updated standards in February 2026.

The usual customer-service experience ends with someone closing your ticket. This one ended with the government removing the thing the ticket was about.

Have you tried turning the regulation off and leaving it off?

EDF says 24 coal plants received $950 million in taxpayer funding and 70 got exemptions from toxic-pollution limits. Those groups overlap. The administration has not invented four additional plants just by adding columns, although at this point I would want to see what happens when someone emails the request.

NorthWestern says its Colstrip plant captures 99.6 percent of filterable particulate emissions and that the updated standard would have required 99.8 percent by 2028 at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. It says its sulfur-dioxide technology is state of the art and its mercury controls meet current requirements. EDF argues that requiring upgrades would have significantly reduced pollution.

The company has its engineering and cost argument; EDF has its pollution argument. I have a smaller request. Could I borrow the customer-service package? I promise not to touch the turbines.

Could my next objection to an expensive requirement receive that kind of handling? Could somebody offer to remove the requirement altogether rather than send me a link to the requirement? Is there a premium support tier where the hold music stops and the rule starts packing its desk?

The White House says its policies protect reliable, affordable power. It claims to have backed and saved more than 100 coal plants this term—a broader claim than EDF’s count—and says it prevented more than 17 gigawatts of retirements.

Retirement is apparently for people who have not been adequately described as strategically important. These plants can reach the end of their planned careers and find the government waiting with a retention bonus and a fresh excuse to miss their own farewell lunch.

And then there is NorthWestern’s description of Colstrip: a “dependable bridge to a cleaner energy future.” The company says it supplies reliable power until equivalent carbon-free resources become commercially available.

The company is describing why it thinks the plant must stay available. What interests me is that the old equipment gets a personal advocate, an exemption and a future-facing nickname. When my old equipment stops meeting requirements, nobody calls it a dependable bridge to a newer dishwasher. They tell me the warranty expired.

But look at the full service. Funding. Exemptions. Intervention to keep plants open. The government is not merely helping the customer with a problem; it is trying to make sure the customer never has to stop being the customer.

There must be a satisfaction survey at the end of this. There is always a satisfaction survey. Did we resolve your concern? Did the administrator understand your needs? Would you recommend the federal government to another power station?

And now imagine the survey reaching somebody who lives near the plant. Finally. A chance to explain what they think of the service. They start typing about the pollution, the exemptions, what they would like the government to do next—

No, no. Wrong respondent. The customer is the thing with the goddamn smokestack.

The people breathing are going to have to stop filling out the coal plant’s survey.