Rep. Lateefah Simon: GAO must investigate Trump’s abuse of DPA to bail out coal

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In late July, Congresswoman Lateefah Simon joined California Senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, as well as Congressmen Jared Huffman, John Garamendi, and Ro Khanna to demand the Government Accountability Office (GAO) “investigate the Trump Administration’s use of emergency national defense authorities and taxpayer funds to subsidize commercial coal infrastructure, including the proposed coal export terminal in West Oakland.”

President Trump announced his $700M coal bailout on June 4, 2026, including $75,000,000 to build “massive new export terminal” in West Oakland.

From Congresswoman Simon’s press release of July 27, 2026:

Last week, in a letter to the GAO Acting Comptroller General Orice Williams Brown, Congresswoman Simon and her colleagues questioned the Department of Energy’s plan to use up to $425 million in Defense Production Act (DPA) funds to support coal-fired power plants and construct the West Gateway Terminal Project in Oakland, California. This terminal project would primarily serve foreign commercial markets, rather than meet national emergency needs.

“The Defense Production Act was intended to scale up domestic industrial capabilities to meet urgent military or national emergency needs; therefore, its invocation to construct a commercial, civilian export facility intended primarily to serve foreign commercial markets raises profound statutory, legal, and fiscal questions,” wrote the lawmakers. “We do not believe this satisfies the statutory definition of ‘national defense’ or ‘critical infrastructure protection’ under the DPA and that there is no legally sufficient, data-driven nexus between civilian coal exports and immediate U.S. military readiness or critical infrastructure defense.”

The full text of the letter can be accessed here, or on Congresswoman Simon’s website.