Mineral dust is among the top contributors to global aerosol loads and is an active element in the Earth system. Ability of non-photosynthetic vegetation (NPV) to suppress dust emission has been supported by observations and small-scale studies, but current regional to global scale models fail to include NPV in the vegetation coverage input. In this study, we implemented a satellite-based total vegetation dataset, which included NPV, into a regional atmospheric chemistry model and conducted simulations of the entire year 2016 for the conterminous United States. We also conducted a control simulation using only the photosynthetic vegetation (PV) to analyze the effects of NPV on dust emissions. Above 10% decreases in simulated dust emissions are seen over most of the southwestern United States from spring to autumn due to NPV. Reductions in dust concentrations are the largest in spring, and when compared to observations, attenuate the overpredictions of fine soil concentrations at over 93% of the observation sites in the western U.S. Further analyses of essential parameters to the inclusion of NPV indicate that sheltering the surface and increasing the threshold velocity through drag partitioning are major mechanisms for the suppression of dust emissions. On the other hand, NPV causes the friction velocity to increase by more than 10% over most erodible lands during autumn and winter, which can amplify the dust flux. This study highlights the necessity of including NPV into the dust model and states that uncertainty analyses of total vegetation datasets are important.