Last year, the Low Income Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, distributed nearly $4 billion to households struggling to pay their energy bills. It’s a lifeline for more than 6 million families, but in recent months the program has become a target for funding cuts.
In early April, Donald Trump’s administration laid off the roughly dozen staff members at the Department of Health and Human Services who oversaw the program. Because HHS hadn’t yet distributed all of the funding for this fiscal year, the staff cuts put about $400 million in jeopardy. Senator Susan Collins, the Republican chair of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, sent a letter to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the HHS secretary, asking him to reverse course “on any staffing or funding cuts that would jeopardize the distribution of these funds to our constituents.”
Then, HHS temporarily rehired one of the employees who’d been laid off. That person’s job was to determine how much LIHEAP money states and other recipients receive. They were brought back on to release the remaining $400 million, which the agency did last Thursday.
In a budget proposal released the next day, the White House proposed ending the program altogether. The Trump White House said LIHEAP is “unnecessary” and that the administration would “support low-income individuals through energy dominance, lower prices, and an America First economic platform.”
“It’s a cruel proposal,” said Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association, which represents managers of state LIHEAP programs. “They’re proposing to zero it out, and that would cause significant harm to some of the poorest families in the country.”
Trump’s budget proposal is, at this point, just that — a proposal. Every year, the president’s submission serves as a starting point for Congress’ budget process. Ultimately, Congress controls the purse strings of the federal government and makes decisions about appropriations for LIHEAP. Historically, Congress has championed LIHEAP. Since 2009, the program, which was created in the 1980s, has received no less than $3 billion from Congress. At the height of the pandemic, Congress appropriated more than $8 billion through LIHEAP.
But the Trump proposal is a signal of the administration’s priorities — it recommends a nearly 23 percent cut in overall federal spending — and HHS still decides whether and how to distribute LIHEAP funds. Staff at the program, who have now been laid off, are responsible for divvying up the money to states, tribes, and territories based on a complex formula that takes climate, demographics, and various other factors into account. Without staff to run the program and given the administration’s position, HHS could decide not to disburse any funds Congress appropriates for the next fiscal year, which begins October 1.
“They’ve been slow-walking the funds, they have been delaying payments — and in this case, since they’re making the argument this program is no longer necessary, why would they release the funds?” said Wolfe.
In addition to questioning the program’s necessity, the White House referenced a long-closed audit of the program by the Government Accountability Office. The 2010 report found 11,000 applications for LIHEAP with names of dead people and 1,000 applications from federal employees whose salaries exceeded the income thresholds set by the program. In response to these findings, HHS required states to collect social security numbers as a condition of LIHEAP eligibility and to cross-reference applications with death data. These changes took effect by 2014, and the Government Accountability Office closed the report.
“It’s just factually inaccurate to say that those findings are the case,” said a former HHS employee who was responsible for LIHEAP compliance and was recently laid off. They said that the program now requires applicants to provide social security numbers, proof of income, and an active utility bill. “And ultimately, someone has to physically come in to apply for the program.
“In my time at HHS and overseeing the LIHEAP program, the majority of the compliance findings had more to do with improving the program to make it more effective and more efficient — not related to fraud, waste, or abuse,” they said.
As the Collins letter indicates, the Trump administration does seem sensitive to public and congressional pressure to fund LIHEAP. Wolfe and others Grist spoke to said it was likely the biggest factor in the administration releasing the remaining $400 million. Given Collins’ crucial role in the budget-making process, the Trump administration could opt to distribute the funds as instructed. But given that the administration wants to end funding for the program and the fact that the staff responsible for running it have been laid off, it’s unclear what might happen if Congress appropriates money for LIHEAP in the coming months.
The lack of certainty about the program trickles down to the state and local implementers of LIHEAP, said Katrina Metzler, executive director of the National Energy and Utility Affordability Coalition.
“Typically, they would have reached out to our federal partners at HHS to answer questions that they have, but those staff have been eliminated,” she said. “There’s just a lot of unrest and uncertainty.”
