As many as 5.9 million households may have to go without heat or air conditioning soon if the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’s proposed budget gets passed, the National Energy Assistance Directors Association warns.
A leaked HHS budget proposal for fiscal year 2026 shows zero dollars allocated to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, which provides financial assistance to help customers on limited incomes pay their energy bills. The federal government’s fiscal year runs from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30.
In 2023, more than 330,000 households in Illinois received LIHEAP with an average of more than $724 per household, Gov. JB Pritzker’s office said in a November news release.
USA Today was the first to report HHS’ intent to ax LIHEAP as well as the Head Start program that helps prepare young children for school.
HHS “Secretary [Robert F.] Kennedy should be ashamed of this budget, because they are proposing to take money out of the pockets of 6 million very poor families so the well-off can get even bigger tax breaks,” said Mark Wolfe, executive director of NEADA, where he leads the state low-income energy directors and represents their interests before Congress.
Will Americans face cutoffs even sooner?
The proposed budget has the ax falling for LIHEAP in fiscal year 2026, but 750,000 households may get cut off even sooner.
Earlier this month, HHS laid off the entire LIHEAP staff. The double-digit number of people laid off may be a small fraction of the 10,000 total layoffs at HHS, but the cuts included the person who determines what funds each state receives for the program.
Without a breakdown of where LIHEAP money should go, HHS can’t distribute the remaining money for the program for this fiscal year, ending Sept. 30, Wolfe said. The remaining money for this fiscal year is about $378 million, which he said would help 750,000 households pay cooling bills this summer.
“At a time when so many families are struggling to make ends meet — and tariffs are poised to drive prices even higher — it’s unconscionable to rip away the help that Congress has already offered to people in need,” Wolfe said.
What are the risks?
Without LIHEAP assistance, people may not be able to pay their bills and end up sweltering in the summer heat and freezing all winter, or even dying. Only 17 states and the District of Columbia provide consumers with some summer shut-off protections, Wolfe said.
“A $500 energy grant might not matter to [senior adviser to the president] Elon Musk and DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency], but it could literally mean life or death for families facing extreme winter cold and summer heat,” he said.
One in 6 American families is behind on their home energy bills, and the total amount owed is about $21 billion, the highest since 2021 and up about 30% since the end of 2023. Nearly 40% of families earning less than $50,000 per year in a recent Census survey were unable to pay an energy bill at least once in the last 12 months.
Seventy percent of the households LIHEAP helps have at least one vulnerable and at-risk member who is elderly, has a disability or is a child under the age of 6.
Read more at usatoday.com.
Contributing: Sun-Times staff