A popular program that helps low-income families pay for heating and cooling is on the chopping block.
President Trump’s recently released discretionary budget calls for eliminating the federally-funded Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP. While the administration argues the program isn’t necessary, supporters warn the loss could imperil billions of dollars in aid to states and harm the health and safety of some of the most vulnerable households in the country.
In the Northeast, where winters can be brutal and energy prices are notoriously high, state officials and consumer advocates say LIHEAP is a critical social safety net for nearly 2 million families. Without it, they predict many people will be forced to make tough spending decisions about essentials such as food, housing and medication.
Lillie Bryan knowns this budgeting conundrum all too well. Just filling the oil tank that heats her small single-family home in Dorchester can cost as much as $1,500. It’s a sum she couldn’t afford without assistance from LIHEAP, or HEAP as the program is known in Massachusetts.
“We are so blessed to have the program,” Bryan said. ”It’s a relief, it’s a comfort, knowing that you don’t have to worry about [staying warm] when October or November comes.”
Sitting on the couch in her living room, Bryan, 77, said her budget is especially tight since she retired from her job at a Boston hotel a few years ago.
The prospect of losing this assistance is frightening, she added.
“It’s going to hurt a lot of families,” she said. “ And at some point you just may find some of these people dead in their house from freezing.”
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LIHEAP changed Bryan’s life so dramatically that she divides the last two decades into two distinct periods: before LIHEAP and after.
The “before times” began in 2008 when she and her husband split up. She stayed in the home they’d bought together in 1979, when their kids were young. Suddenly living alone, Bryan said it didn’t take long to realize her paycheck wouldn’t cover groceries, the mortgage, the utility bills and all the unexpected costs of owning an older home.
“I remember laying in the bed one night, just scared and I just said, ‘Lord, what am I going to do? I don’t got no money. I don’t know who to call,’ ” she said.
Bryan picked up part-time jobs on top of her full-time job at the hotel, but it still wasn’t enough. She cut back on groceries. And to avoid refilling her oil tank, she’d turn the heat way down and take cold showers. On really chilly days, she’d open the oven door to warm up the kitchen and living room — even though she knew it was a fire hazard.
“You just did what you had to do to survive,” she said.
Bryan also described obsessively checking the meter attached to her oil tank, trying to gauge exactly how much oil she had left when it read “E” for empty, and how long it might last.
Her calculations weren’t always great, and on several nights she woke up shivering because the heat had gone off.
Then her oil tank started leaking. For a while, repairmen were able to patch up the cracks. But in February 2013, a fuel delivery worker told her he couldn’t legally fill her tank because the leak could cause an explosion.
It was like hitting financial rock bottom, she said.
Bryan considers herself a spiritual person, so in her mind, it’s no coincidence that around this time, a neighbor happened to get a flyer about heating assistance from a local organization and mentioned it to Bryan.
The organization, Action for Boston Community Development, or ABCD, replaced Bryan’s oil tank and furnace, and signed her up for LIHEAP. She hasn’t gone without heat since.
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Congress created LIHEAP in the wake of the energy crisis of the late 1970s, and the program has typically received strong bipartisan support because it assists residents in blue and red states. This past year, Congress allocated $4.1 billion for the program, and it served more than 6 million low-income households.
“ LIHEAP is working. We rarely ever see anyone die in the winter now [from] being in an apartment that’s not heated,” said Mark Wolfe, an energy economist and executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, a group that represents state agencies that administer LIHEAP.
But if the funding gets cut, he warned that may change.
“Families have energy bills they can’t afford. They fall behind. And without help, they can be shut off from power,” he said. “And if you’re shut off from power, it’s like being thrown back to the Middle Ages.”
Wolfe called President Trump’s plan to defund LIHEAP “cruel” and said he disagrees with the administration’s rationale for eliminating it.
“They didn’t say that they thought this was a good program but poorly run, or they thought this was a good program that could be improved,” he said. “They just said, ‘We don’t need it.’ ”
The president’s budget proposal lays out a few reasons for ending LIHEAP. One concern is fraud and abuse highlighted in a 2010 Government Accountability Office report. The report found at least 11,000 instances where deceased and incarcerated people were listed as household members, which increased the amount of LIHEAP funds the household was eligible to receive.
Advocates for LIHEAP argue the report is out of date and many of the issues it raised have been fixed.
“ I was surprised they were bringing this up because it’s a 15-year-old report,” Wolfe said. He added the problems stemmed from a time “before computerized systems were widely available, and when many of the forms were processed by paper and were hard to check.”
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees LIHEAP, did not respond to a request for comment.
Critics of LIHEAP also argue the program isn’t necessary because most states already forbid utilities from shutting off heat during the winter when customers can’t pay their bills.
While this is true, the policy doesn’t protect people who use fuel oil or propane, said Jenifer Bosco, a lawyer with the National Consumer Law Center.
What’s more, she said, “Just because you’re protected from being disconnected for a period of time, it doesn’t mean you have free utility service during that period of time. You still owe the money.”
A recent report from her organization found that as of last September, the average person in Massachusetts who was behind on utility bills owed $997. The average low-income customer who fell behind owed $1,471.
Trump has repeatedly promised to reduce energy costs, which would help all Americans, including LIHEAP recipients. Since taking office in January, his administration has taken several steps to make it easier for U.S. companies to drill for oil and gas. And while production so far has remained relatively flat, Rachel Greszler, an economist with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said she’s confident the strategy will work in time in the long run.
“The current administration is doing a lot to unleash American energy so that we will see the costs come down,” she said.
To the extent that some families may still need help paying utility bills, Greszler said states, not the federal government, should fund assistance programs. If they have to pay for these programs, she said, they’ll run them more efficiently.
“ I think that all the incentives are better aligned if it is financed by the level of government that is actually providing the benefits to the individuals,” she said. “It’s become incredibly dangerous that we just have this notion that it’s free money if it comes from the federal government.”
But advocates say most states don’t have the money to simply take over the program. This past winter, Massachusetts received $144 million for LIHEAP.
“It would be impossible for the state to fully step in and make up the difference,” said Ed Augustus, secretary of the state’s Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities. ”You look at the budget that we’re dealing with now, we already have some challenges keeping up with a lot of the programs that we primarily fund as a state.”
Any cut to LIHEAP would also come as state officials grapple with other federal funding losses.
Augustus used words like “frustrating,” “insane” and “shortsighted” to describe the president’s plan to cut LIHEAP funding and the recent firing of all federal employees that distribute LIHEAP money to states.
“They think they’re saving money by cutting the staff and by cutting the program, but this is going to end up costing a lot more than it saves,” he said. “ It’s going to result in seniors getting sicker when they don’t have to, and being hospitalized more frequently.”
The fate of LIHEAP is now in Congress’ court. Lawmakers have until October — just when the cold weather begins to set in — to decide whether to accept the president’s proposal to end the program or continue funding it.
While many politicians and advocates in New England say they’re lobbying hard to save LIHEAP, the outcome is far from certain.
But with so many federal programs and grants being cut nationwide, Augustus said he worries LIHEAP won’t get the attention it needs to save it.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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