The Trump administration has gutted the federal home energy assistance program as a part of the mass firing of 10,000 Department of Health and Human Services workers.
The staff in charge of administering the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, were let go earlier today, according to a statement shared via email by the National Energy and Utility Affordability Coalition.
Going forward, the status of the program, which provides roughly $4 billion per year to help low-income families with heating and cooling costs, is unclear. Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, told CNN that the firings could cause the program to “grind to a halt” with $387 million left to distribute.
The program’s target population is low-income households, especially those with a high home energy burden, meaning the share of the home’s income that goes to heating and cooling bills. In 2023, LIHEAP served 5.9 million households, and got heat or cooling restored 261,000 times, according to the department’s records.
LIHEAP was established in 1981 to be a clearinghouse for all federal energy assistance; the program became a block grant to award funding to all 50 states, as well as Washington, D.C., U.S. territories, and roughly 150 tribes and tribal organizations.
In fiscal year 2025, states and territories were slated to receive a combined $3.6 billion in regularly block grant funding, plus $100.1 million in dedicated funds emerging from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Those awards range from $7.9 million for Hawaii to nearly $215.8 million for California, according to a spreadsheet posted on the LIHEAP website, which was last updated in November 2024.
In reaction to what the Trump administration characterized as a “restructuring plan,” Democrats on the Senate energy committee wrote to HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. seeking information on the decision to cut 25% of the department’s staff, which they said HHS did not provide proactively to Congress.
“This is an alarming, irresponsible, DOGE-driven attempt to dismantle an entire department and its critical work in order to fund giant tax breaks for the wealthy,” wrote Reps. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) and Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.) in the letter, seen by Latitude Media. “It is also a blatant effort to push out doctors and scientists whose work has been grounded in real science but that runs counter to your dangerous agenda of misinformation.”
The lawmakers requested a list of the roles being eliminated across HHS, as well as “the statutory authority that provides the basis for these mass terminations.”
“It is simply unclear what authority allows you to make these sweeping changes without congressional approval, and you have not provided that information,” the group wrote.
