Trump Fires All Staff from an Office Protecting Millions from Extreme Heat and Cold
Imagine your family lacks the income to keep the heat on during a cold winter, or your elderly neighbor can’t afford to keep cool during the life-threatening summer heat waves we see as the planet’s temperature rises. For years, a program called the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) has saved lives by filling that funding gap for millions of American families.
Last week, the Trump Administration abruptly fired the entire staff of the office which administers the $4.1 billion LIHEAP program that serves 6.2 million people around the country. “They fired everybody, there’s nobody left to do anything,” said Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, which works with states to secure funding from the program. “Either this was incredibly sloppy, or they intend to kill the program altogether.”
Locked Out of Their Office
The roughly 25 LIHEAP program administrators were all laid off without warning as part of Health and Human Services (HHS) Department Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s purge of 10,000 staff members at HHS. Wolfe said that several senior members of the LIHEAP staff told him that when they arrived for work last Monday, they found that they had been locked out of their office building.
On Thursday, 13 U.S. Senators (including two Republicans) sent a letter to Kennedy urging that HHS reverse the decision to cut the LIHEAP staff, warning that otherwise the firings would undermine the agency’s ability to provide a “crucial lifeline” for low-income seniors and families. The two Republican Senators joining 11 Democrats signing the letter were Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
States’ Response
State and local government officials around the nation have begun to react strongly to this latest destructive bumble by one of Trump’s most controversial cabinet officials. The National Association of Counties (NACo) online news on April 3 observed that Kennedy stated that the restructuring aims to improve efficiency, but that “closure of regional offices and staffing reductions could slow grant administration, technical assistance and federal-state-local coordination” at LIHEAP and other critical programs.
While some states have begun to help these underserved community members, others are struggling to fill the gap. In North Carolina, the only remaining statewide resource is the Crisis Intervention Program, which is routinely depleted of funds before the end of the year. North Carolina also does not have a year-round moratorium shielding low-income residents from disconnections or shutoffs. Federal cuts like this increase the needs of our communities and place more burden on potential long-term solutions to high energy bills, like the Weatherization Assistance Program.
