As part of its purge of some 10,000 employees across the Department of Health and Human Services, the Trump administration on Tuesday reportedly fired the entire staff of the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, a program that helps more than 6 million poorer Americans afford heat and air conditioning.
“They fired everybody, there’s nobody left to do anything,” Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, which represents the state managers of the program, told The New York Times. “Either this was incredibly sloppy, or they intend to kill the program altogether.”
The Times’s Brad Plumer reports that about 90% of the $4.1 billion in fiscal year 2025 funding for the program was sent to states in October, with about $378 million left for summer cooling bills.
Various reports say the program staff numbered between 10 and about 25 employees. With those workers overseeing the program all laid off, “it’s not clear how the remaining funds could be disbursed to the states, even though Congress has explicitly ordered the federal government to spend the money,” Plumer writes.
Funding for the program was reportedly cut this year from $6.1 billion last year.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services told the Times in a statement that the agency “will continue to comply” with the law and that the Trump administration’s reorganization will leave the agency “better positioned to execute on Congress’s statutory intent.”
Democrats slammed the cuts. Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts said he would fight to restore the lost jobs and look to expand and modernize the program. “Eliminating the entire federal staff responsible for LIHEAP—a program that millions of households depend on to stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer—isn’t reform, it’s sabotage,” he said in a statement. “This is what Trump governance looks like: Dismantle the programs people rely on, create chaos in essential services, and leave working families to foot the bill.”