Cutting LIHEAP Doesn’t Mean Poor Will Freeze
Nicolas Loris /
At first glance, President Obama’s motion to kill a program that provides low-income families with energy sounds as politically attractive as legislation to drown puppies, but when you take a look at the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), it makes all the sense in the world.
LIHEAP has become a rapidly expanding federal program meant to help America’s households with the lowest incomes pay their fuel bills. The funding for LIHEAP more than doubled in the past few years, increasing from about $2 billion in 2008 to $5.1 billion this fiscal year. President Obama’s fiscal year 2012 budget request cuts LIHEAP to $2.6 billion. Despite the noble intentions behind LIHEAP, it is a program beset by fraud and waste, and it fails to address the real issue of reducing high energy prices by increasing energy supplies.
Nobody wants the heat shut off on low-income households in the middle of winter, which is why state laws prohibit utilities from doing so, making LIHEAP duplicative. In reality, that money just goes to utilities that would not have collected the money. In many cases the money is lost to fraud and abuse. A June 2010 Government Accountability Office report on LIHEAP found that: