CREDIT:
AP
Winter is coming, but the
vouchers that supply more than 20 million poor Americans with fuel to heat
their homes during the season may not be. With the federal government still
shuttered and Republicans in the House refusing to reopen it, the Low-Income
Heating Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) currently does not have any funding
appropriated for the coming winter.
Like many other safety net
expenditures, the heating program is being pinched by both spending cuts and
increasing costs, and National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association (NEADA)
executive director Mark Wolfe worries that shutdown-related delays in funding
the program will endanger its ability to protect the poorest people from the
cold. “It’s gonna be a very tough winter,” Wolfe said in an interview. Leftover
funds from the fiscal year that just ended give the state-level agencies that
administer LIHEAP some leeway for now. But states can’t legally carry over more
than 10 percent of the previous year’s funds, and that held-over cash usually
doesn’t go to actual fuel payments. Because most states shut down their LIHEAP
administration offices during warmer months, the carryover funds typically pay
for re-initiating administrative systems that were shut down. The government
shutdown isn’t taking away heating vouchers yet — “it’s not good, but you can
work with it,” Wolfe said — but if it lasts into November that could change.
“There’s no magic number
for how much money we need,” Wolfe said, but between spending cuts and rising
prices, “we’re getting down to the bone.”
The Energy Information
Administration (EIA) released its projections for winter temperatures and
heating costs on Tuesday. EIA expects it to be 3 percent colder across the
Northeast compared to last winter. While the cost of heating a home with oil is
projected to tick down by 2 percent, electric heat will be 2 percent more
costly, propane costs will climb by 9 percent, and natural gas costs will rise a full 13 percent,
according to the EIA. “Normally, a price spike or a weather spike would get
more sympathy in Congress and there’d be a supplemental spending bill,” Wolfe
said. But these aren’t normal times.
Heating aid has already
absorbed huge cuts as part of the austerity push of the past few years,
including a 25 percent cut from 2011 to 2012. “Then the sequester hit,” Wolfe
said. Sequestration cuts meant the program suddenly covered less than 35
percent of a family’s home heating costs, compared to 42 percent previously.
“For families living on the edge, this pushes them over,” Wolfe said, adding
that “in the past we could always count on Congress finding more money.”
Anti-spending conservatives have long supported LIHEAP out of the understanding
that poor families can set aside some money for heat, “but if it’s colder or
war erupts in the Middle East there’s no way a family can suddenly pay twice as
much,” he said. “But we’re in an environment now where Congress doesn’t find
more money for anything.” The number of households (8.9 million) and
individuals (23 million) reliant upon LIHEAP hasn’t fallen since 2011, even though
the funding has. In 2012, one in five LIHEAP households
included a military veteran, up from 12 percent prior to the Great
Recession.
Wolfe warned that resolving
the shutdown will just be the beginning of the process of getting states their
LIHEAP money – a process that has sometimes taken over a month for lawmakers to
figure out even under more normal budgeting processes than the current
dysfunction.
“If you assume that the
sun, moon, and stars come together, it’ll be three weeks,” Wolfe said. “But
when the government reopens there’ll be a lot of other stuff left on people’s
desks too.” He’s holding out against a piecemeal fix to restore funding to the
program, however. “We don’t see an extra dollar for LIHEAP as a good thing if
it’s taken from Head Start.”
He warned that “states will
not start their programs until they know how much money they’ll get.” That puts
substantial pressure on those leftover 2013 dollars, and Wolfe couldn’t say how
much each state had on hand to deal with early winter weather.
Luckily for the poor in
South Dakota, where an early blizzard left tens of
thousands without power this
week, the freezing weather hasn’t stuck around. A spokeswoman for the state’s
LIHEAP program told ThinkProgress that the storm hasn’t affected demand for
heating assistance, and that there are enough leftover fiscal year 2013 funds
to support the program administration for now. Representatives for the Maine
LIHEAP program didn’t respond to inquiries about the state of their leftover
funding, but the state’s housing authority can’t start making payments on
behalf of the 55,000 Maine households that qualify for heating assistance until
Congress appropriates LIHEAP money. According to Accuweather, low temperatures
in Maine will slip down between the upper 20s and
upper-to-mid 30s by
mid-October. 200,000Massachusetts
LIHEAP households and 100,000 in Connecticut remain in a similar limbo.
“It’s not hard to figure
out what happens here” if the money doesn’t come through in time or in
sufficient volume, NEADA’s Wolfe said. “There are gonna be more families that
are unable to pay their energy bill.”
“And people do die,” he
added, his voice rising. “They turn their heat down too low and they die.”
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