Whole staff will be released into LiHeap

The Trump administration abruptly released the entire employee of $ 4.1 billion in order to help low-income households in the USA to pay their heating and cooling calculations.

The shots threaten to paralyze the program founded by the congress in 1981 by the Congress to support Home -Home -Home -Home -Home -Home -Home -Home and helps to compensate for high supply calculations for around 6.2 million people from Maine to Texas during the cold winter and hot summer.

“They all released that there is no one to do,” said Mark Wolfe, Managing Director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, who works with states to secure the financing from the program. “Either it was incredibly sloppy, or they intend to kill the program as a whole.”

The layoffs were part of a broader cleaning of around 10,000 employees of the Ministry of Health and Human Services on Monday, as health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., reorganized the agency drastically. Around 25 employees had monitored the energy support program, which is also known as a LIHEP. All of them were released, said Mr. Wolfe.

The congress had approved 4.1 billion US dollars for the 2025 financial year, and about 90 percent of this money were sent to the countries in October to help households to fight with high heating costs. There are still about $ 378 million to support summer cooling because households build their air conditioning systems. Heat waves in the United States become more intense and take longer due to climate change.

The federal government usually sends the money to government authorities after the funds were assigned with a complicated formula and various reviews and audits were carried out. In some states, such as Maine, the money use to help families with low incomes to be used to compensate for the costs of buying heating oil to heat their houses in winter. States also use the money to weather houses and households from which the risk of being separated from their supply company provides emergency aid.

Now it is not clear how the remaining funds could be paid to the states, although the Federal Government’s congress has expressly ordered the money.

“If there is no staff, how can you assign the rest of this money?” Said Mr. Wolfe. “My fear is that you will say that we have this financing, but there is no one to manage them anymore, so we can’t send them out.”

In an e -mail declaration, Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Health and Human Services, said that the agency will “continue to comply with the federal law” and that the legal intention of the congress would be better positioned due to the restructuring. “

In the past two months, the Trump government has repeatedly tried to freeze or retain approved expenditure from the congress. These steps have triggered a growing number of legal challenges and court decisions that state that this is unconstitutional.

The shots of the Energy Assistance Office triggered an angry reaction of several democratic legislators.

“What” efficiency “is achieved by releasing everyone in Maine whose task is to help Mainers afford to afford heating oil when it is cold,” wrote representative Jared Golden, a democrat who represents a largely rural district in Maine who voted for President Trump in a social media post.

Senator Edward Markay, Democrat of Massachusetts, said that he would work to unlock the financing of the program. “The entire federal employee who is responsible for LiHeap – a program for which millions of households are warm and cool in summer – is not a reform,” he said in a statement. “It’s sabotage.”

The office of Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, made an explanation: “Senator Collins was a long -time lawyer for LiHeap and the critical financial support that offers it for families with lower incomes to ensure that they can stay warm in the winter months.

A study published last year in the Economic Journal showed that around 17 percent of US households spend more than a tenth of their income for energy, a threshold that researchers often define as “severe” energy stress. The study also found a close connection between difficulty energy and winter mortality.

“When the heating at home is less affordable, more people die every winter,” Seema Jayacandran, economist at Princeton and one of the authors of the study, wrote on Monday. “That is what our analysis found for a period of time was available as a lieep. Without a LiHeaP, the effect would probably be much larger.”