The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program and the Energy Star program face challenges.
For now, LIHEAP survives, as the remaining 2025 funds – $401.5 million – were released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on May 1. That is a spot of bright news. But the Trump administration plans to eliminate LIHEAP from its 2026 budget, according to news reports and Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (NEADA).
“The administration is supposed to zero out the program for next year, so that’s of concern, of course,” Wolfe told Fuel Oil News. But Wolfe said, “I think Congress will reject” the administration’s plan to eliminate LIHEAP. Wolfe noted that the program has strong bipartisan support in Congress.
Still, the program “has been under persistent threat from the Trump Administration, culminating with the April 1 firing of the entire LIHEAP staff at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS),” NEADA said on its website . “With limited staff to oversee LIHEAP and disburse funds, LIHEAP is facing unprecedented uncertainty. States are being expected to run their programs with no federal training or guidance and delays in funding that make it difficult to plan for the program. The true victims are the low-income families will be unable to pay their utility bills this summer, leaving vulnerable populations in danger of extreme heat exposure.”
NEADA is fighting to restore the federal LIHEAP staff and protect the program . It said that eliminating the program from the 2026 budget would mean the loss of “$4 billion in assistance to about 6 million very low-income households that rely on LIHEAP to pay their home heating and cooling bills.”
The Trump Administration is also planning to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency’s ENERGY STAR program, according to reports by CNN and other news outlets. The program is “a public-private partnership certifying energy efficient consumer appliances like air conditioners, heat pumps, furnaces, boilers, refrigerators and washing machines,” the National Energy & Fuels Institute noted in the May 13 issue of its newsletter, National Energy Online News (NEON).
“It is unclear whether the administration has the legal authority to terminate the ENERGY STAR without Congressional authorization,” the newsletter noted. “Both Republicans in Congress and the Trump Administration during its first term floated the idea of privatizing the program. This idea is controversial, especially if it is folded into a non-governmental program like the Consortium for Energy Efficiency (CEE). The CEE is dominated by utility interests and does not currently set ‘best in class’ efficiencies for oil-fired systems.”
THOMAS J. TUBMAN Finally, we note the passing of Thomas J. Tubman, a long time executive in and advocate for the industry, who died on May 11. He was 77. Tom Tubman was the first executive director of the American Energy Coalition. He was also a contributor to and friend of this magazine, writing numerous columns on a wide range of subjects over many years. l FON