By Paul E. Bollwahn, Lt. Colonel, The Salvation Army
May 2002

For low-income households, the good news this past winter was the mild winter and low prices for heating fuel: natural gas, oil and electricity. That bad news is that good news has become an excuse to scale back the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) for the coming winter.

President Bush, who had praised the program during his election campaign, sent Congress a budget proposal in February that would cut LIHEAP funding by $300 million C from its current level of $1.7 billion to $1.4 billion.

There is some irony here beyond the presidential about face.

A bipartisan Congress has supported greatly increased spending to pay for programs vital to the national interest, such as defense, homeland security, foreign development assistance, a tax cut and even an economic stimulus package. Yet LIHEAP is also vital to the national interest and can ill afford a reduction of this magnitude.

It makes no sense to force a substantial percentage of our population to choose between heating and eating, to forgo food and medicine in order to keep one=s home warm enough or cool enough to survive extremes in temperature.

A recent study by the Colorado Energy Assistance Foundation found that one out of every five Colorado families are low income and need emergency financial assistance at times to help pay their energy bills. Presumably, those figures are equally valid nationwide.

Anecdotal evidence nationwide suggests that LIHEAP is used only as a last resort, when people believe they have no other choice but to reluctantly ask for a helping hand. Sadly, more and more people are being left with that choice.

Although both demand for heating and the cost of fuel were lower during the past winter, that's only part of the story.

Total funds available through LIHEAP declined from $2.25 billion in the winter of 2000-2001 to $1.7 billion this year. And because of the economic downturn, there were even more people this past winter in need of help. This vicious one-two punch meant that the social service agencies who provide federal fuel assistance ran out of money even earlier than they do in most years.

In Wisconsin, for example, roughly 87,000 households applied for energy assistance in the winter of 1999-2000. This year, more than 130,000 sought help C a 49 percent increase. During the same period, however, the state's share of federal funding plummeted from $82 million to $50 million. There is a limit to one's ability to do more with less, and the agencies who distribute LIHEAP assistance have reached that limit.

In one Illinois county, Winnebago, more than 2,000 households qualified to receive heating assistance were turned away because the county=s LIHEAP allotment had run dry.

The program in Oregon, the state with the highest unemployment rate in the nation, has met a similar fate. There, heating assistance funds were exhausted by mid-February, and the Community Action Directors of Oregon said up to 30,000 households meeting low-income requirements were on waiting lists for help paying energy bills. An estimated 7,000 households had been disconnected.

The Governor's Office of Energy & Community Services in New Hampshire reported that more than 1,300 households that applied for help with their heating bills by mid-February had been denied assistance for lack of funding.

If an increase in demand and fewer available funds were not bad enough, social service agencies report that families fighting to survive this year are still struggling to pay off high bills due a year earlier. Just one of the utilities serving customers in Iowa, for example, reported 67,000 customers with utility bills in arrears in January compared with 64,000 last year.

Yet despite all the evidence of need, the Bush Administration not only is proposing a lower budget for LIHEAP but refused to release $300 million in emergency funds already appropriated by Congress to help families cope with heating costs this past winter.

Families all across the country are living on the edge, and any unforseen difficulty C be it an illness, a job loss or some other, sudden problem C can leave them in financial jeopardy.
LIHEAP typically helps people when they need it most, providing them with modest, short-term assistance. Nearly half of all LIHEAP recipients do not need help paying their energy bills after two years.

With more people out of work and scrimping to pay for basic living expenses, there would be plenty of need for LIHEAP even if next winter is also mild. And if the weather returns to the norm next year, the need for help will be that much greater.

So what should be done? First, the Administration should rethink its plans to cut this important part of the federal budget. Second, Congress should fund LIHEAP at least at the current $1.7 billion and, ideally, restore it to the previous level of $2.25 billion or even more.

Our elected officials should recognize that the physical well-being of the poor and elderly is clearly in our national interest. Compassion should be more than a slogan. It should be a priority.
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Lt. Colonel Paul E. Bollwahn is the National Social Services Consultant for The Salvation Army.