Just as it did last year, the Trump administration is targeting home heating assistance for the poor. As in they're proposing it be completely zeroed out.
The program, known as LIHEAP — Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program — helps families pay their heating bills primarily in the form of a grant that’s sent directly to utility companies or heating fuel vendors.
President Donald Trump tried to eradicate the program last year, but encountered resistance in Congress. In October, he released nearly $3 billion, or roughly 90 percent, of the funding.
The assistance is modest, and is meant to keep low-income Americans, including the elderly and those with critical medical needs, from literally freezing to death in their homes. That's all it does: It keeps people from dying. It helps about 6 million families, and the administration wants to zero it out because they Do Not Care, and because if you're going to give rich assholes trillion-dollar tax breaks you've got to find the money from somewhere. Republican budget makers have been very consistent in targeting the poor as the people to squeeze that money out of; in spite of that, LIHEAP has been begrudgingly tolerated by Republican lawmakers because the images of elderly Americans being carried into hearses after a cold snap is widely suspected, by cold-state Republicans, to be something their voters would absolutely not put up with.
The official Trump administration line is that the program is susceptible to "fraud,” which is the rote claim announced every time conservative burn-it-downers want to cut food aid to the poor, or medical aid to the poor, or any other program that they want to see the end of. Since the time of Reagan they have invented notions of scary undeserving people buying Cadillacs or dining on lobster on the taxpayer dime, every claim used to argue that programs meant to keep poor Americans from dying in the streets or in their homes are a luxury we cannot afford, not when our nation's wealthy assholes are suffering from a tax burden already less than half of that faced by the ancestors they inherited the money from. (Our modern generation of wealthy assholes are, to be sure, among the more fragile people on the planet.)
As a reminder, this is not Donald Trump doing this. It's not likely Donald Trump could tell you what LIHEAP stands for if you spotted him the first four letters; he does not know his administration is proposing this, and does not care. This is all due to the conservative reactionaries that surround him and tell him what to think about things, during the rare occasions on which he might ask, and write the rest of it up on their own. Blame the Republican Party for these louts; Donald is just the man who signs the papers. When he remembers to, that is.