Low-income families who need help heating their homes are on the long list of Americans targeted by Donald Trump’s deplorable budget. The budget would eliminate the Low Income Heating Assistance Program because “LIHEAP is a lower-impact program and is unable to demonstrate strong performance outcomes.”
This is bizarre. We’re talking about an extremely simple program: households get assistance heating their homes through traditional heating methods. It’s not like there’s some special kind of government heat for poor people and it turns out that heating method doesn’t actually work, leading to weak performance outcomes. People get grants to help them pay for the form of heating system their houses have, and they are accordingly able to get warm. The impact and performance show up in the fact that people aren’t cold anymore. But maybe, since we’re talking about low-income people here, Trump just doesn’t think that helping them is an impact or performance worth caring about.
Across the country, LIHEAP helps millions of families, 75 percent of which include an elderly or disabled person or a child. In 2013, 13,036 North Dakota households got help from LIHEAP. In Michigan, it was 623,549. In Maine (which, alone among the New England states, Trump might care about since he got one of its electoral votes thanks to the state awarding them by congressional district), it was 44,556.
Can someone please put Donald Trump and Mick Mulvaney in an unheated, poorly insulated house in Maine or Michigan or North Dakota and then ask them how they’d rate the impact of anything that let them warm up a few degrees?