Trump Administration Keeps $400 Million In Summer Cooling Aid Frozen During Heat Wave, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Poor Americans Could Still Afford To Run The Air Conditioning

WASHINGTON. The Department of Health and Human Services confirmed this week that it would continue to sit on roughly $400 million in home energy assistance appropriated by Congress, resolving a long-standing concern that low-income Americans might otherwise use the money to keep their air conditioning running through a record summer.

The withheld funds belong to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, which for decades has helped the nation's poorest households pay to stay warm in winter and cool in summer. States typically receive the full appropriation by the end of March. As temperatures across much of the country climbed toward the triple digits, the remaining balance for fiscal year 2026 stayed precisely where the administration had left it, which is to say in the account.

Forty senators, joined by a bipartisan group of House members, sent letters urging the department to release the money before the cooling season arrived. Administration officials met the appeals with what sources within the department described as measured patience. "The appropriation is completely safe. It is not going anywhere, and neither, in many cases, are the applicants," said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the funds were technically supposed to have moved months ago. "Congress set the money aside. We have simply chosen to keep setting it aside. That is well within our reading of the word."

According to officials familiar with the matter, the delay reflects a broader administration position holding that money appropriated by Congress amounts to a suggestion rather than an instruction. Budget officials have spent the year advancing the view that the President may decline to spend funds he finds philosophically excessive, a theory legal scholars note would have startled the authors of the Constitution, who handed the power of the purse to the legislature specifically so that it would not end up here.

The cooling assistance is designed to prevent heat-related deaths among the elderly, the disabled, and families with small children, populations HHS has separately identified as the most vulnerable to extreme heat. Under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the department has reoriented itself around what it calls a philosophy of individual wellness, and one official observed that few interventions build personal resilience quite like an unaffordable electric bill in July.

At press time, HHS reassured the public that the $400 million was being kept in a cool, climate-controlled account.