LIHEAP moves $4 billion a year. The federal staff who ran it? Zero.

The money still moves.▸ In federal fiscal year 2026, Washington sent $4.1 billion in heating and cooling aid through the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program — on schedule, formula-driven, wired straight to states, territories, and tribes. What no longer exists is the federal staff who ran that formula. On April 1, 2025, HHS fired all 23 of them. Fifteen months later, the checks still clear and nobody is left to answer the phone.

LIHEAP is a block grant: Congress appropriates it, HHS's Office of Community Services runs it through a statutory formula, and the money lands with states, D.C., five territories, and roughly 150 tribes, who hand it to households.▸ For FY2026, that appropriation arrived in three pieces — 90% released under a continuing resolution in November 2025, a $100 million Bipartisan Infrastructure Law supplemental released the same day, and the final 10% held back until the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026 set the full-year total in April 2026.

Add up the first release and the final release and the regular block grant totals $4,035,400,000 for FY2026 — a $20 million increase over FY2025, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (NEADA), which tracks the program's appropriations year to year.▸ Add the $100 million infrastructure-law supplement and total federal funding released for the year comes to $4.1 billion. States, D.C., and the territories draw the overwhelming majority — tribes receive just over 1% of the total, in line with the program's decades-old allocation formula.

Every dollar of that formula still has to be calculated, every state plan still has to be reviewed and approved, every award still has to be processed through the federal grants system.▸ In April 2025, the people who did that work were fired.

LIHEAP is, at bottom, a program that keeps households from being disconnected from heat or air conditioning.▸ In FY2024, the most recent year ACF has published full results for, it did that for 5.9 million households — 5 million of them for heating, 751,000 for cooling, and smaller numbers for crisis assistance and weatherization. (Categories overlap: a household behind on a winter bill and in need of a furnace repair shows up in more than one column.)

That side of the ledger — the households — is a matter of formula and appropriation, the same as the dollars above.▸ The other side is a matter of who was left in the building to run it. On April 1, 2025, HHS eliminated the entire federal staff responsible for LIHEAP — 23 people, according to a joint release from the National Consumer Law Center and NEADA, reported the same week by the National Low Income Housing Coalition. At the time, $378 million in already-appropriated summer assistance funds sat unreleased, with no one left who knew how to run the allocation formula that would get it out the door.

The money eventually moved anyway — the remaining FY2025 funds went out April 30, 2025, and FY2026 funding was released on schedule in both of its tranches.▸ But that happened despite the staffing decision, not because it was reversed. NEADA's mid-2026 program update is blunt about it: federal LIHEAP staff have not been rehired. States are running FY2026 and preparing FY2027 plans with no federal training, no federal guidance, and no one at HHS whose job is to catch a problem with the formula before it becomes a delay families feel in a cold house or a shut-off notice.

Funding figures cover federal fiscal year 2026 (Oct. 2025–Sep. 2026) as released by ACF's Office of Community Services; households-served figures cover FY2024, the most recent year with published full-year results. Staffing figures reflect reporting on the April 2025 reduction in force and NEADA's subsequent program updates — HHS itself has not published a staffing count for the office since.