It’s business as usual for the Connecticut Energy Assistance Program (CEAP)—for now. In April, President Donald Trump’s administration laid off every employee in the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which is the where the vast majority of CEAP’s funding comes through.
Not only that, in his proposed budget, Trump recommended eliminating LIHEAP’s budget entirely.
CEAP provides financial assistance for residents to pay their heating bills. In order to be eligible for the program, recipients need to have a household income of less than 60% of the state’s median income. The vast majority of its budget comes from LIHEAP Block Grants.
In April, Connecticut Department of Social Services (DSS) Deputy Commissioner Peter Hadler reported that there were 100,000 households and 200,000 residents in the state were enrolled in CEAP. Three-fourths of those households included people that were disabled, elderly or young children.
“What will happen is if there is a cut, we will have to assess how deep that cut is; it could be minuscule or it could be significant,” DSS Commissioner Andrea Barton-Reeves said at a public hearing on Thursday, Aug. 7. “Then we will then have a number of scenarios that we will run internally at DSS, and then make recommendations to the Office of Policy and Management (OPM).”
In the fiscal year 2024, the state of Connecticut received $78.3 million from the LIHEAP Block Grant. That same year, CEAP’s overall budget was $90.6 million, and almost $7.3 million was laid over for this fiscal year, according to Barton-Reeves.
This year, CEAP was appropriated $89.2 million from a LIHEAP Block Grant and it’s overall budget is projected to be $93.6 million. The DSS currently projects it will receive the same amount of money from the LIHEAP Block Grant for fiscal year 2026, but have a slightly smaller budget overall.
According to Barton-Reeves, the DSS is expecting a 5% increase in enrollment next year.
But there are a lot of unknowns. For starters, funding might actually increase. The Senate Appropriations Committee proposed increasing LIHEAP funding by $20 million, which, if approved, would make LIHEAP’s budget $4 billion for the upcoming fiscal year.
Since the LIHEAP layoffs, however, DSS has not received any new guidance from the federal government.
“We have an email address that we can use to communicate, but we have not received any directions to cease our operations (or) to not submit any of our grants. Nor have any of our state partners,” Barton-Reeves said. “We’ve been operating as if the office is still intact. It is very hard to predict what is going to happen right now.”
If there are budget cuts, DSS will run several scenarios on how to implement the program with less funding, she said. Last year, there was less funding overall, and less rounds of funding for emergency services, so CEAP may have to return to that. Ultimately, the final decision on how to proceed will be made by Office of Policy and Management, the governor and the legislature.
If funding is cut all together, CEAP has some wiggle room, because it has a carry-over at the end of every year, according to Barton-Reaves.
“One of the reason that we insist on holding a carry-over is because there’s always a lag in the gap of time between the moneys that we receive from the federal government and the time that we actually have to start implementing the program,” She said. “Certainly, the carry-over of $7 million is not the same as funding a program that’s $89 million in totality. So we start there, by providing support for as long as we can with the money that’s in our carry over fund.”
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