$578 Million for Low-Income Families’ Heating Bills Freed

Defying a House plan to kill the program, the Clinton administration on Sunday released $578 million to assist low-income families pay their heating bills.

The funding, said Office of Management and Budget spokesman Lawrence Haas, “will go to meet the energy needs of low-income homeowners across the country who are already feeling the effects of winter.”

The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program is one of the points of contention that have held up congressional action on a $250-billion bill to fund the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services and Education in 1996.

The House version of the bill does not fund the program. The Senate has proposed $900 million, $100 million less than current spending.

Haas said that OMB released the money to Health and Human Services based on the practice of allocating 90% of the funding during the first six months of the fiscal year, the cold months of October through March.

The OMB has already released $232 million under the two temporary spending measures that expired Friday.

The $578 million would put funding at 90% of the Senate budget proposal.

House Republicans say that the program is a relic of the oil crisis in the 1970s, when sharply rising heating costs caused widespread hardships in northern states. But their claims that the program has outlived its usefulness have been resisted by Democrats and many Republicans from northern states.