On the afternoon of Friday, January 17, New York City officials got an unexpected notice from the state. HEAP, the aid program which helps low-income New Yorkers pay their heating bills during the winter, was on the verge of closing, more than two months earlier than usual.
It was a jarring message to receive just before the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. The Home Energy Assistance Program normally doesn’t close until the spring. And just that morning, the state social services agency had posted on Facebook encouraging people to apply.
Upon returning from the long weekend on Tuesday — one of the coldest days so far this winter — city officials received confirmation HEAP was closing, according to emails obtained by New York Focus. New Yorkers who still wanted to apply had until 5 pm that day.
HEAP benefits provide what many advocates describe as a “lifeline” at a time when nearly 1.4 million households are at least 60 days behind on their utility bills — owing a collective $1.85 billion dollars, just shy of the record set during the pandemic.
Advocates working with low-income New Yorkers, some of whom did not learn about the cutoff until that afternoon, scrambled to respond. The consumer advocacy group Public Utility Law Project got the news around 2 pm, said executive director Laurie Wheelock, and rushed to call as many potential enrollees as possible, urging them to file applications in the remaining few hours. Bill Ferris, legislative representative at AARP New York, said the group did not find out until the evening, after applications had closed.
They remained closed for three days, until Governor Kathy Hochul’s office announced that she would reallocate $35 million from an unspecified source to allow the program to open again that weekend. The move eased the initial panic. But it’s unclear how long Hochul’s cash infusion will keep the program open, and key questions remain about why HEAP shut down so early in the first place.
Two weeks on, the state agency in charge does not see it fit to answer them.
The governor’s office blamed the pause on a “federal funding shortfall,” but did not provide further details. The state’s Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance (OTDA), which manages HEAP, did not respond to New York Focus’s repeated questions about the program’s funding status, instead referring back to the governor’s announcement. To date, that remains the state’s only public statement about the HEAP snafu.
“Our people had two hours to call and tell our consumers that HEAP was closing. We need OTDA to tell us more.”
—Laurie Wheelock, Public Utility Law Project
Nor do official statistics shed much light on the situation. The federally funded program is first come, first serve and closes each year when it runs out of money. According to federal records, New York received $360 million for HEAP in the fall — almost the exact amount it received the previous year. Newly released OTDA data shows that, as of the end of December, the state had authorized $245 million in HEAP payments to New Yorkers. That’s only slightly more than at the same time last year, and does not explain how, just a few weeks
later, the state would have exhausted the more than $100 million it apparently had left.
“Our people had two hours to call and tell our consumers that HEAP was closing,” Wheelock told lawmakers last week. “We need OTDA to tell us more.”
In New York, HEAP includes four different
kinds of aid: regular heating assistance; emergency assistance for those
who receive a utility shutoff notice during the winter; cooling
assistance during the summer; and year-round assistance with furnace
repair and weatherization. The January 21 cutoff only applied to regular
heating benefits, which can go up to more than $900 per household and
make up the lion’s share of the funding.
New York distributes the regular heating benefits to more
than 1.5 million households each year, averaging $175 each last winter;
benefits open in the fall and typically last until at least the end of
March. Hundreds of thousands more households benefit from the emergency,
cooling, and repair programs. Records show that the state had approved
just under 1.4 million households for heating aid through December,
before hitting the brakes the following month.
Without that regular bill support, “you’re putting people into deeper levels of crisis and creating emergencies when they don’t have to be emergencies,” said Annie Carforo, climate justice campaigns manager at the group WE ACT for Environmental Justice.
HEAP’s sudden closure and reopening has fueled confusion on the ground. As recently as this Monday, a HEAP hotline in Monroe County — which administers benefits in the Rochester area — said the regular heating assistance portion of the program was closed, as did the county website. (Monroe County spokesperson Molly Clifford said the county has been processing new paper applications since last week, and the hotline and website were updated by Tuesday afternoon.)
Meanwhile, other Northeast states continue to distribute federal heating assistance funds as usual. Spokespeople for the relevant agencies in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont all confirmed to New York Focus that their programs are running normally.
So what explains the abrupt closure in New York?
Absent answers from OTDA, most can only speculate. For now, advocates are mostly just relieved that the program is open again. But some are still concerned about what this episode could spell for the program’s future.
It’s still unclear, for one, how long regular and emergency HEAP benefits will stay open this year, and whether Hochul’s $35 million reshuffle will be enough to see the nearly $400 million program through to the spring.
And the number of households signing up for HEAP is due to keep increasing in the coming years as the state implements a new law to notify seniors enrolled in a low-income health program that they qualify for heating assistance, too. The Public Utility Law Project estimates that only about half of households eligible for HEAP are currently receiving the benefits. With federal funding levels unlikely to increase under a Republican-led Congress, new applicants could find themselves fighting over a shrinking pie.
That’s if New York continues to receive federal aid more or less as usual under President Donald Trump — something his new administration has already repeatedly cast into doubt, whether through its since-rescinded freeze on all federal spending or threats to cut off MTA funding if the state doesn’t cooperate with his deportation agenda.
As things stand now, another important leg of the HEAP program — the cooling benefit that helps New Yorkers buy air conditioners during the summer — already routinely runs out of money before the season is over, said Carforo, of WEACT.
“This is the first time in recent memory we’ve run out of HEAP benefits in the winter,” Carforo said. “We run out of HEAP in the summer nearly every year.”
That can have deadly consequences: On average, some 350 New York City residents die of heat stress every year, according to the city, and lack of air conditioning is the biggest reason. (By comparison, the city estimates deaths from cold exposure at about 15 per year, though it says that is likely an undercount.)
Wheelock, of the Public Utility Law Project, said New York needs to be prepared to put more of its own money into utility assistance to help close the gaps around HEAP.
“If there isn’t any federal funding next year, how can we help the people who rely on this?” she asked lawmakers last week. “We need to shore up the programs while we need to build and grow as a state as well.”
Ultimately, she was grateful that New York was able to reopen the program after advocates raised the alarm. “But we have to learn from it,” she said.