Americans face a grim choice this winter — thanks to Trump

What happened

Americans who heat their homes with oil face a grim choice: absorb sharply higher bills, cut other spending, or lower the thermostat to potentially unsafe levels. AlterNet reports that heating oil had risen from roughly $2.50 per gallon at the same point in 2025 to $4.63, with prices projected to exceed $6 by deep winter.

The National Energy Assistance Directors Association estimated that affected households could spend about 50% more than the previous winter—an average increase of roughly $878, pushing seasonal costs above $2,600. The Energy Information Administration projected a smaller but still substantial 21% increase. The burden is concentrated in the Northeast, which consumes more than 80% of the country’s home-heating oil.

AlterNet attributes the underlying price shock primarily to wars affecting global oil production and distribution. The Trump administration did not create that entire shock, but it weakened the federal program intended to help poor households withstand it: the administration fired the dedicated federal staff of the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program in April 2025 and proposed eliminating its funding. LIHEAP remained operational through state administrators, while the Department of Health and Human Services said it retained the capacity to distribute funds appropriated by Congress.

The headline overreaches

“Thanks to Trump” is politically satisfying and analytically incomplete. The reporting itself says the oil-price increase stems from disrupted global markets, including conflicts in the Middle East and the war between Russia and Ukraine. Blaming the president for the entire price surge obscures the actual chain of events.

Trump’s responsibility is narrower and more concrete. His administration stripped LIHEAP of its dedicated federal staff and sought to eliminate the program while heating costs were rising. That is not the cause of expensive oil. It is a decision to make expensive oil more punishing for households with the fewest financial options.

Loose blame weakens a strong indictment. The relevant charge is not that Trump controls every refinery, shipping route, and war. It is that his administration used its institutional authority to degrade a layer of protection against a foreseeable hardship.

Power sits in Washington

Households have almost no leverage over global oil prices, regional pipeline infrastructure, or federal assistance. Independent heating-oil customers also lack some protections commonly imposed on regulated utilities. Telling them to budget better would be scapegoating people for conditions they did not create and cannot negotiate away.

The Trump administration had power over federal staffing and budget priorities. Congress retained authority over appropriations. HHS controlled implementation of the money Congress made available. Those are the institutions with agency; the family deciding between heat and groceries is the object of their decisions, not a co-author of the crisis.

The administration’s assurance that HHS could distribute funds without LIHEAP’s dedicated staff does not erase the staffing decision. It merely states that the department believed it could still perform the work. Whether that reduced structure would delay or impair assistance was not established by AlterNet’s reporting, but removing specialized capacity during an affordability crisis plainly increases administrative risk.

States inherit the damage

Governors were already assembling emergency responses. Massachusetts unlocked nearly $150 million in relief and expanded assistance to middle-class oil-heating households. Rhode Island directed $28 million in reserves toward electric-bill relief, while Maine announced $40 million in automatic electricity discounts for low-income residents.

Those measures show state governments using available power, but they also expose the familiar federal maneuver: weaken a national support system, then leave states to construct uneven substitutes from emergency funds. Geography begins to determine protection. A household’s exposure depends not only on income and fuel type, but on whether its state has the money, legal tools, and political willingness to intervene.

Some of the announced relief also targets electricity rather than heating oil. That matters because oil customers face the steepest projected increase and often buy from independent dealers outside conventional utility-protection systems. “Energy relief” is not automatically relief for the households at the center of this story.

Cruelty through administrative retreat

The political pattern is not mysterious. Government can intensify hardship without ordering anyone to turn down the heat. It can fire the staff who administer aid, propose erasing the program, and insist that the remaining bureaucracy is sufficient. The harm then appears as household sacrifice rather than federal policy.

That is how deliberate retrenchment is laundered into unfortunate circumstance. The war-driven price shock is external; the decision to weaken LIHEAP is not. Conflating them lets the administration evade responsibility for its own choices while allowing critics to overclaim responsibility for forces beyond its control.

The systemic error is treating assistance as optional charity after markets deliver pain. Energy insecurity is structured by infrastructure, regulation, federal capacity, and political allocation. When officials dismantle capacity precisely where vulnerable households depend on it, the resulting suffering is not an administrative misunderstanding. It is the foreseeable consequence of who government chose to protect—and who it chose to leave exposed.

Thanks to Alter Net

Source: Americans face a grim choice this winter — thanks to Trump