They died with the AC off: Why the government pays for heating but not cooling

Millions of Americans are endangered by extreme heat due to federal policies that steer billions of dollars away from the nation’s hottest regions.

At least a dozen government agencies oversee programs that ignore or minimize the threat of extreme heat as rising temperatures shatter historical records across the U.S., an investigation by POLITICO’s E&E News found.

Disregard for the health dangers of heat is embedded in federal laws and regulations written decades ago, when home heating costs were soaring, air conditioning was rare and the risks of climate change were not widely understood.

The programs treat extreme heat as a discomfort rather than today’s deadliest weather events by denying millions of people federal aid to cool their homes and barring homeowners from using tax credits and government-backed mortgages to pay for window air conditioners.

The policies belie the Biden administration’s unprecedented flood of grants, regulations and tax incentives aimed at reducing climate pollution and strengthening the nation against the effects of climate change. The administration has promoted heat safety extensively, proposed workplace heat protection mandates and spent hundreds of billions of dollars on green energy , emissions reductions and energy efficiency.

“We do not currently have the climate that most of our buildings, our laws, policies, formulas and grants were designed around,” said Grace Wickerson, health equity policy manager for the Federation of American Scientists.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Low-income people from Florida to Arizona are forced to turn off air conditioning, live in poorly insulated homes or simply forgo cooling equipment due to longstanding federal policies.

The nation’s disaster apparatus, which has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to protect people and rebuild from storms and other weather-related perils, does not consider extreme heat a catastrophe.

“Natural hazards, including hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, droughts, wildfires, winter storms, and floods, present a significant and varied risk across the country,” says the government’s National Preparedness Goal , omitting the only weather danger that killed more than 2,300 people last year.

The disregard has persisted as temperatures across the U.S. climb to levels never recorded by humans, resulting in 201,000 extreme heat events in the U.S. between 2019 and 2023 — a fourfold increase from 30 years earlier.

“I just don’t think people really grasp how catastrophic the exposure is going to be even within a decade,” said Justin Schott, project manager at the University of Michigan’s Energy Equity Project. “Now, people being hot seems like just a source of discomfort.”

E&E News analyzed thousands of pages of laws, regulations, reports and spending records. Here are the findings:

— Since the 1970s, Congress has penalized warm weather states when allocating $142 billion through a program that pays residential energy bills and a home-weatherization program.

Result: Arizona, Florida and Hawaii have received an average of $131 per person from the two programs. Maine, North Dakota and Vermont have received an average of $982 per person.

— The Federal Emergency Management Agency excludes heat-mitigation from a list of 16 project types that states can undertake with $27 billion FEMA has allocated since 1989 for climate protection. A FEMA guide says the project list is “not comprehensive.”

Result: FEMA has given billions of dollars to roughly 150,000 homeowners to protect their homes from flooding, tornadoes, hurricane winds, earthquakes and wildfire including by installing tornado safe rooms in 42,000 homes. FEMA has not given similar grants to protect people from extreme heat at home and in 2022 rejected a $10 million request by the New York City Housing Authority for air conditioning improvements, calling the project “ineligible.” The agency said it recently provided about $15 million for projects addressing extreme heat.

— Homeowners who buy energy-efficient window air conditioners cannot receive federal tax credits or rebates that are available for efficient central air conditioning and other home equipment, even as the Biden administration vastly expands the credits. Federally insured “energy-efficient mortgages” that finance items such as central air conditioning cannot be used to buy window units.

Result: The policies penalize low-income people and enrich those with higher incomes. Households earning less than $40,000 a year have half of the nation’s 21 million residential air conditioners, federal data show. For households earning $100,000 or more, 78 percent have central air conditioning.

— Agencies use minimal and potentially misleading weather data to measure counties’ vulnerability to extreme heat. The Census Bureau’s Community Resilience Estimates for Heat relies on heat records from a single year — 2022 — to determine which counties are exposed to heat.

Result: In 2021, a heat dome killed 72 people in Multnomah County, Oregon, which includes Portland, and 34 people in King County, Washington, which includes Seattle. Census estimates published in July say both counties have no heat exposure. The Census Bureau did not respond to a request for comment.

Also, FEMA’s National Risk Index relies on National Weather Service heat warnings from 2005 through 2022. That resulted in Miami-Dade County, Florida, receiving “no rating” for heat risk because NWS’ local forecast office had never warned about heat. The office changed its policy in 2023 after NASA reported , “Every summer up to 600 people die in Miami-Dade County, FL, from extreme heat exposure.”

FEMA acknowledged its index “allows for inconsistent reporting practices across the forecast offices.”

— The Department of Housing and Urban Development does not pay air conditioning bills for the nation’s 1.6 million public-housing residents, although it pays for heating, water and electricity not used for cooling.

“The prohibition means that oftentimes residents wouldn’t even turn on their air conditioning in extreme heat because they knew they wouldn’t be able to cover the actual utility costs,” Richard Monocchio, HUD principal deputy assistant secretary in charge of public housing, said in a recent interview. “Some people who funded our programs maybe thought air conditioning was a luxury.”

HUD has taken no official action on a legal petition filed in October 2022 asking the department to start paying air conditioning bills.

“There’s a racism that’s built into all of the policymaking and implementation of things like public housing,” said Lisa Sitkin, supervising attorney of the National Housing Law Project, which advocates for low-income tenants and homeowners. “The residents are obviously poor but also very often Black and brown. There is a devaluing of their physical comfort.”

Monocchio said the administration has taken “historic actions to protect vulnerable families” from climate impacts including HUD “guidance” released in June to encourage local housing authorities to pay for air conditioning.

‘Focused on cold’

Federal heat-safety campaigns that emphasize wearing light clothing, avoiding sun exposure and minimizing physical exertion obscure the truth about heat deaths: Most people die of heat-related causes inside their home.

National Weather Service records dating back to 1996 show that among heat deaths where a location is known, 62 percent of people died indoors, according to an analysis of the records by E&E News.

Only 29 percent occurred outdoors. Nine percent were in automobiles.

“The most important housing characteristic affecting heat vulnerability is the absence of working air conditioning,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a 2020 report on heat response .

“Once considered a luxury,” the Department of Energy says on its website about air conditioning, “this invention is now an essential.”

EPA urges people to consider replacing air conditioners that are more than 10 years old.

Yet the federal program that pays energy costs for low-income households has spent just 7 percent of its assistance on air conditioning bills, repairs and purchases since it began in 1981. Heating bills, repairs and purchases comprised 71 percent of funding.

“Everything we’ve done has been focused on cold weather for quite a while. Funding is all based on that kind of mentality,” said Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), a leading advocate for federal policies that address extreme heat.

People who die from heat-related causes at home fall into two categories — those who weren’t using their air conditioner and those who didn’t have one.

After 72 people died in the Portland, Oregon, area during a heat wave in June 2021, a Multnomah County investigation found that three people died in vehicles and one died outside.

The other 68 died at home.

Yet only 10 of the 68 people who died at home — 15 percent — had air conditioning. The small number reveals a group of people who are mortally threatened by withering heat in contrast to the 79 percent of households in the greater Portland area that have air conditioning.

“Access to air conditioning is a life-saving intervention during extreme heat,” the county concluded. “Lack of air conditioning (AC) was a key driver in mortality.”

“We still at some level of our consciousness believe air conditioning is a luxury and it’s not a necessity,” said Larissa Larsen, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan. “With climate change, we know that’s a contentious assumption at this point.”

Officials in Maricopa County, Arizona, which encompasses Phoenix, found that air conditioners alone do not protect people from extreme heat. Residents must maintain and run the equipment.

Maricopa, with 4.6 million residents, has recorded 819 indoor heat-related deaths since 2011. Unlike in Multnomah County, most of those killed in Maricopa had home air conditioning.

But in 589 deaths — 72 percent of the total — air conditioners were either broken or turned off, county records show.

“A lot of us are really annoyed because heat deaths are preventable,” said Melissa Guardaro, an extreme heat researcher at Arizona State University. “There are laws everywhere about home heating. We need to do the same thing for heat and hot weather and cooling.”

More than any other state, Arizona illustrates the federal inaction on extreme heat.

By a staggering margin, Arizona has had more heat deaths than any state since 2018. Arizona’s indoor heat deaths exceed the combined total of the next four deadliest states — Texas, Nevada, Washington and California, which altogether have more than 10 times as many people, federal records show.

Yet Arizona has received the least amount of money per person from the federal program that helps low-income residents pay their energy bills.

The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program has given Arizona $91 per person since 2001, an E&E News analysis shows. No state has received less money.

Vermont, the best-funded state, has received $921 per resident.

It’s a pattern that extends across the South, pushing states with the hottest weather to help only a small portion of eligible people.

Since 2011, LIHEAP aid was received by 34 percent of all eligible people in Michigan, Vermont and Wisconsin combined.

It went to only 4 percent of eligible people in Arizona, Florida and Texas.

“It has a very anachronistic point of view on heat,” Gallego, the Arizona representative, said of the federal government. “It’s not just something happening in Arizona. There will be more extreme heat deaths happening in Oregon and Washington state. But they’re stuck in some old ways of thinking.”

Property over people

In October 2022, after a heat dome blanketed California while wildfires burned across the state, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) tried to unlock billions of dollars in federal disaster aid using a clever pitch to President Joe Biden.

No president had ever approved a governor’s request for disaster aid to deal with heat — because federal assistance is designed to repair damaged property rather than prevent deaths. Newsom’s gambit would have hit a jackpot by opening the Treasury’s vault.

FEMA had already agreed to pay 75 percent of California’s firefighting costs.

But Newsom wanted more. He contended in a 16-page single-spaced letter to Biden that the heat dome should be a presidential disaster because it had triggered “the explosive spread” of six wildfires that collectively caused “catastrophic damage.”

“What California did was very different,” recalled Cornell University climate expert Alistair Hayden, who in 2022 was division chief of Newsom’s Office of Emergency Services.

Newsom was trying to overcome a problem that had doomed previous disaster requests for heat waves — a lack of property damage.

“A state doesn’t get a presidential declaration when extreme heat occurs,” Sherman Gillums Jr., director of FEMA’s Office of Disability and Integration, noted during a June webinar on extreme heat.

Biden rejected Newsom’s request after FEMA scoffed at his attempt to link the heat dome to the wildfires. Disasters are “discrete events,” FEMA told congressional researchers in April , not “seasonal or general atmospheric conditions.”

“People-centered disasters that cause harm to humans and not to property — we don’t have good systems for measuring those,” Hayden said.

Federal disaster law is similar to other heat-related measures in one important aspect: It was written in the 1970s.

The 1974 Stafford Act says in its most crucial phrase that a natural catastrophe must cause “damage of sufficient severity” to become a major disaster.

“Damage,” according to FEMA, means property damage — not human damage from injuries, illnesses and deaths, which is often enormous during heat waves.

“FEMA is not used to dealing with anything but property damage,” said Jean Su, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. “One of the biggest obstacles they have is to think differently beyond property damage.”

In June, a coalition of environmental and public-health groups petitioned FEMA to make heat waves and wildfire smoke eligible for disaster aid.

“The real push is, FEMA needs to evolve to deal with these climate-fueled events,” said Su, whose group led the petition effort.

A presidential disaster declaration unleashes a flood of help that goes far beyond the FEMA spending of roughly $400 billion in disaster aid since 1992, mostly for repairs and cleanup.

At least $150 billion more in rebuilding money has been allocated after presidential declarations by the Department of Housing and Urban Development , the Small Business Administration, the Federal Transit Administration and the Department of Education .

The largesse makes presidents even more reluctant to declare extreme heat events a disaster.

“There’s a fear of opening that door and realizing how much need there is going to be,” said Wickerson of the Federation of American Scientists. “We don’t have the capacity to add on other disasters.”

Although federal disaster policy ignores the effects of extreme heat on humans, that’s not the case for animals.

The Department of Commerce has given out $250 million since 1994 for 25 disasters to fisheries caused by marine heat waves or abnormally high ocean temperatures, an E&E News analysis of federal records shows.

Since 2012, USDA’s Farm Service Agency has approved 653 livestock and crop disasters caused partly or entirely by heat.

‘No sense of who’s in charge’

In July 2023, as extreme heat killed an estimated 1,130 U.S. residents — the most ever in a single month — Biden vowed to create a “national heat strategy.”

It was finalized a year later, in August 2024, but it’s unclear if the strategy will reverse decades of confusion around who within the government is in charge of blunting the effects of extreme heat — or if anyone is.

“There’s a lack of a coherent governmentwide policy,” said Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association. “There’s no sense of who’s in charge.”

The Congressional Research Service echoed that criticism in an April report : “No federal agency claims responsibility for managing emergency preparedness and response to extreme heat.”

Federal officials and lawmakers have been trying — and failing — for 40 years to make the government more responsive to heat’s dangers.

Lawmakers from warm-weather states have sought since the early 1980s to revise the allocation of LIHEAP funds. The program favors states with the highest heating costs by allocating funds based largely on how often and how far temperatures drop below 65 degrees Fahrenheit.

“You’ve still got a lot of parochial interests,” said Gallego, the Arizona representative.

Southern lawmakers notched an apparent victory in 1984 when Congress agreed to a new funding formula that also accounted for how often and how far temperatures exceeded 65 F. But northern lawmakers effectively blocked the new formula by inserting language that limited its use and prevented any state from having its annual allocation cut.

“Congress has limited the operation of the ‘new’ formula by requiring that the majority of regular funds be distributed using ‘old’ formula percentages,” the Congressional Research Service noted.

“The political support for the program is still coming from the cold weather states,” said Wolfe of the energy assistance group. “Southern states have not been that supportive in general of social welfare programs.”

Other changes to federal policy on extreme heat depend on agencies taking action, which can take years to finalize.

HUD cannot start paying air-conditioning bills for public housing residents without going through a lengthy rulemaking process.

The Census Bureau cannot add questions about air conditioning— or any topic — unless an agency makes a request.

Larsen, the University of Michigan professor, said in a recent essay that a request for air conditioning data should be made by the Administration for Children and Families, the agency within the Department of Health and Human Services that runs LIHEAP.

The agency declined to comment on the suggestion when contacted by E&E News.

“This would help make a better case than we’re able to make now” for addressing extreme heat, Larsen said. “We haven’t kept up our thinking with what our pressing needs are.”

Even a major policy that Biden celebrated in July remains uncertain. Proposed standards to protect workers from extreme heat will not be finalized until 2026 at the earliest and are likely to be dropped if former President Donald Trump wins the presidential election in November.

After getting record funding for LIHEAP after the coronavirus pandemic, Biden requested $4.1 billion in fiscal 2025 — the smallest presidential request since 2017 in current dollars.

“It doesn’t help that the budgets for LIHEAP don’t increase as fast as other budgets,” said Gallego, who is running for Senate in Arizona. “There’s just a lot of political willpower to keep the status quo.”