MVAC faced with federal funding cuts

MANKATO, Minn. (KEYC) -Another addition to the list of federal programs cut by the Trump administration is the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.

Better known as LIHEAP, the program saw its entire staff cut by the administration, one of many departments that was affected by cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services.

The program provides support to low-income families to pay for utilities like heating and electricity.

The organization responsible for dispersing those funds at the local level is the Minnesota Valley Action Council.

MVAC said that the demand for utility services in the local area is significant, as they see around 7-thousand applicants for the program each year from families across southern Minnesota.

“There’s a lot of need out there, and the program will never be able to fund the entire need,” said MVAC’s Judd Schultz. “It’s just a struggle to pay those energy bills and we do the best we can to help them out.”

MVAC has already received 90-percent of their 2025 LIHEAP funding, and were expecting the rest sometime in April.

That money is guaranteed by law, as it was granted to them by Congress, but now they’re not sure when it will come in, or what the program will look like in the fall when a new run of applications will come in.

“We just spend a lot of time reacting to these changes, we’re not able to be proactive, we don’t see them coming. So the best we can do is just keep doing what we do. Keep helping people. The Department of Commerce will tell us if something changes and then we just need to get that word out as best we can,” said Schultz.

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