Shauna Thomas Needed More Help, Not Less

In his seminal book about the social, spatial, economic, and political factors that made the 1995 Chicago heat wave the deadliest in US history, New York University sociologist Eric Klinenberg detailed how efforts to “reinvent government” through neoliberal austerity and privatization — a precursor to Musk’s DOGE blitz — left people increasingly atomized and vulnerable, ultimately exacerbating mortality. A whopping 739 individuals perished in a single week, with isolated seniors in low-income and predominantly black neighborhoods hit hardest.

Four months ago, at the behest of DOGE and OMB, Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr laid off thousands of employees, including the vast majority of HHS staffers working on heat-related issues. The entire team responsible for administering the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which helps about six million poor, elderly, and disabled households maintain safe indoor temperatures every year, was placed on administrative leave on April 1 and eventually fired.

In June, Shauna Thomas died, alone, in her St Louis–area apartment during a heat wave intensified by fossil fuel pollution. Thomas was found dead in her scorching apartment on June 23. Her utility, Ameren Missouri, had shut off her power twelve days earlier due to nonpayment, according to St Louis Public Radio.

Thomas was nearly helped by Missouri’s Hot Weather Law, which temporarily prohibits utility shutoffs when a temperature above 95 degrees Fahrenheit or a heat index above 105 degrees Fahrenheit is expected. The law was triggered on June 20, but Thomas’s electricity had already been cut off by then. The fifty-five-year-old lost access to air conditioning on June 11, when the high was “only” 88 degrees Fahrenheit — revealing the fatal irrationality of allowing disconnections between heat waves. Health risks exist at heat indexes far below 105 degrees.

Following pressure from advocacy groups and some House and Senate lawmakers, HHS in May released roughly $400 million in remaining LIHEAP funding. (About 90 percent of the $4.1 billion Congress approved for fiscal year 2025 had already been sent to states in October 2024 to help defray the costs of home heating during the winter.) According to Grist, HHS temporarily rehired one of the dismissed workers to help determine the disbursement of the final 10 percent.

Still, that move doesn’t invalidate concerns about program continuity. As a coalition of environmental justice groups pointed out in late May, the Trump administration had forced state and local agencies “to operate under uncertainty, delaying outreach and enrollment while vulnerable residents face another summer of dangerous heat without assurance of relief.”

The Trump administration’s war on LIHEAP does not appear to have contributed to Thomas’s death because by early April, Missouri had already allocated its LIHEAP funding through the end of September. Nevertheless, her tragic passing is a cautionary tale about the lethal consequences of underinvesting in energy assistance and heat protections amid soaring temperatures. Before Musk brought his chainsaw to Washington, LIHEAP was already woefully underfunded, resulting in millions of people not receiving lifesaving resources (currently, only one in five eligible households secures aid).

The need for those resources is about to skyrocket. Killer Heat in the United States, a 2019 report from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), outlines how extreme heat is projected to increase nationwide in the coming decades. An interactive data tool and story map show that on our current trajectory, we should expect a mid-century (2036–2065) average of ninety-four days per year with a heat index above 90 degrees Fahrenheit and thirty-seven days per year with a heat index above 105 degrees (including three days above 127 degrees) in St Louis County, where Thomas died. That’s up from historical (1971–2000) averages of forty-eight days and four days with “feels like” temperatures above 90 and 105 degrees, respectively. By the late twenty-first century (2070–2099), St Louis County is expected to see 119 days per year with a heat index above 90 degrees and sixty-four days per year with a heat index above 105 degrees (including thirteen days above 127 degrees).

Expanding fossil fuels and undermining the nation’s uneven patchwork of home energy assistance is precisely the opposite of what should be happening right now.

“When we see tragic heat-related deaths, like that of Ms Thomas, driven by the dangerous combination of fossil-fueled climate change and access to cooling being cut off,” said Juan Declet-Barreto, senior social scientist for climate vulnerability at the Union of Concerned Scientists, “it underscores the urgency of protecting vital programs like LIHEAP and addressing the vital necessity of reducing heat-trapping emissions.”

Currently, only twenty-one states and Washington, DC, have protections against hot-weather-related utility shutoffs. This underlines the need for increased LIHEAP funding (and a concomitant requirement that states help energy-burdened households with cooling in addition to heating) along with a federal moratorium on disconnections amid extreme heat.

Despite being supported by three-quarters of all voters, including a majority of Republicans, LIHEAP is on OMB’s chopping block for fiscal year 2026. The White House has proposed completely eradicating the program, which constitutes a miniscule 0.4 percent of the $1 trillion military budget sought by Trump.

In Russell Vought’s cruel, and misguided, opinion, LIHEAP is “unnecessary.” Notably, the Senate Appropriations Committee recently approved a $20 million increase in LIHEAP funding for the next fiscal year. But even if Congress declines to defund LIHEAP, the program is still at risk; without adequate staff, Trump’s HHS could refuse to disburse money — a real possibility considering Vought’s ongoing threats to unlawfully withhold congressionally appropriated funds.

Trump’s Climate Plan: Bake the Working Class

The federal government has never done an adequate job of protecting people from extreme heat. While it was a far cry from the robust, whole-of-government effort needed to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and redress lethal inequality simultaneously, former president Joe Biden’s administration began to take some belated steps in the right direction. Trump, by contrast, has moved swiftly to undo his predecessor’s limited progress. And it’s not only LIHEAP that is under attack. Trump’s anti-climate crusade and federal workforce purge has undermined the government’s capacity to tackle this public health crisis writ large.

Last year, the White House Interagency Working Group on Extreme Heat and the National Integrated Heat Health Information System (NIHHIS) — launched in 2015 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the CDC — published a National Heat Strategy “to build a heat-resilient nation and promote heat resilience globally.” Agency-specific efforts to implement the plan were underway in early 2025 but have “stalled,” according to the Federation of American Scientists. The Trump administration took the plan offline, and most of the leaders who developed it either left or were pushed out of their posts. If Congress approves Trump’s proposed budget cuts, even in part, additional NIHHIS staff could be laid off, which would further degrade federal capacity to address extreme heat.

In 2023, Biden announced that NOAA and NIHHIS would establish, with funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, the Center for Collaborative Heat Modeling and the Center for Heat Resilient Communities. In May, however, Trump withdrew funding for both centers, thus hindering plans to better assess and manage extreme heat risks. Future work of this kind is in jeopardy due to Trump’s proposed cuts to NOAA’s research budget.

Last year, Biden’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) published a proposed federal heat standard designed to protect workers from dangerously high temperatures — more than fifty years after experts at the CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) first recommended such a rule. Trump has not committed to finalizing the rule. OSHA held a series of informal hearings on the proposal in June and early July, but there has been silence since then, as the American Prospect reported recently.

As OSHA heard testimony during the same June heat wave that killed Shauna Thomas, at least three workers died from extreme heat: an outdoor worker in Atlanta; Mitchell Huggins, an umpire in Sumter, South Carolina; and Jacob Taylor, a postal worker in Dallas. They are among the dozens of workers in the United States who suffer occupational heat-related deaths each year, and like other heat-related fatalities, those are vastly undercounted. As with utility shutoffs, lifesaving protections for outdoor workers vary geographically, with just seven states providing safeguards to agricultural, construction, and other laborers. Despite the broad popularity of extreme heat protections, Kentucky recently followed Florida and Texas in preempting state and local efforts to shield workers amid federal inaction.

Experts have warned that Trump’s purge of federal heat experts, including NIOSH personnel whose research is indispensable to developing heat regulations, could make it easier for Trump to kill the rule — or enact a weakened one, which appears to be the preference of some corporate interests. Another concern is that David Keeling, Trump’s nominee to lead OSHA, will thwart strong protections given his lethal track record as a former UPS and Amazon executive.

Other Biden-era initiatives to reduce heat-related morbidity and mortality have been undercut or remain at risk. The Inflation Reduction Act opened up more than $1 billion in grant funding to increase access to trees and green spaces in neglected neighborhoods across the country. This was part of an effort to provide relief from urban heat islands — areas, typically in less affluent parts of cities, where concentrations of asphalt and industrial pollution, combined with lack of tree canopies and other greenscapes, push temperatures higher. However, Trump’s illegal spending freeze disrupted the US Forest Service’s urban and community forestry programs, and his proposed budget cuts would terminate them.

In another attack on extreme heat mitigation and adaptation, Trump’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in April canceled the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program, which pursued disaster risk reduction through green urban design. Vought went so far as to claw back more than $3 billion for projects that had been approved but not completed.

During his July 23 congressional testimony about the Trump administration’s abysmal response to the deadly Texas floods, acting FEMA administrator David Richardson said that the White House eliminated BRIC because it was being used to fund things like “shade at bus stops.” His incredulous delivery confirmed that in the eyes of the Trump administration, the provision of lifesaving relief from extreme heat is a frivolous waste of money. (In a July 25 court document, Richardson claimed that “FEMA has not ended the BRIC program,” but the judge was unconvinced.)

Even though extreme heat kills more people every year than all other forms of severe weather, FEMA has failed to treat heat waves with the same seriousness as tornadoes, wildfires, hurricanes, and floods. To a significant degree, this reflects Klinenberg’s observation that “spectacular and camera-ready” weather events “destroy valuable property” while “heat waves kill the expendable poor,” including people who are homeless or incarcerated.

Labor, environmental justice, and public health advocates have long pushed lawmakers to amend the Stafford Act to explicitly define extreme heat as a “major disaster.” But don’t expect any improvements under the Trump administration. Not long after Richardson scoffed at the prospect of improving shade at bus stops, we learned he wasn’t even aware that extreme heat is responsible for most weather-related deaths. That’s precisely the combination of Republican ignorance and callousness that is already killing people and putting more of us at risk of premature death every day.