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The funding, however, is limited, said Victoria Arredondo, program manager at the Community Action Corporation of South Texas, known as CACOST, the agency that administers the energy assistance program for Cameron, Willacy and Starr counties.
Each state administers its own program, and in Texas, a household is eligible if it does not exceed 150% of the federal poverty guidelines — or $32,460 per year for a family of two.
“There is such a big need in the Rio Grande Valley,” Arredondo said. “We don’t have the funds to help everybody.”
Like Alanis, Arturo Gómez got utility assistance only once. The year he got it, he and his wife were able to turn on the A/C at night and slept better. They haven’t been able to get help since because of lack of funding.
The money often runs out in Texas before eligible families can receive help.
In Cameron and Willacy counties, for example, about 42,000 households qualify for assistance, but CACOST was able to help less than 8% — about 3,000 in Cameron County and just 135 in Willacy County in 2025, Arredondo said.
Funding also falls short in Hidalgo County. More than 100,000 families qualify for utility assistance, but the Hidalgo County Community Service Agency receives only enough funds for about 8,000 families, said Jaime Longoria, the agency’s executive director.
Longoria recalls recently speaking with a client in his 70s who said his $500 rent and $360 summer electric bill in themselves surpass the $700 he gets each month from Social Security.
Longoria said the man told him, “By the end of the month, we are surviving from whatever we can get from the food bank.”
Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association in Washington, D.C., said LIHEAP has fixed funding, unlike other key social assistance programs such as the Supplemental Assistance Program, or SNAP, which provides food stamps to all those who qualify. Even SNAP has not been spared from the Trump administration cuts, however, with the number of eligible families being reduced.
“The problem we are facing is that [LIHEAP] is severely underfunded,” Wolfe said, noting that it only has enough money to cover about one in six eligible households.
Residents of hotter states such as Texas are at a further disadvantage. LIHEAP was designed to help with heating costs in winter, so the funds are often depleted by the time hot weather rolls around, according to the MIT study.
“It has effectively not really changed since the 1980s, in terms of how they allocate the money across different states,” said Christopher Roland Knittel, a climate and sustainability professor at MIT and a co-author of the study. “Yet the world has changed a lot since the 1980s.”
In the Valley, families could get anywhere from $1,200 to $1,800 a year for utility costs, but those dollars stretch thin with summer bills in the hundreds of dollars each month.
Arredondo said applications from residents of Cameron and Willacy counties have spiked in the first half of 2026, meaning the funds will be exhausted even more quickly this year.
“When the funding runs out, the program stops,” Wolfe said. “When Texas uses its allocation, that’s the end of the program for the year in Texas.”
CACOST also handles the weatherization program for 13 South Texas counties. A weatherized home can save a family around $300 in a year, but, once again, the funding is limited, said Doug Hairgrove, director of the weatherization program and the Community Action Comprehensive Energy Assistance Program at CACOST.
In 2025, CACOST was able to weatherize 293 homes in Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr and Willacy counties, according to data shared with Public Health Watch.
“We could probably do eight times as many if we had the funds and the workforce,” Hairgrove said.
Ongoing struggles
For the elderly in the Rio Grande Valley, the rising energy costs often mean going without air conditioning altogether.
Perez, with the South Texas Emergency Care Foundation, is still troubled by the memory of finding the Harlingen couple dead inside their home more than two years ago.
Perez had their deaths in mind when the foundation started its Community Health Paramedicine program, the first in South Texas, in which paramedics help residents manage their health issues and spot problems before they need emergency care. Among the red flags: people who don’t have A/C or need help paying their electric bill.
For now, Gómez plans to keep using A/C only during the day, even though he and his wife struggle with health conditions such as hypertension.
They easily meet the definition of “energy poverty”; a recent electric bill of $250 took about 12% of their household income that month. But with no help in sight, they’ll continue to turn off the A/C at night.
Gómez feels they have no other choice.
“Running the A/C 24 hours per day,” he said, “it’s just a bunch of money.”
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