Milwaukee losing another federal lifeline. Impact will be swift and devastating.

Yahoo

15-04-2025

On April 1, the Trump administration fired the entire federal staff responsible for administering the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, a $4.1 billion program that helps millions of families afford heat and electricity. Starting today We Energies, the most profitable monopoly utility in the state of Wisconsin, will end its winter shutoff moratorium.
Amidst a manufactured crisis at the federal level, our utilities will soon start cutting off power for tens of thousands of working-class residents at the very same time that emergency relief services lose all capacity to respond. For reference, in 2023, the federal program restored or prevented nearly 85,000 disconnections across the state.
This means that thousands of Milwaukeeans will face imminent (and entirely avoidable) blackouts, while $378 million in federal relief sits untouched – a ruthless efficiency that requires exceedingly small sacrifice from those with obscene political influence and concentrated wealth, and that exacts life-altering consequences from those of us with neither.
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We ought to call this what it so clearly is: a coordinated assault on the poor because of their poverty. Congress allocated the money. Hard-working families need the help. Instead, political sabotage by multi-billionaires in the federal executive branch and profit-maximizing imperatives of multi-billion-dollar investor-owned utility have cast literal darkness across our neighborhoods – conditions that, as study after study confirms, increase winter mortality, worsen respiratory illness, destabilize housing and break apart families.
Abandonment and punishment rarely, if ever, generate wholeness or healing. When the former happen simultaneously, the odds shrink to zero that the latter can ever emerge peacefully. What arises in the organized absence of safety or care are the very social phenomena – poverty, eviction, homelessness and so-called lawlessness – that then justify the further marginalization and increased criminalization of those abandoned by the state and punished by private corporations.
In Wisconsin, the state not only allows We Energies to punish the poor in this way, but it actively enables it through relaxed regulation, guaranteed profit structures and a Public Service Commission that has so far refused to enforce meaningful accountability in true service to the public.
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Energy insecurity doesn't just dim the lights – it shortens lifespans. And in We Energies' service territory, it compounds the racialized energy burden that already forces Black and brown households to pay a disproportionate share of their income to keep the heat on.
Meanwhile, the very institutions tasked with ensuring public well-being continue to collapse around us. Last year, the Social Development Commission – once a vital anchor in the heart of Lindsay Heights – closed its doors. Whatever the stated reasons, the outcome remains the same: another critical site of support in a historically divested neighborhood disappeared, reinforcing a broader pattern of systemic retreat in the places that need the most investment.
That same pattern plays out now, as federal agencies dissolve essential energy assistance programs under the guise of efficiency, while our Public Service Commission stalls on the very solution it already agreed was necessary. In 2022, the Commission directed We Energies to work with Walnut Way and other rate case intervenors to co-develop an alternative low-income assistance program in response to Wisconsin's affordability crisis and racialized disparities in energy burden.
The community's clear demand: a Percentage of Income Payment Program that would cap energy bills at 2% of household income. Nearly two and a half years later, the need has only grown more urgent – yet the PSC has failed to act. As disconnections resume and federal help evaporates, that failure now puts thousands of lives at risk.
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As a society, we cannot normalize a government that abandons us under the myth that we've somehow been given too much, nor accept a utility that punishes us for not having enough. We cannot treat disconnection, displacement or death as the price of policy inertia. We must name what's happening, resist it and build something that reflects our values of dignity, justice and love.
At Walnut Way, a community-based organization in its 25th year of supporting the residents of Lindsay Heights, we organize, invest and build. Our efforts, from installing solar panels and rain barrels to raising awareness about the energy burden and organizing for structural change, offer a roadmap for community-rooted infrastructure that meets energy needs, keeps people housed and creates local jobs. We're not waiting on a bailout. We're building the alternative.
We must stop managing the fallout of abandonment and start confronting the systems that produce it. We don't need nonprofits to patch holes in a sinking ship – we need public institutions to be accountable to the people they were built to serve. And we need them to follow the lead of those already doing the work.
The safety net didn't break. The state is cutting it, and the corporations are pulling the threads. And now the lives of our elders, our children and our communities hang in the balance. So yes – we mend. But we do more than repair what was never designed to hold us. We build something stronger, rooted in care, in justice, and in our refusal to abandon each other. Not just to survive the storm, but to weatherproof the future for all of us.
Bryan Rogers is the Environmental Justice Director at Walnut Way and leads the Environmental Justice and Infrastructure Initiative, a statewide formation advancing energy justice and community-led solutions to environmental racism and systemic disinvestment.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Poor people will suffer from coordinated assault on poverty | Opinion