The climate crisis is at our doorsteps. Following record-breaking temperatures across the globe this past summer, 2026 is shaping up to be one of the hottest years on record, and a supercharged El Niño means 2027 could be even more disastrous.¹ Extreme heat is increasingly a life-threatening danger for millions of US households, who are experiencing longer and more intense heat waves. Utility companies are hiking electricity bills, fossil fuel companies are making record profits, and landlords are failing to make critical repairs. Many working-class families are torn between spending their limited paychecks on essential cooling and basic needs like food, shelter, and healthcare. To ensure universal green, cool homes and address the spiraling dangers of extreme heat, the federal government should dedicate $20 billion to create a tiered “Cool Homes” Program to deliver high-efficiency active and passive cooling technologies to tenants and homeowners across the country at no or low cost, as well as a Cool Homes Energy Rebate.

The Department of Energy (DOE) would administer this program by entering into bulk purchasing agreements with equipment manufacturers to achieve economies of scale and cost savings. The Cool Homes Program would prioritize home interventions that can be quickly installed and deliver immediate relief. Where feasible, plug-and-play balcony solar panels could be distributed to minimize increased energy cost burdens—a major barrier that working-class communities deal with today. To directly address the intersection of extreme heat and affordability, the proposal includes a Cool Homes Energy Rebate to ensure working-class families can afford to operate their new or existing ACs and heat pumps. The program would be funded by a windfall profits tax on the fossil fuel industry, placing the burden squarely on the industries and corporations driving economic and climate catastrophe.

While extreme heat is a hazard that demands policy action across multiple domains of life, from work to school, home is where the burdens are often most viscerally felt.² Glaring inequalities in outdoor surface temperatures in communities across the US—mediated by race, class, and the built environment—have been systematically documented; these inequalities also surface indoors, yet are too often hidden from view.³ The reality is that more than 13 million US households report feeling uncomfortably hot at home for an extended period of time.⁴ Research demonstrates that most heat-related fatalities happen at home, where most people spend the vast majority of their time.⁵ Besides the unacceptable tragedy of preventable deaths, high indoor temperatures and humidity degrade sleep quality, wellness, mental health, and physical functioning. Non-fatal heat stroke can also have severe long-term health consequences, including chronic kidney disease, mobility impairments, and increased risk of heart attacks.⁶

Furthermore, the danger of extreme heat has been increasing due to climate change but also due to demographic factors like an aging population. A 2025 study found deaths from extreme heat rose by 50 percent from 2000 to 2020.⁷ Extended exposure to heat stress has been shown to raise the risk of death, particularly for those with chronic diseases and other preexisting health conditions.⁸ Research has shown that the health consequences of extreme heat are unequally distributed, with Black and brown working-class households suffering the most. These impacts are heightened for tenants, especially those living in rent-restricted affordable housing units and manufactured housing.⁹

Extreme heat compounds the longstanding problems working-class families already face with low-quality housing. Millions of people in the United States experience substandard housing conditions, including poor insulation, leaky roofs, dangerous mold, pests, and inefficient windows. Low-income households are almost twice as likely to experience persistent repair needs than households at or above 200 percent of the federal poverty guidelines. A 2023 Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia report estimated the cost of addressing physical housing deficiencies nationwide at $149.3 billion.¹⁰ Access to cooling equipment is also stratified by class. According to analysis of data collected by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), nearly 20 percent of low-income households lack cooling in their homes—more than twice the rate of high-income households.¹¹ Without dedicated support, green home cooling upgrades are out of reach for many US residents.

In places where extreme heat is common (or increasingly so), cooling is no longer a “luxury” but a necessity that must be built into already-squeezed monthly budgets. Roughly a quarter of US households are energy cost-burdened, meaning they spend more than 6 percent of their income on energy.¹² Large hikes in residential electricity prices have exacerbated this crisis. Analysts have estimated US residents will, on average, spend roughly $800 on electricity between June and September 2026, a jump of 10.5 percent in comparison to the previous year.¹³ This is most acutely felt in states like Arizona, where residents are estimated to pay $1,060 this summer on electricity, up nearly 14 percent from last year. According to the EIA, electricity consumption for air conditioning accounted for roughly 19 percent of electricity consumption in US homes, and the EIA’s analysis highlights how “weather remains the main source of uncertainty in our forecasts for summer residential electricity bills.”¹⁴

Despite decades of advocacy, the federal government has largely avoided taking meaningful responsibility for mitigating or responding to extreme heat, with many of the obligations pushed down to state, local, tribal, and territorial governments.¹⁵ As a result, the governance burden has fallen on underfunded public health entities, emergency response services, non-profits, and mutual aid initiatives attempting to triage the most acute manifestations of this life-threatening crisis.

A Cool Homes Program administered by the DOE would finally tackle the interconnected issues of utility costs, extreme heat, and healthy homes. The program would allow families to select from a menu of interventions that would be best for their housing and their regional climatic zone. Cooling measures would include both “active cooling” measures (dual-use heat pumps, high-efficiency air conditioners, and ceiling and window fans) and “passive cooling” measures (exterior shutters, awnings, exterior shading, and trees).¹⁶ The combination is critical, given the importance of pairing the more immediate, active cooling measures with long-lasting, passive approaches. These passive measures help prevent overheated homes in the first place, thus reducing the need to rely solely on active measures, which consume electricity and can impose utility cost burdens.¹⁷ Nevertheless, active cooling measures are necessary for public health, and their attendant cost burden is especially borne by working-class households and Black and brown communities.¹⁸ To address the affordability concern, the program would also offer working-class households an electric cooling rebate to ensure electricity bills are not an obstacle.

The $20 billion Cool Homes Program would be tiered, operating with a mix of targeted measures to ensure all US households have the equipment to keep cool and healthy. Cool Homes is designed to address both the operating and equipment cost dimensions of extreme indoor heat, with household income eligibility for both aspects of the program set at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty guidelines.

On the capital side, Cool Homes is flexible enough to address the tiered needs of working-class households by offering an average of $300 of capital funds. Assistance would fund the cost of purchasing—and, as needed, installing—a combination of high-efficiency ACs, balcony solar, and the mass adoption of passive cooling measures like external window shutters and solar screens. The program would partially cover the cost of bigger-ticket items, such as dual-use heat pumps. On the operating side, households would be entitled to a one-time $300 Cool Homes Energy Rebate via direct deposit or check. While this proposal emphasizes delivering fast directly to households, it should also be paired with an ambitious green retrofit program directing massive investment into nonmarket owners and operators of social housing, such as the Green New Deal for Public Housing legislation.¹⁹

The DOE is a good fit for running this program, as it builds on its institutional experience advancing home energy efficiency through implementing the federal Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP) alongside state and local governments as well as local non-profits. Funding would be secured via an excess profits tax on the fossil fuel industry, redistributing the windfall profits the industry accumulated following the destructive US–Israel war on Iran. Similar legislative proposals estimate this tax would net $33 billion in funding annually.²⁰

Tenants are structurally disadvantaged in addressing extreme indoor heat, as they typically have much less agency than homeowners to make improvements to their homes and are subject to the whims of their profit-maximizing landlords. In contrast to other programs that too often leave tenants behind, Cool Homes directly addresses this challenge by intentionally selecting window ACs, shutters, and awnings that are “tenant-friendly” and avoid landlord involvement. Yet in some cases, landlord coordination would be required for installation, and local program administrators would be involved to support tenants through this process.

Equipment distribution is another important element of the Cool Homes Program design. The DOE should set up a simple and easy-to-navigate website where cooling equipment could be ordered by mail or picked up in-person at a local hardware store or Cool Homes distribution site.²¹ An interactive questionnaire could also guide users through a series of questions that would provide recommendations for what combination of interventions to select from the menu of options based on their local climate, housing typology, whether they own or rent their homes, and other factors. Local non-profit partners will also be important to Cool Homes implementation, assisting with program outreach, ensuring program accessibility, and coordinating proper installation of cooling measures.

A Cool Homes Program would increase governmental capacity to address indoor extreme heat by focusing on in-house capacity, bulk procurement, and direct-to-household strategies. It would correct for some of the headaches of WAP and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provisions, including low uptake among eligible households, complicated paperwork, limited benefits for tenants, and problematic cost–benefit analysis that discourage needed upgrades.²² There is also precedent for this direct distribution of critical supplies to households by the federal government, including the Biden administration's distribution of COVID-19 tests via an easy-to-access website during the pandemic.

This federal immediate relief program is also an opportunity for driving longer-term Green Industrial Policy, making a market for new renter-friendly cooling equipment.²³ Examples range from cutting the costs of manufacturing novel window heat pumps through (again) invoking the Defense Production Act to encouraging the development of more renter-friendly external shutters and awnings.²⁴ Depending on existing logistical capabilities, the federal government could also partner with certain vendors or organizations to assist with equipment distribution to accelerate execution while administrative capabilities are being built out.

More broadly, a Cool Homes Program would create an entry point to demand further federal government involvement in green home climate adaptation. Rather than limiting green home improvements and cooling to the wealthy, this program would also enable working-class tenants and homeowners to improve their quality of life and cut their energy costs. On the issue of extreme heat, it would demonstrate one example of taking the issue seriously and would spur further policy responses toward achieving a universal right to cooling that extends from home to work to school and beyond.