Today, Marilyn shows how the Missouri Governor, the legislature, the President, and Congress have acted to transfer massive amounts of wealth from the working poor to the utility companies who funded their campaigns. During Lucas’ US Senate run, many people asked me why I decided to join him on the campaign trail all over Missouri. After all, not every spouse is interested, or thrilled, about the constant travel, the late nights, and the sacrifices a family makes to cover every corner of the state and meet as many people as possible. On top of that, at the beginning I was pregnant with our little boy Harvey. Later, we had a newborn to care for, I was juggling my master’s degree, and I still had a full-time job. On paper, it probably looked like the worst timing in the world. But my answer was always the same: once you’ve seen what I saw across this state, you can’t unsee it, and when the people in power don’t care about the struggle and suffering, it’s the job of the rest of us to pick up the slack. On our travels I saw, up close, how Missouri leaders were letting their campaign funders strip our state and the people here, who I’d come to love, for parts. The people they were destroying, senior citizens, mothers, workers, young adults, children, frequently came to us with tears in their eyes about situations they couldn’t control and couldn’t overcome. In our travels, I really fell in love with Missouri and Missourians. With the farmland and the people who work it. With the stories shared over kitchen tables and in folding chairs at town halls. I fell in love with the stories, the conversations, the connections we made across the state. The more I listened, the more I knew: I wasn’t going to walk away from them. That just isn’t in me. I’ve mentioned in past posts that I grew up on a farm, and I’m not trying to repeat myself here, but I can’t leave behind the fact that my heart sank each time we visited rural communities and felt how deep the worry and sadness ran. You could see the weight in people’s faces, not just worry, but the kind of quiet desperation that comes from feeling you’ve been doing everything right, and still the deck is stacked against you. And that sinking feeling is about to get much worse throughout our state because one of the things that people brought up the most, their inability to pay their utility bills, is about to get even more impossible thanks to the people in charge of our state and country. In Missouri, our newly elected governor, Mike Kehoe, alongside his pals in the state legislature, pushed through Senate Bill 4, an energy package that critics warn will raise costs for families while cushioning utility profits. Under SB 4, utilities can now pass the cost of building new power plants onto customers, even before those plants are up and running, a practice known as Construction Work in Progress, which voters banned back in 1976. Despite the risks, Governor Kehoe signed it on April 9, 2025, under the promise of “securing Missouri’s energy future,” even as consumer advocates warned it would drive household bills up by as much as $1,115 a year. At the federal level, this past April, RFK Jr. fired the entire Missouri staff of the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, otherwise known as LIHEAP. A program that helped about 216,000 Missourians pay their utility bills in 2023 and also provides funding to weatherize and make homes more energy efficient, saving us all. And yet the President’s FY26 Budget for LIHEAP proposes eliminating $4 billion in assistance to about 6 million very low-income households that rely on LIHEAP to pay their home heating and cooling bills. This hits Missouri hard, across just the eight counties Central Missouri Community Action, a LIHEA service provider, serves, for example, nearly 14,000 individuals in nearly 5,000 households utilized LIHEAP funds to keep lights on and temperature controlled. The majority of them are people with disabilities or elderly households. This comes at the worst possible time considering that one in six families are already behind on their energy bills. For them, it comes down to choosing between groceries, medicine, and the power bill. Katrina Metzler, executive director of the National Energy & Utility Affordability Coalition, summed it up bluntly: “My fear is that quietly in their homes, grandmothers will die this summer”.” As for winter, there is no indication of anyone new being hired to run the program or get utility funding to those who are in danger without it. But it doesn’t end there. Passed on July 4, The One Big Beautiful Bill Act makes sweeping changes to federal energy policy that benefit fossil fuel interests while reversing investments in energy efficiency and renewables. Here is what the bill means for energy efficiency and energy costs in a nutshell:
The corporate gains and moving from renewable energy are costing us, nearly 60 utilities across the country have already raised or proposed rate hikes in 2025 alone, representing $38.3 billion in electricity customer costs and $3.5 billion in gas customer hikes, amounting to 56.7 million electric households and 26 million gas customers impacted. In other words, while claiming to cut taxes, the Missouri Governor and President Trump are actually massively increasing taxes for the middle class and poor through their utility bills, and transferring that money directly to fossil fuel and utility company shareholders. It’s an American tragedy, and we could have so much better. One thing that never failed to excite the crowd was Lucas’s The Marshall Plan for the Midwest. It was his way of thinking through how we could keep our region on the map by investing in the build-out and production of the next generation of energy right here in Missouri, to create good jobs, improve the efficiency of older buildings and homes, and save everyday people money. The ideas were practical, things that could help lower utility bills, modernize what we already have, and give families a little breathing room instead of watching their paychecks vanish into outdated systems. The plan was based on a knowledge of Missouri and what it is really like here on the ground where older homes are harder to keep cool in the summer and warm in the winter, and there are more of them in historically red-lined neighborhoods. The “St. Louis Energy Burden Report” dives into census tracts across the state, using real data from Missouri utility bills to understand how costs overlap with factors like race, income and even rates of childhood asthma. The report found that residents with an average income of about $35,000 pay $2,408 a year for utilities, while residents with an average income of about $85,000 pay $2,082 a year, according to the report. Meaning that low-income Missourians pay more utilities than wealthier counterparts, which seems counterintuitive since higher income people usually have larger houses. But it happens because people who are lower-income live in older more broken-down housing, which is significantly less efficient. Since lower-income people are also more likely to be renters who pay their own utilities but don’t own their homes, the decisions about energy efficiency or appliances in their homes aren’t up to them, but to their landlords. If you live anywhere in the Midwest, you’ve felt it already. Your energy bill is climbing fast. A big part of that is that heat waves are becoming more dangerous, especially here in Missouri, where summer temperatures have been climbing steadily over the years. But another part of that is the reason that the tech bros have buddied up so much with President Trump and the Republican Party: their insatiable thirst for energy. U.S. electricity demand, after being flat for nearly two decades, is projected to grow at about 1.7% per year through 2026, with commercial and industrial demand rising faster. New data centers, especially those serving AI and cloud infrastructure, now consume 4.4% of U.S. electricity and are expected to triple by 2028, according to the US Department of Energy. And, of course, much of that cost is being picked up by the public, the working poor, subsidizing the Big Tech’s power bill. New power plants like the natural gas plants that some utilities are proposing to serve new data centers, are extremely expensive to build. And when build new plants, expand old ones, build transmission lines, or update grids for AI or data centers, the costs are largely passed on to everyday ratepayers. For example, In Louisiana, customers of the state's major public utility could be responsible for $5 billion in costs associated with new natural gas plants and transmission lines needed to serve a Meta data center. And as we all know, the current administration is doubling down on the outdated energy sources, relying on oil and gas to power AI as the future of fossil fuels. Putting it together, older, inefficient homes coupled with more extreme weather leave residents exposed to higher bills. Rolling back energy-efficient upgrades and solar incentives removes the tools many families use to reduce costs. Utility monopolies ensure rate increases are passed directly to consumers without relief. And for regions like Missouri, the combined effect may mean extra hundreds of dollars per household per year by 2030–2035, while local economies suffer job losses. Midwestern families are being squeezed at the meter while big energy flows upward. And our job has to be to connect the dots for people who don’t understand how or why they have to choose between groceries and heat or cooling. -Marilyn Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy Lucas’s Substack, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe.
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