Old government buildings have been getting more energy efficient—but Trump threatens that progress

It can be easy to forget that, among all its other roles and responsibilities, the federal government is also a real estate giant. It owns or leases 363 million square feet of space in nearly 8,400 buildings across the country, which is the biggest commercial real estate portfolio in the U.S.

It’s so big, in fact, that there’s an entire arm of the government—the General Services Administration, or GSA—in charge of dealing with its holdings. Inside that seemingly anonymous agency, with its seemingly mundane remit, major environmental progress is underway. It will be up to the next presidential administration to either continue this work, or kill it.

For the past few years, the GSA has been retrofitting, renewing, and redesigning its portfolio of buildings to be as energy efficient as possible. It’s doing everything from replacing windows to installing heat pumps to commissioning net-zero-energy building designs. The agency estimates it has saved $826 million in energy costs since 2008 through what are often simple building retrofits.

“By doing that, we’re reducing our consumption of energy, reducing greenhouse gases, making our communities healthier, and helping really drive the market for innovative new products in the United States,” says GSA administrator Robin Carnahan.

Under the Biden administration, federal green building retrofits have gone into overdrive, mostly through funding allocated by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), passed in 2022. The act included $3.4 billion for the GSA to use on efforts ranging from energy efficiency improvements to the development of more sustainable construction materials.

Some $1 billion of that funding is being used to perform building energy retrofits and new commissions. Carnahan says that chunk of funding is also being leveraged with private-sector spending in the form of efficiency improvements made by energy services companies that supply federal agencies, nearly doubling the overall investment. “We’re going to end up with 100 more all-electric buildings. We’re going to have dozens and dozens more that are net zero. We’re going to add just a huge amount to our building portfolio that’s saving hundreds of millions of dollars,” she says.

Energy efficiency has a been a priority for the federal government for decades, and it has helped spur the broader adoption of sustainability initiatives in the private market as well. An example is the LEED green building certification program, which GSA began requiring for all its new construction back in 2003, helping it spread into the mainstream of the architecture and construction industries. The GSA now requires new construction and substantial renovation projects in its portfolio to achieve LEED Gold at a minimum.

“We’ve been doing a bunch of this stuff for a long time. So it’s not just new to the Biden-Harris administration,” Carnahan says. “What we see is an opportunity to really increase all of that. And that’s what we’re doing.”

One current program that’s shown success in reducing the environmental impact of federal real estate is called the Green Proving Ground, which evaluates new private-sector green building technologies by installing them within federal facilities. Technologies range from highly insulated quad-paned glass windows to a heat pump that runs on captured carbon dioxide. Since its launch in 2011, more than 100 technologies have been accelerated, tested, and vetted through the program, and 23 are now being deployed within the GSA’s portfolio on green building retrofits. The GSA estimates that these technologies avoid 116,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions and save the government $28 million annually.

The Green Proving Ground’s main goal is to bring down the government’s costs, but it’s also to seed the market for the most promising energy-saving technologies and make them more affordable. The IRA is augmenting that effort. Jetta Wong, deputy chief of staff for policy at the GSA, says the Inflation Reduction Act is taking an “all of government approach” to these emerging technologies, offering the companies behind them grant funding from the Energy Department and tax credits from the Treasury Department.

“This whole government approach is taking what we’ve done in the past and escalating it and supercharging it to a whole other level,” Wong says. “And that’s how you’re going to scale technology.”

But for all the billions of dollars being dedicated to building retrofits and energy-saving technologies, Carnahan says the GSA is only scratching the surface of its building portfolio. “We’ve got vastly more demand for this and capacity to do this than we have funding,” she says.

It will be up to the next presidential administration to determine just how much, or whether, to continue this progress on federal green building retrofits and green technologies. Carnahan, who was nominated to lead the GSA by President Joe Biden, sees a strong track record in the current administration. That would likely continue if Kamala Harris wins the White House in November. Meanwhile, Donald Trump, who pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord during his presidency, would likely be less generous with climate-centric funding if he were to return for a second term. Trump has even directly attacked the IRA, a linchpin of the government’s green building progress, vowing to “impose an immediate moratorium” on its grants and funding.

“These are smart investments. That’s the bottom line,” Carnahan says. “When things save money and they make economic sense, that’s not a political fight. That is just good stewardship of taxpayer money.”