ENERGY STAR caught in legislative limbo
Convoluted U.S. budgeting process could preserve funding at current levels
Monday, July 21, 2025
The Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) International is rallying support to propel the threatened ENERGY STAR program over to the stable side of its current legislative limbo. The association, which encompasses more than 90 local chapters in the United States under its umbrella, is lobbying policy-makers in Washington D.C. and urging members to appeal directly to their own elected officials in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate.
For now, ENERGY STAR’s various labelling, certification and benchmarking initiatives are in a precarious, but not necessarily fatal position. Although the U.S. administration (executive branch) has expressed its desire to mothball the program, the authority to terminate ENERGY STAR’s funding actually rests with the House and Senate (legislative branch). The appropriations bills that could bring about that result are now progressing through the legislative process, but are yet to be fully debated in either forum.
In a recent advisory, John Boling, BOMA International’s vice president of advocacy and building codes, sketches out the convoluted law-making procedures that could trip up efforts to reduce program funding. Notably, if the appropriations bills are not passed by Oct. 1, there is a possibility that ENERGY STAR could receive default funding at 2024-25 levels up until Sept. 30, 2026.
“The ENERGY STAR program is funded through two appropriations bills — the Interior and Environment Appropriations Bill, which funds the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Energy and Water Appropriations bill, which funds the Department of Energy (DOE),” Boling explains. “There are 12 appropriations bills Congress must pass every year to fund the government. The House of Representatives and the Senate must pass their bills and if there is a single difference, (there always is) then it must be resolved before the bill can be sent to the President for his signature or veto.”
BOMA International is particularly keen to preserve the ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager program, which has been widely adopted in both the U.S. and Canada to track and benchmark energy and water use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the commercial, institutional and multifamily building sectors. ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager also provides consistent, verified building performance data for voluntary certification programs, such as LEED and BOMA BEST, and various mandated reporting exercises, such as Ontario’s energy and water reporting and benchmarking (EWRB) initiative, and building emissions performance standards (BEPS), such as those in New York City and on Toronto’s agenda for future adoption.
The Canadian government department, Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), has a licensing agreement with the U.S. government that allows Portfolio Manager to be offered in Canada. Canadian data is held separately under NRCan’s stewardship, but program development and ongoing refinements occur in the U.S..
ENERGY STAR’s product labelling measures, which rate and display the energy performance of a range of consumer and commercial products, equipment and appliances, also have resonance in Canada. Since Canada’s energy and water efficiency standards are largely aligned with those in the U.S., the labels are an effective means for Canadian manufacturers and distributors to signal to the market, and for consumers and procurement officers to gauge what they’re buying. As well, numerous rebates and incentives for purchasing products with preferential ENERGY STAR ratings are tied to federal, provincial/territorial, municipal and utility-based energy efficiency programs across Canada.
Paths to continuity
The timetable for passing the appropriations bills that could reduce or eliminate ENERGY STAR’s funding for 2025-26 appears to be getting tight. Boling notes that both the House of Representatives and the Senate traditionally take a recess for the month of August. That leaves just a few working weeks before the Sept. 30 deadline to achieve necessary support from legislators and required consensus between the House and Senate.
If that does not occur, a continuing resolution comes into play. As the name suggests, this simply prolongs funding at existing levels until the appropriations bills are passed.
“It can be for 24 hours or the whole year,” Boling advises. “If Congress ends up with a full-year continuing resolution, like last year, we can expect the ENERGY STAR program to receive roughly $32 million.”
Advocates for the program, such as BOMA International and the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), argue that $32 million (CAD $44 million) is both a negligible drop in the entire U.S. budget and highly proficient spending, which underpins an estimated USD $42 billion (CAD $57.5 billion) in annual energy savings.
“The ENERGY STAR program alone delivers billions of dollars in energy cost savings to U.S. consumers and businesses every year on a budget of just $32 million,” asserts Elizabeth Beardsley, the USGBC’s senior policy counsel. “Thousands of product manufacturers, utilities, real estate companies and local governments rely on the program to create value, adopt energy efficiency practices and manage energy use. Shuttering it would only cause confusion and raise costs.”
A model letter is now available, via BOMA International’s website, for members to send to their Representatives and Senators. That addresses both the near-term threat of reduced funding and the possibility that ENERGY STAR could be outright dismantled.
“Constituent letters showing support for the program are critical for our advocacy efforts to work,” Boling reiterates. “BOMA and others maintain that because ENERGY STAR was initiated under the ’92 Clean Air Act Amendments and then officially stood up in the 2005 Energy Policy Act, the only way to end the program is to introduce legislation and move it through the process. This takes time, and BOMA will be there at every step educating why the ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager program serves America’s interests.”
Fallout for Canada
Many Canadian enrollees and energy management specialists are now contemplating the potential fallout from U.S. decision-making. Recent analysis from Efficiency Canada, a non-governmental research and advocacy organization that promotes the dual environmental and economic benefits of energy and water efficiency, explores various scenarios, which might see ENERGY STAR:
- retained in U.S. statute, but left dormant;
- terminated as a U.S. federal program, but transferred to administrators outside of government;
- terminated, with allowance for NRCan to keep the trademark and programs; or
- terminated, along with deregistration of the name and trademark.
Of these, it’s deemed preferable for ENERGY STAR to be neglected on the shelf, rather than actively purged.
If staffing cuts and altered priorities halt updates to ENERGY STAR standards, reference points for certifications would steadily fall further behind new advancements coming into the marketplace. Or, there could be less impetus for continued improvements in the absence of ever-toughening standards. However, Sarah Riddell, a policy research associate with Efficiency Canada, concludes there is less risk that existing standards will be eroded.
“The U.S. Energy Policy and Conservation Act contains an anti-backsliding clause prohibiting the weakening of efficiency standards once they are finalized. Manufacturers have also likely already begun retooling their factories to comply with the finalized U.S. standards, many of which were actually recommended by the manufacturers,” she observes. “The ongoing attempt to roll back some standards in the U.S. may have little practical effect.”
Riddell also speculates there could be an opportunity for NRCan to pick up some of the slack, provided it still has leeway to administer ENERGY STAR here. For example, instead of licensing the required software for Portfolio Manager from the U.S. EPA, as it currently does, she suggests NRCan could contract the software developer directly and, in turn, license it to other coordinating bodies that might step in if the U.S. government withdraws from the program.
“Because states, utilities, municipalities and non-profits across North America would likely want to continue to rely upon the suite of Canadian-led ENERGY STAR programs, there might be an option to explore co-funding arrangements to jointly support the costs of maintaining the standards,” Riddell muses. There could be some ‘brain gain’ opportunities as well, if former U.S. ENERGY STAR employees want to work for the Canadian initiative.”