Appendix D: Expanding construction and financing energy upgrades

Supports getting construction moving.

Building the capacity to build

The RFC team must organize investment in the construction industry alongside investment in the buildings themselves. Existing contractors and building trades unions supply the first crews. Expanding their work requires customers, financing, equipment, materials, and experienced supervisors. Bringing those pieces together is part of the mobilization, not a separate task to leave until projects have been announced.

A large contractor may organize a portfolio of similar properties. Small contractors can deliver scattered homes, small public buildings and subcontract packages within the wider program. They need a succession of projects and enough working capital to cover payroll and materials before their customers pay. The team brings builders and banks into the project discussions early so that financing the work and financing the firms delivering it proceed together.

Private lending is part of this work nationally. For eligible small businesses, SBA 7(a) loans can support working capital and equipment, subject to the program’s borrower, use, and repayment requirements. This is a specific financing route, not an assurance that every contractor will qualify or that every training expense belongs in a project loan. SBA, 7(a) loans.

Upgrading buildings across the country

The federal government owns nearly 250,000 buildings and is the largest single consumer of energy in the United States. The owned-building count comes from GAO’s March 2026 testimony using the FY2024 property inventory. It has permanent authority to arrange upgrades through energy savings performance contracts (ESPCs), using private capital repaid from existing energy budgets. Congress does not have to provide a new up-front capital appropriation for each project.¹

The first executive order of this program directs every cabinet agency to audit its own buildings. Each agency inventories what it owns, measures how much energy each building uses, identifies the worst performers, and reports which of them are the strongest candidates for one of these contracts. The count of buildings not yet assessed is published monthly until it reaches zero. Projects ready to proceed move ahead while the rest of the inventory is assessed.

Federal buildings are where the administration gets the delivery process working at the pace the mission requires. The government can begin with properties it controls and a contract model that already exists. Picture the first group of office buildings: engineers inspect the heating and ventilation, the contractor prices the work and guarantees the savings, a lender supplies the capital, and the agency signs. Crews install the equipment; the contractor tests it and verifies the savings. Each agency needs people who can carry a project through that whole sequence. DOE already supplies the process, model documents, and technical assistance to build on.²

Those early projects establish working relationships among agency staff, contractors, and lenders. The team finds the approvals that stall, improves the common documents, and carries those improvements into the next group of projects. The first round does useful work while making later rounds easier to deliver. It also gives manufacturers a developing order book for the equipment the crews will install. This is the opening stage of the larger building mobilization: get the process working, repeat it, and keep widening the work.

Enforce the work already required

Federal energy law already provides a starting point. Its covered-facility rules reach facilities accounting for at least 75 percent of an agency’s energy or water use, with evaluations on a four-year cycle. It also requires implementing identified life-cycle-cost-effective measures within two years, subject to the statute’s provisions. The plan’s inventory of all buildings goes beyond that covered-facility starting point. Its executive order makes overdue evaluations and unimplemented measures visible and assigns responsibility for acting on them. 42 U.S.C. §8253(f).

DOE’s Federal Energy Management Program already supplies expertise, contract vehicles, and guidance. The RFC team adds coordination across departments, staff, and direct presidential attention. It should build on FEMP’s work rather than ask each agency to invent the same process again. Agency contracting officials retain responsibility for signing and administering the contracts.

How savings pay for the work

An energy savings performance contract is an arrangement in which a contractor pays for the work and is repaid out of the energy savings created by their labor.

A contractor surveys a building, calculates what would cut its energy use, and then designs, installs, and pays for the entire project. The money is the contractor's own or, more often, a third-party lender's. Most financed contracts of this kind are backed by a bank loan, arranged by the contractor and repaid out of the same savings, and the federal program has run that way since 1998. If the savings guaranteed in the contract fail to arrive, the contractor makes up the difference. The federal authority to make these deals is permanent, and the contracts can run as long as 25 years.

That is why no new appropriation is needed. The capital is private, and the contractor is repaid out of the energy accounts Congress already funds every year.

As with every part of this plan, the nationwide retrofit program will serve as a proof of concept for the larger Mission for America. Homes and buildings are one of the largest sources of carbon emissions in the country, and upgrading every one for clean energy will require a massive deployment of labor and capital. By showing how structures and communities can be improved through existing federal programs and political will, the president will build support for the larger mission.

The record, and the national commitment

Since 1998
Projects awarded under the Energy Department's contracts	455
Private capital invested in federal buildings	$8.9bn
Energy cost savings guaranteed over the contract terms	$19.3bn
New up-front capital appropriation required	none

DOE reports 455 awards, including major modifications, through its IDIQ contract program from FY1998 to FY2026. This is not a count of all federal performance contracts or of individual buildings. It is about 16 per year over the elapsed period. The $19.3 billion is guaranteed savings over the contracts’ terms, not savings already received. The plan’s goal is at least 200 federal contracts a year. DOE’s award record.

Taking the contract beyond federal buildings

Schools, hospitals, cities, states, and private owners can also use energy savings performance contracts. Hardly any of them take the option. The national program will help them do it, wherever they are in the country.

The owners and public bodies sign the contracts for their buildings. The RFC team in Washington helps them assemble projects, find financing they qualify for, and complete the applications, wherever they are. The methods established through the federal projects give that team a place to start; each new owner still needs a contract suited to its buildings and legal authority.

The pilot state is where all the mechanisms that follow will be put to work far more densely. Its embedded RFC team works alongside state agencies, banks, builders, and property owners organized around a common program. That concentration is how the pilot can go much further beyond government buildings, reaching privately owned apartments, businesses, and homes with portfolios of projects and financing assembled together. Private capital already finances the federal contracts and can finance projects elsewhere in the country. The pilot organizes it across a state, alongside paid training, care, and the state's commitments. A financing program may require state participation, but access to it does not require selection as a pilot.

The contract is hard to sign, not hard to get. A school district business manager has never negotiated one and has no way to tell whether the terms in front of them are fair. So the federal government does the hard part once and gives it away. A standing federal team in Washington, built out of staff on loan from other agencies, builds on the model contracts, procurement guidance and methods for measuring savings that federal agencies already provide. It gives applicants a common contract framework, a standard method for measuring whether the promised savings arrived, and one application form to start with, and then walks districts through the approvals their projects require. It serves every state by telephone and by template, which is what makes it affordable to run for the whole country at once. The first district still costs what it costs. The hundredth costs a fraction of it, because the work of getting to a signature has already been done.

The authority to sign a performance contract varies by state. Nearly every state already has a statute or an executive order authorizing public bodies to sign these contracts, so the authority exists almost everywhere; what differs is who may use it and how long a contract may run. A handful of states would need their legislature to widen those limits before the instrument reaches every building this plan wants.

Work in bulk

This program does houses in bulk. Doing them one at a time is what makes retrofits expensive; doing them together is what makes them cheap. A crew that arrives once and works through 300 identical units buys its materials at volume, sets up its equipment once, and gets faster with every unit because the next one is the same as the last. A crew that drives to a different house every morning does none of that, and pays for the driving.

Bulk also makes it much easier to train new workers quickly. Rather than continually moving a cohort between unrelated single-family jobs, it can be put through a 300-unit complex, on one site, on the same building repeated, with an experienced supervisor to each crew.

The federal weatherization program, which has been fixing low-income houses since the 1970s, is the example of how not to do it. One household, one application, one audit, one appointment, one crew, one set of consent forms, one house.

So the unit of organization is a counterparty that can bring many homes into the program at once. Individual homes can be served within that organized work. A 300-unit complex is one project. So is a housing authority with 40 buildings scattered across a city, a company that owns 200 manufactured housing communities in 14 states, a rural electric co-op with 60,000 members on its billing system, or a state agency that decides which affordable housing gets built and rebuilt. The owner can sign for its own buildings. A co-op or allocating agency brings a different kind of reach, through financing or funding rules, with the property owners still agreeing to the work.

Who does the work

Across most of the country this work is done by the contractors and the building trades unions who already do it, hired on the same terms they are always hired on. The federal government is the customer for its own buildings. Housing authorities, school districts, local governments and private owners are the customers for theirs, with the federal team helping them arrange eligible financing and delivery. Where there are not enough trained people, the administration uses the training and apprenticeship powers the executive branch already holds to expand the supply, registering apprenticeship programs and pointing existing federal workforce money at the trades this program needs.

The pilot state gets its own RFC team embedded in its agencies to demonstrate the full program. Every other state, and every school district, hospital, and city in them, works with the RFC staff in Washington. It is the single door they can walk through to find out which federal program can finance their work and how to apply. The possibility of extending the pilot to additional states, if enough private capital comes forward, is set out in Part Two.

Building-upgrade targets by November 2030

These are delivery targets for the national program. Federal building contracts can proceed under permanent authority, with repayment from existing energy budgets. Reaching thousands of school districts also requires willing owners, financing that fits each project, and enough contracting capacity. The targets set the work to organize; they are not a count of projects already financed.

	Where it stands	Target by November 2030
Federal buildings assessed	not published as a number	all of them, with the outstanding count posted monthly
Federal performance contracts awarded	about 16 a year in the DOE record	at least 200 a year, reported every month
School districts with a contract signed	a few hundred nationally	thousands, once one application replaces 50

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