What Happened to ENERGY STAR: Full Funding, the Move to DOE, and What Portfolio Managers Should Do
ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager is still running. In May 2025 it looked like it might not be, and plenty of coverage from that period, including an earlier version of this post, was written on the assumption that the program was ending. It did not end. This post has been rewritten to describe what actually happened and what it means for the roughly quarter of US commercial building space that benchmarks through Portfolio Manager.
What actually happened
In May 2025, the EPA under the Trump administration proposed eliminating the ENERGY STAR program as part of a wider reorganization. More than 1,200 organizations lobbied Congress against it.
Congress responded by funding the program and, for the first time, mandating that it do so. H.R. 6938, signed into law on January 23, 2026, allocated $33 million to ENERGY STAR for fiscal year 2026, a modest increase on the $32 million provided in FY2024. As the US Green Building Council noted at the time, this was the first occasion on which Congress has stipulated a mandatory annual spending level for the program, which prevents the administration from reducing it administratively.
Then the program changed hands. On March 3, 2026, the EPA and the Department of Energy entered a Memorandum of Agreement establishing DOE as the lead federal agency for ENERGY STAR. The agreement set a 90-day transition covering the program's activities, partnership agreements, trademarks, and its IT systems and databases. It runs for ten years, and either agency can withdraw with one year's notice.
Is Portfolio Manager still running?
Yes. Portfolio Manager remains operational and is still the tool that most local benchmarking ordinances are written around.
The honest caveat is that the program is thinner than it was. Facilities Dive reported that ENERGY STAR has been operating with limited staff and function, following EPA reorganization and the loss of many longtime program staff during 2025 through buyouts, early retirements and layoffs. The US Green Building Council has publicly asked for more detail on how DOE intends to operate and fund the program.
So the risk profile has changed rather than disappeared. The question is no longer whether the tool exists. It is what level of service, support and continuity to plan around while a long-running federal program changes departments.
What this means for benchmarking compliance
Local benchmarking laws, including NYC Local Law 84, Boston BERDO and DC BEPS, are written around Portfolio Manager reporting. Those obligations have not changed, and the deadlines have not moved. If you were reporting through Portfolio Manager before, you still are.
What is worth watching over the next reporting cycle:
- Whether support response times and data quality hold through the DOE transition
- Whether the ENERGY STAR score methodology or the underlying reference data changes hands intact
- Whether any local jurisdictions adjust their submission requirements in response
None of these are reasons to change how you report this year. They are reasons to keep your own copy of the record.
Exporting your Portfolio Manager data is still good practice
This was framed as emergency advice when the program looked like it was ending. It is better understood as ordinary data hygiene, and it is worth doing whether or not anything changes. Any organization whose multi-year energy history exists in only one system, operated by someone else, is carrying a risk it has not priced.
To export:
- Log in to ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager
- Go to the Reporting tab
- Select Create a New Report
- Choose all properties and a full historical timeframe
- Include energy use, water use, emissions and ENERGY STAR score
- Download as CSV or Excel and store it in your own systems
Once a year, ahead of your reporting deadline, is a reasonable cadence.
Where Noda fits
Noda is an agentic AI platform for commercial building operations that works as an always-on virtual building engineer, scaling engineering team capacity across every asset in a portfolio.
It is not a replacement for Portfolio Manager, and given that the program is funded through 2026 and has a ten-year agreement behind it, nobody should be looking for one. Benchmarking answers how a building compares. Operations answer what to do about it, which is the gap Noda works in: ingesting historical and live data from meters, utilities and building systems, identifying where performance is drifting, and carrying the resulting work through to a verified outcome.
For teams reporting under a benchmarking ordinance, the practical overlap is that the same underlying data serves both purposes. Energy, water and emissions data collected continuously for operational decisions is the data a benchmarking submission draws on.
Key takeaways
- ENERGY STAR was proposed for elimination in May 2025 and was not eliminated
- Congress mandated $33 million in FY2026 funding through H.R. 6938, signed January 23, 2026
- The program moved to DOE leadership under a Memorandum of Agreement signed March 3, 2026
- Portfolio Manager remains operational, with reduced staffing during the transition
- Local benchmarking obligations and deadlines are unchanged
- Keeping your own export of your Portfolio Manager history is sensible regardless
If you want to talk about what your benchmarking data could be doing operationally, you can request a demo.