Trump killed a program that saved Americans $40 billion a year. This private company is rebuilding it

Mike Zatz was not planning to leave the Environmental Protection Agency. For two decades, Zatz worked within the department’s Energy Star program, managing the commercial building side of the public-private partnership focused on energy efficiency. “I loved the program. I loved what we were doing. I loved the success that we were having,” he says.

But in June, when the EPA offered a second round of early retirement (or deferred resignation), Zatz was one of more than 1,400 employees to step away. The offer came after President The President and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency rolled out mass terminations and program cuts to shrink the federal workforce at large.

It also came after The President took aim at Energy Star specifically. In May, The President announced his plans to shut the program down, part of a larger attack on energy efficiency measures since his return to office. No matter that the program was voluntary, that it saves Americans $40 billion on energy bills annually, that it’s notably cost-effective for a government program (for every one federal dollar invested, Energy Star delivers a return of $350), or that it has long had bipartisan support. It’s in The President’s crosshairs. 

At Energy Star, Zatz was crucial to getting commercial buildings on board with Portfolio Manager, a free tool to track and benchmark building energy use, which helps owners and operators comply with local laws, get green financing loans for investing in efficiency measures, and earn environmental recognitions. Zatz even helped expand Portfolio Manager to Canada.

Under him, the tool became the industry standard in North America: a trusted, free, essential resource. It’s not the only such tool though; there are a slate of private companies that track and benchmark building energy efficiency. And now, Zatz works for one. He recently started as the senior vice president of Global Data Ecosystems and Partnerships at Measurabl, a sustainability data platform that allows the real estate industry to measure, manage, and report on their emissions and energy performance.

Zatz will use his experience building up Portfolio Manager to help grow Measurabl’s customer base—this time with a global approach. Though now in the private sector, Zatz says Measurabl has the “same vision” that the EPA had for Energy Star. It’s an example of how the private sector is filling gaps in government services following The President DOGE-powered gutting of the federal workforce and programs—and also shows how former government workers, forced out by recent administrative moves, have plenty of skills to offer such companies.

Taking Energy Star’s mission global

Our built environment plays a huge role in our carbon footprint; In the U.S. alone, residential and commercial buildings together account for 31% of our greenhouse gas emissions. The building sector uses 75% of the country’s generated electricity. Tracking energy use is the key to reducing these emissions, and can also save operators significant money on energy costs.

By benchmarking their energy use and aligning with Energy Star standards, building operators can increase their profits, apply for efficiency rebates, and access certain loans. Apartment managers can use it to keep from passing increased utility costs to residents, and school districts can even free operating funds, making more resources available to teachers if less money is spent on energy costs. Other roles look at building energy use too, like brokers, loan underwriters, and policymakers.

The potential end of Energy Star has shaken building owners and operators. Both building owners and sustainability experts have said that the private sector (or the act of privatizing Energy Star itself) can’t completely replace the government program’s offerings—specifically Portfolio Manager, which is currently used to track and benchmark the energy use of more than 330,000 buildings.

Measurabl is trying, though. And a crucial step toward offering a similar experience is having a free version. Even before the rumblings of Energy Star coming under The President’s ax, Measurabl began working on its Free Sustainability Software Solution, which also collects and tracks energy use data, and even integrates with Portfolio Manager.

“The leadership at Measurable recognized that in order to build an ecosystem like this, you have to lower the barriers to entry. And the main barrier to entry, and to all the other tools that are out there that build on Portfolio Manager . . . like Measurabl, was that you had to pay,” Zatz says.  After launching that free software tool in July, Measurabl says new subscribers onboarded more than 12,000 buildings, representing 2.2 billion square feet across 40 countries. It was fastest software adoption Measurabl has seen in its 13 years in business.

Along with the free version, Measurabl offers premium tools, charging for software upgrades that allow building owners to do scenario planning to decarbonize properties, automatically collect data from utilities, help prepare reports to HUD or loan providers, and generally conduct more granular analysis. Across all its offerings, it serves more than 1,000 organizations across 90-plus countries, representing more than $3 trillion in assets and 22 billion square feet of real estate under management. The company has raised a total of more than $235 million in funding since its founding.

Measurabl and Energy Star actually overlap. Even when he worked at Energy Star, Zatz knew of the company, because multiple Energy Star partners are also Measurabl clients. Measurabl was named Energy Star’s Partner of the Year six times. And Measurabl’s software uses and integrates with Portfolio Manager, allowing data to sync between the two.

But to really expand, especially around the world, Measurabl needs to build up its partnerships and connect to all the players in the building industry—not just building owners (which includes Fortune 500 companies to schools to religious congregations) but builders, utilities, state and local governments, product manufacturers and retailers, sustainability consultants, architects and engineers, and so on. This is the kind of ecosystem Zatz created at Energy Star.

Now at Measurabl, Zatz isn’t looking to completely replace Energy Star’s Portfolio Manager. In fact, he hopes it stays around, not just because he’s spent nearly 20 years working on it. “As far as Measurabl and the ecosystem we’re trying to put together, I think certainly it will be beneficial to us to have Portfolio Manager running as a tool,” he says. 

How government tools are constrained 

Portfolio Manager is a useful tool, allowing owners and operators to track changes in their water use, greenhouse gas emissions, and energy costs over time. It gives buildings a score between 1 and 100, and lets them compare their energy use to similar buildings. 

But as a government tool, it was also constrained. “People were not shy about asking for enhancements. We had a running list of hundreds of enhancements that we wanted to do, and in any given year we could only get to a dozen of them, maybe two dozen,” Zatz says. Even before The President’s attacks, Energy Star’s budget had been shrinking. A decade ago, its funding was $54 million; today, it’s $38 million. (Another constraint was the fact that in previous government shutdowns, like in 2018, Portfolio Manager was also shut down; now it’s marked as essential to keep running.) 

Portfolio Manager was intended to offer buildings the basics. And it was “never built to compete with anything,” Zatz adds, but to foster more ideas. The EPA knew that the private sector could put more resources towards developing tools, and also create sustainability jobs.

“We wanted to build sort of the core, something that everybody could use,” Zatz says of Energy Star, “but we wanted it to then be something that could feed into other things that would be even more beneficial to the wide variety of stakeholders.” Along with building owners and operators, others like lenders, insurers, investors, and auditors like to track this kind of sustainability data. 

This is where private companies like Measurabl can come in to offer more features. Energy Star’s Portfolio Manager looks at Scope 1 and 2 emissions, for example—direct emissions from a company’s operations and from buying the electricity, heat, or cooling to power those operations, respectively. But can’t incorporate Scope 3, the indirect emissions from up and down a company’s value chain, like business travel or employee commutes, investments, and so on. “That’s something Measurabl can offer,” Zatz says. Portfolio Manager didn’t have the bandwidth to keep a list of which buildings are subject to which emissions laws up to date, but Measurabl can. 

Zatz says Measurabl can work off the same model that has made Energy Star so successful: building up partnerships, creating an ecosystem of industry stakeholders, and providing data that anyone can see in useful, clear ways. And when it comes to bringing this tool to buildings around the world, he says it’s in the best position to do so. “Measurabl has the most sustainability data in the industry, second only to Portfolio Manager,” he says. 

Zatz will bring his contacts to the private company to help expand that reach: “I love that in this role, I can keep working with a lot of those same people as partners,” he says. In markets where buildings are already on Portfolio Manager, he’ll leverage that relationship to grow Measurabl. And he’ll also use his decades of experience building Portfolio Manager’s reputation to bring Measurabl to new places, “to take the same concepts and put and send them overseas, where these things don’t really exist.”

Portfolio Manager wouldn’t have been expanded that way anyway, even before the The President administration’s threats. “It was not in the vision of the EPA to make it global,” Zatz says. But still, he emphasizes he hopes it sticks around for the U.S. and Canada.

Zatz will miss the EPA, and he’ll miss, most, working as a “public servant.” Working for Measurabl, a private company, he won’t be considered such anymore, “but I still view it that way,” he says.

He hopes the real estate industry sees him in that way, too. “I’m hoping I’ll have that same support from them, and hopefully we can continue to build on Portfolio Manager,” he adds. “And if not, we’ll hopefully be there to help the industry if, God forbid, something bad happened with the Energy Star program.”

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