Trump rescinds federal program to boost low-carbon building materials

A federal effort meant to boost domestic manufacturing of low-carbon construction materials abruptly ended this week after the Trump administration moved to unravel a wide array of U.S. climate policies.

On Monday, President Donald Trump rescinded an executive order that established and supported a federal Buy Clean program. The Biden-era strategy pushed federal agencies to procure cleaner materials for public works projects. The idea was that the government, by using its massive purchasing power, could help jump-start the U.S. market for steel, cement, and other products made using less carbon-intensive methods.

Trump’s action marks a significant setback for the emerging policy approach. Proponents say Buy Clean programs can play a crucial role in curbing planet-warming pollution from heavy industrial sectors — both by disincentivizing dirty operations and by spurring public and private investment in cutting-edge domestic factories.

“We feel this is going to really slow down the pace of adoption of innovative technologies in the United States,” Yong Kwon, a senior policy advisor for Sierra Club’s industrial transformation campaign, told Canary Media.

The federal initiative also aimed to unify and build upon the patchwork of Buy Clean programs underway in a handful of states — including California, Colorado, and Washington — and to boost existing efforts by industry groups to compile and share emissions data. Many of these initiatives are expected to continue in the years ahead, though it’s unclear how quickly and deeply they can transform industries on their own.

“It makes it a lot harder to do,” said Michael Williams, a senior fellow at the progressive think tank Center for American Progress. ​“But I would say that the impact of Buy Clean still has a lot of potential.”

One particular initiative that launched under Biden, the Federal-State Buy Clean Partnership, will move forward through the U.S. Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition of two dozen governors. Through the partnership, 13 states said they’ll continue to collaborate on and support the procurement of low-carbon infrastructure materials in state-funded projects.

The U.S. industrial sector accounts for about 30 percent of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions every year. Certain facilities, such as coal-based steel mills and cement kilns, are also significant sources of toxic air pollution in the communities where they operate.

America’s earliest Buy Clean efforts began about a decade ago in California as a way to boost business for local steel producers, which were losing out on state contracts to Chinese manufacturers offering cheaper but more emissions-intensive metal. Today, the broader Buy Clean concept has evolved to include prioritizing materials made not just from cleaner conventional facilities but also from next-generation projects — including potentially steel mills fueled by green hydrogen or cement plants that use coral-inspired processes to curb CO₂.

The federal Buy Clean strategy officially launched in December 2021, when former President Joe Biden signed Executive Order 14057 to ​“reduce emissions across federal operations, invest in American clean energy industries and manufacturing, and create clean, healthy, and resilient communities.” The White House also formed a Buy Clean Task Force to coordinate efforts among government agencies, which later received a $4.5 billion funding boost from 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA.

About half of that pie went to help the General Services Administration procure low-carbon building materials for construction and renovation projects. As part of the work, the independent agency — often dubbed the government’s landlord — established environmental reporting requirements for federal contractors and set first-ever ​“low embodied carbon” standards for asphalt, concrete, glass, and steel. 

In a related effort, the Environmental Protection Agency last year awarded $160 million of the IRA funding to dozens of businesses to develop environmental product declarations — akin to a climate nutrition label — that measure and disclose the CO₂ emissions associated with extracting, transporting, and manufacturing individual products. Just last month, the Federal Highway Administration granted another $1.2 billion to support 39 state agencies as they work to study, track, and buy cleaner materials for road transportation projects.

Much of that IRA funding has already been disbursed or legally obligated, which makes it much harder for the Trump administration to try and claw back. Yet as of this week, the policy directives and task force underpinning the Buy Clean agenda no longer exist. Along with rescinding Executive Order 14057, Trump’s ​“Unleashing American Energy” order also directed federal agencies to ​“prioritize cost-effectiveness” when procuring goods and services ​“to the greatest extent.”

Kwon said he’s less concerned about what happens to the federal funding than he is about losing three years’ worth of progress on developing expertise, publishing data, and establishing relationships among government workers, contractors, and manufacturers. The White House website has taken down many announcements and resources related to Buy Clean. It’s unclear whether national databases on emissions inventories and product declarations will remain online and accessible, though the U.S. Climate Alliance said it will house and sustain work related to the federal-state partnership

​“That learning is something that should be safeguarded, along with the money that we’ve already put into the system,” Kwon said. ​“Let’s expand that learning — not waste it.”

Rescinding Buy Clean also adds uncertainty for the slate of new U.S. facilities that received federal funding to demonstrate novel, lower-carbon manufacturing methods. Under Biden, for example, six cement projects were selected to receive up to $1.5 billion in awards from the Department of Energy to demonstrate everything from carbon-capture systems to alternative cement chemistries. Federal agencies were meant to serve as crucial early customers to help lower the risk and open the doors to private buyers.

Sublime Systems, one of the award recipients, is set to receive nearly $87 million to build its first commercial-scale facility in Holyoke, Massachusetts, which is expected to begin producing materials for the market around 2027 or 2028. The startup has developed an electrochemical process for making cement in a way that doesn’t emit carbon or require fossil fuel–burning kilns.

Joe Hicken, Sublime’s vice president of business development and policy, said that reducing public procurement policies like Buy Clean ​“is a miss for domestic manufacturing and domestic innovation.” Still, the startup ​“has been mindful not to rely on it for our business model and financial projections,” he said, noting that ​“companies like Sublime must be able to scale resilient, commercially competitive products that are viable and attractive to all customers.”

For U.S. steel producers, such market competition could push the industry to address emissions from existing and future facilities, even in the absence of a federal Buy Clean policy.

The American Iron and Steel Institute, a nonprofit trade group, said it will continue working with its members to document and reduce the CO₂ emissions associated with making the essential metal. That’s because private-sector buyers like global automakers and architectural groups are increasingly looking to source materials with lower embodied emissions, said Kevin Dempsey, the institute’s president and CEO.

“It’s not just in the U.S.,” he said. ​“Every international steel conference I go to, people from all over the world are talking about sustainability and steel: What’s the best way to measure [emissions], what’s the right methodology to use, and what are the technologies that can facilitate further emissions reductions going forward?”

Dempsey added that Buy Clean is just one tool for advancing lower-emissions industrial products. Another approach — one that could gain more traction under the tariff-friendly Trump administration — could be to adopt trade policies that penalize imports of steel made in highly polluting overseas facilities. Making cleaner domestic steel ​“is a competitive advantage for us,” he said.

And while the federal Buy Clean strategy was pivotal, Williams of the Center for American Progress said he expects that state agencies will keep broadening their own Buy Clean strategies to curb industrial pollution within their jurisdictions. On the Pacific Coast, the states of California, Washington, and Oregon are working together to boost the use and production of low-carbon materials across the region.

“You can see this starting to coalesce together into something bigger,” Williams said of state-level initiatives. ​“We can still have a pretty substantial impact on public procurement.”