The Problem

The buildings Americans live and work in fail us in three ways at once. They pollute our air and warm the planet. Many are unsafe and deteriorating. There are nowhere near enough new homes constructed to meet demand. Adding to the strain, the country currently lacks both the workforce and the financing to build and repair at the scale the crisis demands.

American homes and commercial buildings consume roughly 28 percent of the country's energy directly, and closer to 37 percent counting the energy lost generating and delivering electricity. Most of the on-site energy comes from burning fossil fuels in the structures themselves, with gas appliances that heat the air, heat the water, and cook meals in more than 50 million American homes. Combined, on-site combustion and the emissions from the electricity that buildings consume make the sector responsible for roughly 30 to 31 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, one of the largest sources of pollution in the country. The same fuels release toxins linked to asthma, heart disease, and premature death among the many people who live and work inside.

The buildings themselves are in urgent need of repair. The EPA's 7th Drinking Water Infrastructure Needs Survey estimated roughly 9 million lead service lines in 2023, later revised to about 4 million in a 2024 regulatory analysis, with many experts and advocates arguing the true count is closer to the higher figure. Mold, asbestos, failing electrical panels, leaking roofs, broken furnaces, and cooling systems that cannot keep up with hotter summers are routine in tens of millions of American homes. The federal government's public housing stock alone carries a roughly $90 billion repair backlog that has been growing for decades.

Equally urgent, our country simply does not have enough homes. The 2010s were the slowest decade for new home construction in modern American history, and supply has remained below demand ever since. Housing costs have moved out of reach for many Americans, fueling a larger affordability crisis. Post-COVID, cities are full of empty office towers but short on places for people to live.

Compounding all of this, the country is short on the skilled tradespeople needed to build new homes and retrofit old ones. The construction industry is running a deficit of hundreds of thousands of workers, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 81,000 electrician openings every year through 2034, far more than the existing training pipeline can fill. The result is that getting work done on an American home or building is an ordeal. A homeowner who needs a new furnace waits days for an estimate, weeks for an installation date, and pays whatever price the contractor who finally shows up quotes. A landlord trying to upgrade 20 units calls a dozen firms before finding one with the crew capacity to take the job.

The technology to decarbonize and modernize our built environment exists. Heat pumps outsold gas furnaces in 2025 for at least the fourth straight year, by roughly 12 percent in AHRI shipment data. The U.S. heat pump market is on the order of $11 to $15 billion annually as of 2024 (industry estimates vary by methodology and product scope) and is projected to grow substantially through the 2030s. But a full home electrification retrofit costs between $10,000 and $50,000 upfront. Annual energy savings vary, often $1,000 or more for homes coming off oil or propane heat and far less for homes already on cheap gas in cold climates, with the upfront cost still putting the upgrade out of reach for most homeowners and landlords. The Inflation Reduction Act tried to bridge that gap with consumer tax credits and rebates, but the credits were nowhere near generous enough to retrofit every gas-using home in the country. Then the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act accelerated repeal of the main consumer tax credits (the 25C Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit and the 25D Residential Clean Energy Credit) effective for property placed in service after December 31, 2025.

The Mission

The Mission for America will rally millions of workers, thousands of firms, and communities nationwide to upgrade every existing building in the country and construct a historic wave of new homes. The president will open the Mission by declaring the country's housing shortage and the sad state of its built environment a national emergency, describing the decades of Washington corruption and mismanagement that enabled both, and calling the country into a sweeping rebuilding project.

This will be the largest mobilization of labor since World War II. Within one decade, the majority of America's building stock will be brand-new or substantially upgraded, and every remaining building will be on a financed pathway to get there — transforming the homes, workplaces, and essential services of the country at a pace it has not seen in generations. The buildings sector will go from burning through over a third of the nation's energy to becoming a source of power and resilience.

This is bold, and many Americans will be skeptical that the country can still build at this scale. Decades of dysfunction in American housing and infrastructure have given them every reason to doubt. This chapter lays out the tools and strategies that will make this vision possible. Here and elsewhere, the Mission for America bets that a nation in "mission mode" can succeed where a nation in decline has failed for decades. When FDR set initial 1942 war production targets of 60,000 aircraft, 45,000 tanks, and 8 million tons of merchant shipping, critics dismissed the numbers as fanciful. The country went on to surpass those production targets.

The president and the RFC will organize construction workers, manufacturers, mayors, governors, trade unions, and civil society organizations into one cohesive movement. Communities will mobilize themselves block by block, with neighbors gathering on porches and in church basements, neighborhood associations going door to door, and landlords and tenants coordinating around shared upgrades. Everyone signs up through a simple federal online portal. When a neighborhood meets the sign-up threshold, the federal government dispatches the upgrade as one great push. Convoys of specialists will move from door to door like NASCAR pit crews, with HVAC technicians, electricians, weatherization teams, framers, plumbers, and inspectors handing off in choreographed shifts. Old furnaces, gas appliances, and lead pipes come out. Heat pumps, induction ranges, modern wiring, EV chargers, fresh insulation, new windows, battery storage, and rooftop solar go in. Indoor air clears as gas combustion ends, and the upgraded building meets the next heat wave or winter storm with insulation that holds and battery backup that runs smoothly. A block that would have taken years of one-house-at-a-time upgrades finishes in weeks.

Running alongside the convoys will be a parallel build-up of the workforce itself. During the transition, the RFC will meet with trade groups, unions, and private employers across construction, HVAC, electrical, manufacturing, and homebuilding, asking each one how fast they can grow with federal support. Together this coalition will design a new slate of skilled-trades credentials built around portable certifications and the freedom and flexibility working Americans want from their careers.

As private partners grow their own training pipelines, the RFC and the U.S. military will then stand up a joint training network to round out the workforce, running classrooms and worksites on underused military bases, in empty shopping malls, in vocational schools, in community colleges, in union halls, and anywhere the country can put a teacher in front of trainees. A federal online learning platform will be the on-ramp. Any American can begin paid coursework the day they sign up, with a cash bonus on completion of the online track and direct enrollment in the paid in-person classes that follow.

Once they qualify, enrollees step into one of the federal corps the Workforce Mission charters. The Civilian Conservation Corps is the on-ramp for Americans facing the biggest barriers to work, taking on conservation and restoration projects — public-lands restoration, wildfire defense, watershed and wetland repair — while its crews learn foundational trade skills on the job. The Federal Construction Corps takes on the construction and retrofit work private firms cannot take on profitably, from retrofits in remote and underserved communities to lead-pipe replacement and public-building electrification. Neither program is designed as a permanent career. Both are funnels into the wider construction sector, with training and credentialing that lead directly into private-firm jobs as the procurement convoys ramp up demand. Cabinet secretaries, governors, and mayors will recruit Americans into the corps in every state and every zip code, with the president visiting the training centers and the work sites in a regular series of online videos.

The first wave of work will land on public housing and government buildings, including federal courthouses, VA hospitals, post offices, public schools, and the millions of square feet the federal government already owns. Visible, fast results in those buildings will build momentum, and business districts and residential neighborhoods will start signing up to be next.

This same pipeline will produce new housing at a scale this country has not seen in generations. The RFC will invest in the production of American factory-built homes, the high-quality modular and panelized housing that rolls off assembly lines and stands on its foundations in weeks rather than months. RFC financing will make these homes affordable for every American family, bringing rent and mortgage costs back within reach for working households after decades of rising bills. Federal demand will give the industry the volume to drive prices down year after year. The same RFC capital will flow up the supply chain. Heat pump assembly lines, lumber mills, electrical-component plants, window factories, and steel and concrete producers will all expand domestically and clear the bottlenecks that have held American construction back for decades.

As rooftop solar and on-site batteries roll into every neighborhood, American buildings will become a generation fleet of their own. Houses, apartment buildings, and storefronts that have always pulled power off the grid will start pushing it back, freeing capacity for the new factories, electric vehicles, and heavy industry coming online elsewhere in the Mission. Even the early efficiency gains will drive down the country's need for fossil fuels. As the Clean Power Mission scales up new generation in parallel, the buildings sector will accelerate the wider energy transition. The vast amount of energy that today escapes through cracked windows, leaky envelopes, and obsolete heating equipment will be redirected to the factories, vehicles, and other heavy lifts the Mission has to make.

The federal government will pay for the work. Residents will never fill out a loan application, never wait on a reimbursement check, and never write a sticker-price check to a contractor. The regional American Building Corporations the RFC charters to run this Mission will fund direct procurement contracts that send accredited construction crews into every neighborhood that organizes, paying the bill before the homeowner ever sees one. The Upgrade America Loan Program will sit underneath the procurement system to cover any gap that remains, with grants scaled to household income and loan terms identical for every American who chooses to go deeper or move faster than the federal pipeline. Every gas utility will file a Decarbonization Pathway Study to unlock RFC capital for grid upgrades and neighborhood electrification, with performance bonuses flowing through a new Utility Electrification and Efficiency Performance Program for the gas disconnections it actually delivers. Bulk federal procurement will pull heat pump costs down year after year. On the supply side, expanded federal tax credits, the repeal of restrictive housing rules, the removal of construction tariffs, and faster federal permitting will all clear the path for more construction. Federal housing grants will flow to cities that liberalize their zoning to allow more residences.

The Mission will reward speed and volume. Labor crews that finish fastest with the cleanest worksites will win cash bonuses, recognition at the White House, and first call on the next high-profile contract. Their work will be filmed and broadcast through a continuous reality program covering whole-block rebuilds, conversions of vacant office towers into housing, and rehabs of century-old tenements. Neighborhoods that meet the participation threshold first will move to the front of the deployment queue, with bonus federal investment in the parks, the streets, and the small businesses on their block. Rival contractors will compete for the next federal contract. Rival neighborhoods will compete for the most sweeping community upgrades. Block parties and neighborhood events will organize around residents cheering on demolitions, rehabs, and new construction.

Set this against today's American building economy, where housing supply trails demand by years, construction costs spiral, and a homeowner who wants a heat pump faces months of quote shopping, financing applications, and rebate paperwork few people ever finish.

Four goals will run through the Mission at once. The country will move toward energy independence as tens of millions of homes and buildings stop burning fossil fuels and start running on electricity. The quality of American housing will rise across the board, with aging homes getting the upgrades they have needed for decades. The overall housing supply will expand as millions of new homes go up alongside the retrofits. And the millions of Americans who want steady, high-wage work will go from the sidelines of the economy into the neighborhoods of their fellow citizens, rebuilding the country.

That jobs engine may well be the most important function of the entire Mission. As artificial intelligence threatens to displace huge numbers of American workers in the years ahead, the buildings pipeline will offer physical work that cannot be automated, paid at security wages in every community, with training and placement guaranteed by the federal government.

America has done this before. The Rural Electrification Administration financed the cooperative and private utility expansion that lifted rural farm electrification from about 11 percent in 1935 to over 90 percent by the early 1950s and near-universal service by 1960. The federal government built nearly a million units of public war housing during World War II. After the war, Levittown's mass-production methods peaked at roughly 36 finished houses a day, an output rate unprecedented in American homebuilding.

Solution 1: Finance and Deploy the Retrofit

This solution lays out the procurement, deployment, and community-organizing system through which the federal government will upgrade every existing home, business, and community building in the country.

Past federal upgrade programs have asked households to navigate subsidies on their own. The Department of Energy's Weatherization Assistance Program has run on that model since 1976. Germany's KfW bank, Ireland's SEAI retrofit scheme, the UK's Energy Company Obligation, and Australia's rooftop solar program have all relied on grants, loans, supplier-obligation schemes, or certificate-driven discounts that ultimately subsidize household upgrades one at a time. These programs prove that federally financed retrofits work, but they also reveal the structural ceiling of the consumer-subsidy model. Even the most successful programs upgrade only a low single-digit share of their eligible housing stock annually. After almost 50 years, the Weatherization Assistance Program has touched only a small fraction of the American homes that qualify for it.

The Mission for America inverts that model. The RFC will pay accredited contractors directly to do the work, organized at the neighborhood level once communities sign up together. Grants, loans, and tax credits remain available as backstops for households that move outside the neighborhood deployment, but the dominant mechanism is procurement. The mechanism will allow the mission's retrofit program to succeed at a scale rebate-driven retrofits have never approached. What looks impossible in "decline mode" will become routine.

The program is a long-term national investment that will more than pay for itself. The upgrades will drive down healthcare costs as gas combustion ends inside American homes. They will save working families from the fossil-fuel price volatility and emergency-repair shocks that today eat through household savings. They will produce a building stock that generates and stores power on a mass scale, turning a sector that has always been a drain on the grid into a national asset that pays its operating costs back to the country in clean electricity.

The American Building Corporation

The work of this Mission will be run not by one central bureaucracy but by a family of competing regional public corporations operating under a shared federal charter: the American Building Corporation (ABC) system. The RFC will charter several regional ABCs, each responsible for rebuilding every home and building in its territory — ABC West, ABC South, ABC Midwest, ABC Northeast, ABC Pacific, or whatever map the RFC judges best when it stands the system up. The RFC capitalizes them; the regional ABCs do the work. Rather than route the largest construction mobilization since World War II through a tangle of agency line items, the country will stand up mission-driven enterprises with the authority to move fast, make deals, and pay the people doing the work.

Why several corporations instead of one. A single national agency would have one playbook, one culture, and one speed. Several regional corporations, each free to solve the same problem its own way, will out-innovate any monopoly. One ABC might crack the fastest way to retrofit 1920s brick row houses; another might invent a financing wrinkle that gets landlords to sign up in weeks; another might cut convoy times in half. Because they all share the RFC's charter and answer to the same Mission, what one discovers spreads to the others. And because they are measured against each other — homes upgraded, dollars per retrofit, sign-up rates, worksites finished clean and on time — they push each other to go faster. This is friendly, additive competition: the corporations race each other and learn from each other at the same time, the way the original RFC financed competing aluminum and aircraft producers to break monopolies and explode supply. It is a mechanism the Mission for America reaches for again and again. It is not right for everything, but wherever a problem is big enough to put several teams on at once, decentralized competition beats a single monopoly every time.

Each regional ABC is a builder's institution, not a bank. It holds its own procurement accounts and pays accredited contractors directly for every retrofit, repair, and new home the Mission delivers in its territory, at the scale of thousands of contractors and millions of individual worksites. This is exactly the kind of work the original RFC did when it financed appliances on families' utility bills through the Electric Home and Farm Authority and made disaster loans as small as twenty dollars. A national project with millions of local payees is not too granular for a public corporation to run. It is precisely what one is for.

Each ABC does five things:

• It pays the contractors. When a neighborhood organizes and the convoy arrives, the regional ABC pays the crews out of its procurement accounts against published price caps. The homeowner never sees a bill, a loan application, or a reimbursement form.
• It runs the deployment. The Corporation operates the procurement convoys and the regional dispatch network directly, handling assessment, contractor matching, scheduling, inspection, and payment itself rather than routing the work through outside intermediaries.
• It buys in bulk. It pools demand from public housing authorities, federal agencies, and participating neighborhoods into fleet-scale orders for heat pumps, panels, windows, and the rest, driving unit costs down year after year and guaranteeing the order books that anchor domestic manufacturing.
• It builds the homes. Where private developers cannot close the housing gap fast enough, the Corporation builds directly, operating the factory-built-housing and office-conversion pipelines as its own homebuilding division.
• It earns returns for the public. Its loans are repaid, the surplus power from the building stock it electrifies is sold, and where it takes an equity stake in a modular plant or a homebuilder, the American people hold the shares. The original RFC turned a profit nearly every year it operated. The American Building Corporation is built to do the same, with the returns flowing back to the public that financed the work.

The ABCs stay agile by design. Divisions can be spun out, sold, merged, or kept in public hands as the Mission matures, and a regional corporation that finds a better way becomes the model the others copy. If one ABC outperforms the rest, the RFC can hand it more territory; if one lags, the RFC can split it, restaff it, or fold it into a stronger neighbor. The single test is always what keeps the work moving. The goal is not to build a permanent bureaucracy, and it is not to finish and hand everything back to the market. It is to keep making big things happen until every building in the country has been rebuilt, and to leave behind a set of institutions the country can turn to the next time it needs to build at scale.

How the work gets paid for

Direct federal procurement. The default mechanism is federal procurement. When a neighborhood meets the threshold and the convoy arrives, the regional American Building Corporation pays the accredited construction contractors out of its procurement accounts. The homeowner never sees a bill, a loan application, or a reimbursement form. Public housing, federally owned buildings, and households already enrolled in a federal-housing program like Section 8, USDA rural housing, or a federally backed mortgage will move through this same procurement track. Accredited contractors will invoice the Corporation against published price caps for each kind of upgrade, with competitive bids required on larger projects. The program will run on a 10-year authorization so contractors can build their businesses around a known pipeline and households can plan around it.

The Upgrade America Loan Program. UALP will sit underneath the procurement system as the universal backstop. Congress will create UALP as a national program run through the RFC offering every American household a combination of income-scaled grants and low-interest loans for upgrades that fall outside the procurement scope, including a deeper retrofit than the neighborhood convoy delivered, an upgrade timed before the local deployment date, or work on a second property. UALP grants will be larger for low- and middle-income families and smaller as income rises. Loan terms will be the same for every household regardless of income. Households that use UALP will see one bill at the point of sale, with the contractor claiming the federal payment against the invoice. The procurement and UALP tracks will share the same published price caps, the same accredited contractors, and the same competitive-bid requirements on larger projects.

On-bill financing for the buildings where it fits. On-bill financing is reserved for the narrow set of buildings where tying repayment to the property rather than the person is what makes an upgrade happen at all. That means rental buildings, where a landlord funds work the tenant's utility savings help repay, and households likely to sell before a deeper upgrade pays for itself. For those buildings, the RFC will fund on-bill loans through participating utilities. The RFC pays the incremental cost upfront, and the property owner repays the loan over 15 to 20 years as a line item on the utility bill. The on-bill charge will attach to the meter rather than the person, so when the property changes hands the charge transfers by default to the new owner along with the lower utility bill that justifies it. A restored 25C tax credit will buy down sticker prices at the upper end of the cost curve. The Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit, with eligibility ended by the OBBBA for property placed in service after December 31, 2025, covered up to $3,200 per year combined (a $1,200 cap for insulation, windows, doors, panels, and similar improvements plus a separate $2,000 cap for heat pumps, heat pump water heaters, and biomass equipment). The Mission will revive it as a fully refundable credit, paid as direct cash through the IRS, so households that owe little or no income tax receive the full amount rather than a fraction.

Disclosure and appraisal at sale. Two federal design choices will keep on-bill charges from chilling resales. Every listing of a home with an active on-bill charge will carry a federally standardized disclosure showing the current monthly charge, the remaining balance, the expected utility savings, and the net cash-flow math. HUD, FHFA, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac will update appraisal guidelines so federally backed mortgage appraisers value a retrofitted home with the on-bill charge treated as part of the energy-cost profile rather than as a property liability. A retrofitted home has permanently lower operating costs and should appraise higher than the same home unretrofitted.

The equipment

Matching the technology to the building. Full electrification involves several categories of equipment, and the right combination depends on the building. The RFC will help businesses and homeowners install the package that fits.

Heat pumps for heating and cooling. Conventional air-source heat pumps work well for single-family homes and newer commercial buildings. A new generation of window-mounted heat pumps opens up buildings that were previously too expensive to retrofit. These units install through an existing window opening, come precharged with sealed refrigerant, plug into a standard wall outlet, and release condensate outdoors as a fine mist. No HVAC technician, electrician, or plumber is needed. Ground-source heat pumps move heat between the building and the earth, delivering far higher efficiency than air-source units, especially in cold climates and large buildings. The upfront cost of the ground loop has limited them to wealthy single-family installations and institutional campuses. Networked geothermal solves that. When the convoy rolls into a neighborhood, the RFC will finance a shared ground loop as utility-owned infrastructure that every household on the block connects to at a fraction of the stand-alone cost.

Heat pump water heaters. Heat pump water heaters use a fraction of the energy of conventional electric resistance tanks and eliminate gas water heaters. They are a straightforward swap in most buildings. Electric water heaters captured about 54 percent of 2025 residential tank water heater shipments, with heat pump water heaters the fastest-growing share of the electric mix.

Induction stoves. Gas stoves produce nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, and particulate matter inside the home. Induction cooktops are faster, more efficient, and eliminate indoor combustion. The cost gap with gas has narrowed substantially. For renters and low-income households, portable induction cooktops costing under $100 can serve as an immediate first step.

Insulation and air sealing. Electrification works best when the building envelope is tight. Insulation, air sealing, and window upgrades reduce the heating and cooling load, which means a smaller, cheaper heat pump can do the job. Weatherization is often the highest-return investment in a retrofit package.

Electrical panel upgrades. Many older homes have 100-amp or even 60-amp electrical panels that cannot support a heat pump, heat pump water heater, and induction stove simultaneously. Panel upgrades to 200 amps are a common prerequisite for full electrification and one of the more expensive components, often $2,000 to $7,500 depending on existing wiring, permitting, and utility-side meter work. Procurement, UALP, and on-bill financing will all cover panel upgrades as part of the retrofit package.

Rooftop solar and home energy storage. Where feasible, rooftop solar and battery storage will be bundled with electrification retrofits. Beyond cutting the building's own electricity demand and providing resilience during grid outages, every retrofitted building will be wired to push surplus power back onto the grid. Solar inverters and battery systems installed under the program will come with the standard hardware and the standard interconnection agreements that let homes and small businesses sell electricity to their utility, store it for the grid during peak periods, and discharge it when the system needs support. The federal government will pay for the export-ready equipment as part of the retrofit, and the utility-side compensation and aggregation that make those exports valuable to the homeowner are detailed in Solution 4. The wholesale-market and tariff design are covered in the Mission for Clean Power. Both the procurement track and UALP will fund these installations alongside the core electrification equipment.

Home EV charging. Charging infrastructure is core retrofit equipment, on the same footing as the heat pumps and solar panels. When the convoy upgrades a building's electrical service, it will run the wiring and install a Level 2 charger so the household can plug in an electric vehicle the day it buys one, with the panel sized for the charger from the start. In apartment buildings, the package covers shared and curbside charging at the parking residents already use. Bundling the charger into the standard retrofit means a household never has to organize a separate job, schedule a second contractor, or front the cost later. The vehicles themselves and the wider public charging network are detailed in the Mission for Electric Vehicles.

Repairs that come before the upgrade. Solar panels do not go on rotted roofs. Heat pumps do not work well in buildings with failing windows, leaking envelopes, or broken electrical panels. The Mission will take an expansive view of what gets covered. Procurement and grants will pay for the electrification equipment and for the repairs that make the upgrade possible and the building livable, including roof replacement, window and door replacement, siding and envelope work, structural and foundation repair, mold remediation, asbestos abatement, lead paint and lead pipe replacement (coordinated with the Toxins and Water chapters), electrical service upgrades, bringing plumbing up to code, and repairing or installing heating and cooling systems.

Deployment

Procurement convoys. The work happens in convoys. When a neighborhood, a business district, or a federally designated public-buildings cluster successfully organizes itself, the RFC dispatches a multi-trade procurement crew that takes on the whole block at once. HVAC technicians, electricians, weatherization teams, framers, plumbers, and inspectors move from door to door in coordinated shifts, competing against other crews for the lowest disruption time, the shortest cumulative outage, and the cleanest worksite. A block that would have taken years of one-house-at-a-time upgrades will get done in weeks. The convoy format will substantially reduce per-home costs, since the crews will share equipment and collaborate on preparations.

Compensating for inconvenience. A full home retrofit is disruptive. Where needed, homeowners and tenants will receive direct cash payments, hotel and short-term rental vouchers, or quality mobile homes placed on or near their own lot so they can stay in their neighborhood during the upgrade. The federal government will also cover the cost of lost work hours for homeowners who take time off to oversee major upgrades.

Regional dispatch. The RFC will fund regional operations infrastructure to keep the convoys moving. The regional American Building Corporation owns the full deployment lifecycle for its territory, including assessment, contractor matching, scheduling, inspection, and the small share of households who go through the UALP backstop. One phone number, one point of contact, one office responsible. Local contractors will do the installations under federal procurement contracts. Utilities will administer on-bill repayment for the households that need it. The RFC's role will be to make sure the procurement budget is there, the price caps are honored, and the convoys keep moving from neighborhood to neighborhood.

Bulk procurement. The RFC will pool demand from public housing authorities, large building owners, and government agencies into fleet-scale orders for every category the retrofit and new-build push depends on. Heat pumps, heat pump water heaters, window units, ductless mini-splits, induction stoves, insulation and air-sealing materials, high-performance windows and doors, electrical panels, EV chargers, rooftop solar panels, and battery storage all run through the same procurement engine on the retrofit side. New construction adds lumber, low-carbon concrete, and clean steel. This will drive unit costs down, guarantee stable order books for manufacturers, and create the anchor demand that sustains the domestic supply chain.

Voluntary factory support for heat-pump-capable air conditioners. The difference between a standard air conditioner and a heat pump at the factory is a low-cost component called a reversing valve. The Mission will not ban cooling-only units, but the RFC will provide generous capital for manufacturers that want to add heat-pump capability to their product lines. The goal is to make the heat-pump version the default product the market offers, not to outlaw the alternative.

Contractor recognition. Contractors that deliver the highest volume of completed retrofits with the best outcome data and the fewest complaints will receive Early Adopter designation, priority access to bulk procurement allocations, and public credit alongside the communities they serve. The message to every firm in the industry is that the federal government will throw its weight behind the companies that move fastest and do the best work.

Public housing and low-income households. Public housing will be handled through direct federal procurement and grants, with no cost to residents. Congress will fund a direct initiative to upgrade every public housing unit in the country to Energy Star certification with the full electrification package, while drawing down the public housing repair backlog at the same time.

Federal, state, and local government buildings. The federal government owns or operates roughly 280,000 buildings totaling around 2.3 billion square feet, per GSA's most recent Federal Real Property Profile. Every federally owned building in the country will be part of the Mission's retrofit and upgrade program. Electrifying and weatherizing that portfolio will be a guaranteed anchor workstream for the early years of the Mission and a first-mover market for domestic heat pump, envelope, and low-carbon-materials manufacturers. Congress will also create targeted grant programs for local governments, school districts, and universities proposing ambitious electrification and efficiency upgrades. Public buildings are visible, high-traffic, and politically easy to justify. These projects will also serve as training sites for CCC and Federal Construction Corps workers.

Capturing natural demand

Emergency replacement at the point of failure. Furnaces fail in January, air conditioners die in July, water heaters give out in the middle of the night, and whatever the contractor can put on the truck in 48 hours is what ends up in the house for the next 20 years. A single federal phone number and online dispatch system will deliver a rapid heat pump installation for any household whose heating or cooling equipment fails, paid for directly through the federal procurement system at zero upfront cost. The RFC will stockpile popular heat pump models at regional distribution hubs so rapid installation is physically possible in every region of the country. Participating contractors in the emergency-replacement network will get priority access to that inventory and featured placement in the Early Adopter registry.

Automatic enrollment where the federal government already has a touch point. Households in public housing, Section 8, USDA rural housing loans, and federally backed mortgages all have an existing relationship with the federal government. For those households, enrollment in the upgrade pipeline will be the default, not an opt-in. Residents can decline. The burden will be on the program to reach out and coordinate, not on the household to fill out forms. Public housing authorities will be resourced to manage the flow, and CCC community organizers will be deployed as the coordinating front line for residents.

Outreach and opt-in

Going door to door. The Mission will not wait for households to come to the federal government. The president, cabinet secretaries, governors, mayors, and a standing corps of federally funded community organizers will run a multi-year canvass of every neighborhood in the country. In every zip code, residents will be able to sign up for an electrification consult on the spot, compare their current utility bill against the post-retrofit estimate, and book an upgrade. Once in office, the president will call for the program in primetime televised addresses, go on morning shows and late-night shows and local news to pitch it, and run a recurring door-knocking tour of neighborhoods across the country. Those tours will be covered as press events, with the president on the porch with a homeowner, walking the block, signing neighbors up, listening to what is broken in the house and promising to fix it. The president will also appear as a recurring guest on the reality program following the rebuilds, dropping in on whole-block rebuilds and conversion sites to talk with the workers and the families moving back in. The goal is for the program to feel personal, local, and inevitable rather than bureaucratic, and for every American to know that the president is leading the effort.

Trusted-intermediary network. Plenty of households will never respond to a federal mailer, a door-to-door canvasser, or a video ad, no matter how good the offer is. But they will listen to their pastor, their union rep, their community health worker, or their hair stylist. The Mission will fund a small-grants program to train sign-up concierges embedded inside existing institutions, including faith communities, labor halls, federally qualified health centers, community centers, small businesses, and civic organizations. Concierges will be paid for their efforts and will have a direct line to federal case managers for anything complex. Federal community organizers will canvass the neighborhood from the outside; trusted intermediaries will work it from the inside.

Community sign-up drives. Collective neighborhood sign-up is the engine of the Mission's deployment. When a block meets the sign-up threshold, it triggers the convoy. Crews schedule efficiently across every home on the street at once, bulk procurement rates pass through to every resident, and the block-by-block organizing rhythm sets the pace of the program nationally. Rapid community-scale organizing is the civic achievement at the center of the work. The Mission will formalize that achievement through a federally administered Community Mission Award. The award goes to neighborhoods that combine the highest sign-up rates with the fastest organizing timeline. A block that hits 95 percent in three months beats a block that takes a year to reach 85 percent. Winning neighborhoods will receive substantial federal and RFC investment in public amenities of their own choosing (parks, libraries, community centers, transit stops, broadband upgrades, school renovations, public art, youth programs), a presidential or cabinet-secretary visit on award day, annual White House ceremonies for the organizers who did the work, and visible local markers like plaques and signs at neighborhood entrances. The Mission will publish an annual state-by-state and national ranking of the fastest-organizing communities, turning the organizing phase into a civic competition that compounds year over year. The president will turn this into a public challenge, celebrating specific neighborhoods by name on television and daring others to be next. Rival blocks will compete for the Mission Award, for the presidential visit, and for the bragging rights of going first.

First-mover bonuses for landlords and businesses. Landlords, commercial property owners, and business districts compete for the same speed-and-depth bonuses as neighborhoods. A landlord that organizes its tenants to meet the commitment threshold quickly, or a business district that signs up most of its tenants in a short window, gets front-of-queue convoy dispatch, listing in a federally administered Early Adopter registry that consumers can consult when choosing where to rent, shop, or do business, larger UALP grants for buildings outside the neighborhood deployment scope, and public recognition at White House ceremonies alongside the winning neighborhood organizers. The incentive curve declines each year. Signing up in year one is worth measurably more than signing up in year four. The cheapest, easiest, best-supported path through the transition is the early one.

Shared-win terms for rental properties. Whether the work is paid through procurement or UALP, rental property upgrades will be structured so both landlords and tenants come out ahead. Landlords will get bigger grants as a share of project cost than homeowners do (in exchange for the tenant protections below), lower operating costs from modern equipment, a property-value bump from the upgrades, and, when a tenant eventually moves out, the freedom to reset rent to market. Tenants who are living in the unit when the retrofit happens will get their rent frozen during the work and for a year after, with any increases after that capped at the rate of inflation until the retrofit is fully paid off. The savings on the utility bill will go to the tenant, not the landlord. Tenants can say no to a retrofit in their unit, and if they have to move out during the work they will get the same cash, hotel, or on-site temporary-housing options as homeowners. Early Adopter status and the enhanced rental terms will go to landlords who hold to the shared-win agreement.

What this delivers. A federal construction program that pays directly for the upgrade of every American home as soon as the surrounding neighborhood organizes, with the Upgrade America Loan Program as the universal backstop for households that move outside the neighborhood pipeline, and on-bill financing for the rental and soon-to-sell buildings where it fits. A regional deployment network that uses existing institutions to keep the procurement convoys moving from block to block, with same-week emergency procurement capturing the failure-point conversions that today default to gas. Public housing and federally owned buildings upgraded directly at no cost to residents, alongside automatic enrollment for every household with an existing federal touch point. A door-to-door and community-organizing campaign that treats participation as a civic achievement, backed by a trusted-intermediary concierge network reaching households that federal outreach alone will not. First-mover advantages that put the landlords, businesses, and neighborhoods that move fastest at the front of the procurement queue, and bulk equipment procurement that drives unit costs down year over year.

Solution 2: Train and Mobilize the Workforce

The retrofit and construction pipeline laid out in Solution 1 needs hundreds of thousands of skilled workers to deliver it, and the country is short across every trade. The Mission for Workforce Development (Chapter 16) builds the national system that produces those workers: the online learning portal, the staggered-completion stipends, the year-one military training kickstart, the federal staffing agency, the national journey-card credentials, the wraparound health and childcare benefits, and the three federal corps. This chapter is that system's single largest customer. What follows is how the buildings pipeline draws on it and the buildings-specific demand it places on it, not a separate training system standing alongside it.

Private contractors and unions are the anchor. The default strategy is to grow what already exists. Through the Workforce Mission's federal staffing agency, the RFC will fund training programs run by unions, technical colleges, community colleges, and civil society organizations, and pay contractors directly to run their own apprenticeship programs on the job. Every HVAC shop, electrical contractor, and construction firm that can bring new workers up to standard on a jobsite will become part of the training pipeline. Workers will be paid during training, and every training track will include a union pathway.

Federal benefits and wraparound support travel with the worker. Every worker in the buildings pipeline — trainees, corps crews, and apprentices on Mission-financed retrofit and construction projects — receives the federal health benefits and universal childcare the Workforce Mission attaches to every Mission worker, and reaches them through the community health and workforce hubs that also handle childcare, transit to the jobsite, and barrier removal. Breaking the benefits lock is part of what lets a worker leave a job they could not afford to quit and retrain for the buildings trades.

Buildings coursework on the national online learning portal. The Workforce Mission builds and runs the national online learning portal that goes live on Day One; the buildings trades are its largest early tenant. The buildings pipeline will populate the portal with coursework spanning heat pumps, weatherization, electrical, and HVAC, so any American — including AI-displaced knowledge workers switching to the trades and high school students starting before graduation — can begin paid online study from Day One, before in-person apprenticeships come online in their region. Online completion earns an entry-level credential and priority access to buildings apprenticeship slots as they open. The full credentialing model, the staggered-completion stipend structure, and the in-person certification path are detailed in the Workforce chapter.

The year-one military training kickstart. In the first year, the Workforce Mission's military kickstart — the military's logistics and mobilization machinery, staffed by veteran instructors drawn from the skilled trades leaving service — will produce the initial wave of welders, pipefitters, electricians, and the other trades the construction and retrofit pipeline needs, handing off to permanent civilian institutions by month 18. The buildings pipeline is one of its first destinations.

The federal corps for the remaining gap. Where private partners cannot close the gap, the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Federal Construction Corps — both chartered in the Workforce chapter — fill in. The CCC is the on-ramp for people facing the biggest barriers to employment. The Federal Construction Corps is the public prime contractor of last resort: where the regional American Building Corporation cannot get a private firm to take a job at the published price cap, it dispatches the Federal Construction Corps to hold and deliver that job directly. It is the operator on the buildings work the private market will not touch — public housing, federal buildings, and lead-pipe replacement in remote and underserved communities — not a pool of workers lent to private contractors, who draw their own crews from the Workforce Mission's staffing agency instead. Both corps pay a security wage calibrated to compete with entry-level private-trade wages, not exceed them, so the next step in a building-trades career points into a private employer at private-sector wages, and this chapter's procurement pipeline makes sure that job is there.

Union pay and apprentices on every Mission job. Mission-funded projects will reward contractors that put apprentices on the jobsite alongside experienced workers. Procurement preference, larger UALP grants where applicable, and Early Adopter status will all flow to firms that build their businesses around union pay and apprenticeship.

Priority for AI-displaced workers. A specialized track will be designed for workers displaced by AI. Displaced workers will get priority placement in the training pipeline, moving to the front of the line for paid coursework and in-person credentialing.

The rehabs-as-reality-TV campaign. Reality TV about construction and real estate is already one of the most popular genres on American television. The Mission will tap that existing appetite, financing a continuous stream of professionally produced short-form and long-form video content following the most dramatic building projects in the country. The workers will be the stars. Episodes will follow the HVAC installer who upgraded 200 homes in a single neighborhood, the framing crew rebuilding a hollowed-out block in a Rust Belt city, the demolition team bringing down a 1970s office tower for conversion to mixed-income housing. RFC grants will fund production, and the content will be distributed free across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, streaming platforms, and local broadcast. The point is to turn the tradespeople doing the work into household names and influencers. Featured workers will be recognized at White House ceremonies alongside the organizers of the communities they served. Featured contractors will get priority access to RFC bulk procurement and elevated status in the Early Adopter registry.

Closing the trades gap. The combined private-contractor, union, and federal training tracks will be sized to credential tens of thousands of new workers per year above the current baseline across every trade this chapter depends on. This is enough to cover BLS's projected annual openings in each occupation and reverse the retirement-driven shrinkage hitting the skilled trades across the board.

Mandatory outcome tracking. Congress will require rigorous tracking of where graduates of all these programs go, how long they stay, and what they earn. Training programs that deliver placements into private-sector trades at good wages will receive more funding. Programs that do not will receive less. The data will be published, so the public can see in real time how many workers are being credentialed and how many are landing private-sector jobs.

The Mission for Workforce Development chapter details the full training model, barrier removal programs, and placement pipeline. This chapter is the single largest customer for what that chapter builds.

What this delivers. The Workforce Mission's single largest source of trained-worker demand. The buildings trades populating the national online learning portal from Day One. Federal corps crews filling the buildings gaps no private partner will close, at wages designed to keep the path forward pointed at a private career. A priority on-ramp into the buildings trades for AI-displaced workers. A reality-TV program that turns the country's tradespeople into household names. Tracked placement outcomes instead of vague job-creation claims.

Solution 3: Build Abundant Housing

The Mission will build millions of new homes in a decade, including public housing, private market-rate housing, and office-to-residential conversions, and make them accessible to every American. Every new unit will be zero-emission from Day One.

Modular and manufactured housing. Factory-built homes are one of the biggest opportunities to drive down what new housing costs in America. By the early 1970s, mobile and manufactured homes reached roughly one-third of single-family production, with per-square-foot prices falling by about two-thirds between 1955 and 1973, before a 1974 federal law reshaped the regulatory landscape in ways widely blamed for stalling the industry's growth ever since. Modular and manufactured units are assembled in factories, trucked to the site, and put together in days rather than months. Modular construction runs roughly 10 to 30 percent cheaper per square foot than site-built, and HUD-code manufactured housing runs 30 to 50 percent cheaper, with none of the weather delays, material waste, or lost labor hours that drive site-built prices up. The RFC will capitalize a national factory build-out with long-term low-interest loans for new and expanding modular plants, federal procurement of factory-built units for public housing and disaster recovery, and a national library of pre-approved unit designs that builders can adapt without restarting the permitting process for each project. Federal housing grants will incentivize states and cities to recognize modular construction on equal footing with site-built housing, ending the inconsistent local rules that have slowed the industry for decades. Plant workers will be union-eligible from Day One and will feed into the same Mission training pipeline as the site-built crews.

A unified federal building code for factory housing. The Mission will assemble stakeholders to draft a single national building code for factory-built homes, with manufacturers, fire-safety experts, structural engineers, and accessibility advocates working in equal partnership. The new code will replace the patchwork of state and local rules that has held the industry back for decades. Once it is in force, any factory-built home that meets the code can be installed on any qualifying lot in the country. Suppliers and component makers will see a market large enough to justify investing in process improvement, the same flywheel that drove costs down during the postwar boom.

Many manufacturers, not one. The federal procurement pipeline will reward a competitive industry. RFC orders will be split across multiple firms, with antitrust pre-clearance on factory acquisitions and consolidations and standing set-asides for new entrants and worker-owned plants. A revived factory-housing industry that ends up consolidated into one or two corporate winners would defeat the affordability goal.

Mortgage parity for manufactured homes. Most manufactured-home buyers today are forced into chattel loans, the same instrument used to finance cars, with shorter terms and higher rates that price the most cost-sensitive families out of homeownership. The RFC, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Federal Housing Finance Agency will end the distinction. Any factory-built home meeting the federal code and sited on owned or long-term-leased land will qualify for a standard 30-year mortgage on the same terms a site-built home commands, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will purchase those loans onto their books. A refinancing program will let existing chattel-loan borrowers move onto mortgage terms and recover the years of inflated interest the old structure forced them to pay.

Anchor cities for factory deployment. Mid-sized cities recruiting manufacturers and research facilities run into a familiar problem. Workers cannot afford to relocate because affordable housing does not exist where the new jobs are. The RFC will offer paired financing packages to cities and states that commit to siting factory housing alongside incoming employers, so the homes roll off the line on the same schedule the new jobs come online. The same pairing will work for federal investments under the Industry, Clean Power, and Public Transport Missions. Where the federal government is putting capital into a region's productive base, the buildings sector will be putting roofs over the heads of the workers filling those jobs.

Empty office towers. Post-COVID commercial vacancies represent significant apartment-creation potential. The active 2026 conversion pipeline tracked by Yardi Matrix is already approaching 90,000 units, and a 2023 NBER analysis estimated that converting the suitable share of U.S. office stock would add roughly 400,000 apartments. Not every vacant tower is worth saving. Office floors are often too wide and too oddly subdivided to slice cleanly into apartments, and the cost of redoing plumbing, wiring, and HVAC can rival new construction. The RFC will finance both paths and back whichever delivers more housing per dollar on a given site, with long-term low-interest capital for adaptive reuse where the building geometry supports it, and patient capital for demolition-and-rebuild where it does not.

Transit-oriented development. Dense housing around transit corridors expands the housing supply, makes the transport network more efficient, and makes cities more livable. Federal transit capital and housing grants will incentivize TOD at new and existing stations, and where it makes sense, transit agencies will be authorized to develop and lease land around stations to generate recurring revenue for operations. The Public Transport Mission details the full TOD framework.

Repeal the Faircloth Amendment. The Faircloth Amendment bars HUD from funding new public housing units that would push any local public housing agency above the unit count it held in October 1999, and the stock has only shrunk since then as old units have been demolished without replacement. HUD has no legal authority to expand the funded pipeline no matter how much Congress appropriates, and waiting lists in major cities stretch for years. Congress will repeal the cap and fund substantial new public housing units built to Energy Star certification with the full electrification package.

Double the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. LIHTC is the federal government's primary tool for financing affordable rental housing and funds the large majority of newly built affordable rental units each year. Congress will double the LIHTC budget with larger payouts for projects in high-opportunity areas, roughly doubling the affordable-housing pipeline.

Zoning and permitting reform through federal incentives. RFC housing grants and major federal infrastructure dollars will flow to communities that adopt pro-housing rules, including abolishing parking minimums, eliminating single-family-only zoning, and allowing accessory dwelling units by right. The same conditions will apply to permitting, with states and cities incentivized to streamline approvals to qualify for federal housing or transit funding. A point-based system rewards more reform with more money.

Reduce construction costs. Tariffs on steel, lumber, drywall, and fixtures have driven material costs up across the country, and federal permitting delays add months of carrying costs to every project that needs federal sign-off. A presidential executive order will exempt new residential construction from all tariffs, taking the federal thumb off the scale on material prices overnight. Federal permitting will be streamlined so that projects move from approval to groundbreaking in weeks rather than years.

New construction standards. Every new building constructed in the United States will meet high-performance standards from the start.

• An all-electric default for new construction. The national building energy code described below will set heat-pump HVAC and water heating as the default for every new building, and EPA emission standards on appliances and heating systems will lock in that default through the equipment supply chain. Federal housing, transit, and RFC capital for new construction will flow to all-electric builds, and the restored 25C tax credit, RFC heat pump manufacturer financing, and bulk federal procurement from Solution 1 will buy down equipment costs so the all-electric build comes in cheaper than the gas alternative. Buildings already under construction will be exempt.
• Federal building codes modeled on California's Title 24. The federal government will adopt a national building energy code modeled on California's Title 24 standards, with mandatory insulation and air-sealing minimums, high-performance windows, heat-pump HVAC and water heating as the default, solar on most new single-family and low-rise multifamily construction, LED lighting throughout, and stringent duct sealing. Federal housing grants, the restored 25C tax credit, and RFC capital for builders and material manufacturers will pay for the compliance pathway so meeting the code is the cheapest path forward for any new build.
• Embodied carbon tracking. A HUD Carbon Accounting Standard will measure lifecycle emissions for steel, lumber, concrete, and insulation. Mandatory producer disclosure will create market pressure for low-carbon materials. A new Office of Embodied Carbon in HUD will coordinate R&D and provide technical assistance. Federal R&D funding, RFC capital for low-carbon material producers, and bulk federal procurement of low-carbon steel, concrete, and lumber will pay for the supply-side build-out so manufacturers can meet the disclosure standard with products that are already cost-competitive.
• Low-carbon building materials. The Manhattan Projects Mission will make low-carbon building materials a key focus, funding accelerated R&D into bio-based concrete and advanced wood products. Public housing and federal buildings will serve as first-mover markets. Investment tax credits for low-emission steel and concrete will connect to the Industry chapter's clean steel mission.

The ABCs' homebuilding divisions. If private developers and existing programs cannot close the housing gap fast enough, the regional ABCs build directly through their own homebuilding divisions. Each Corporation will start by financing private builders, but if market gaps persist, it will build itself rather than wait — and, as everywhere else in the system, the regional corporation that finds the cheapest, fastest way to put up housing becomes the model the others follow. The original RFC used this model repeatedly, standing up purpose-built operations when the private sector could not or would not act at the necessary scale. Housing both the financing of private builders and the public homebuilding function inside the same corporations that run the retrofit pipeline keeps factory orders, crews, and supply chains shared across the whole Mission rather than split across separate institutions.

What this delivers. A national factory-housing industry rolling cheap, high-quality homes off the line at speed. Vacant office towers converted to apartments. Dense housing around transit corridors. A new generation of public housing built at mass scale, fully electrified. A doubled LIHTC pipeline building affordable housing to modern standards. Zoning reform in every city that takes federal money. Construction costs reduced through tariff relief and permitting reform. Every new building in the country built right from the start. Hundreds of thousands of construction jobs running in every zip code, filling the pipeline that Solution 2 is training workers for.

Solution 4: Align the Utility System

The Mission will run utility-level upgrades in lock step with the construction and retrofits happening at the community level, so a neighborhood's power company is winding down gas service on the same schedule the homeowners are switching to electric.

Decarbonization Pathway Studies. As discussed in the Mission for Clean Power, every gas utility in the country will file a Decarbonization Pathway Study with its state public utility commission, laying out a plan for transitioning its service territory from gas to electric heating. Once filed, the DPS will unlock RFC capital for grid upgrades, workforce reskilling, and neighborhood electrification pilots.

Buildings as grid assets. As retrofitted buildings come online with rooftop solar and on-site storage, the Mission will turn that distributed capacity into a working part of the grid. Every utility receiving RFC capital will offer standardized interconnection on a fixed federal timeline, run virtual power plant programs that aggregate participating homes, apartment buildings, and small commercial sites into dispatchable blocks of supply, and pay owners at full retail value for power they export and storage capacity they make available during peak demand. The Mission for Clean Power covers the wholesale-market and tariff design that make distributed assets dispatchable across the system. Inside the buildings sector, the result is a generation fleet that lives inside the country's housing stock, paying its owners back month after month and freeing utility-scale capacity for the new factories, electric vehicles, and heavy industry coming online elsewhere in the Mission.

A federal Building Performance Standard framework, with local flexibility. A Building Performance Standard sets a measurable energy or emissions target that an existing building has to meet by a set deadline, tightening over time, and leaves it to the owner to decide how to get there. Unlike a building code, which governs what goes into new construction, a BPS pushes the buildings already standing to keep improving. Four states and a dozen cities already run mandatory Building Performance Standards for their largest commercial and multifamily buildings, and California's Energy Commission is the live national test case for what a coordinated framework looks like. The Mission will set federal guardrails on top of that work, with standardized terminology, common reporting processes, and a single national data backbone built on the EPA's Energy Star Portfolio Manager platform, so building owners and managers operating across multiple jurisdictions face one set of metrics. BPS is a tool for large commercial and multifamily buildings, not for single-family homes and small residences, which the Mission decarbonizes through equipment standards, building codes, and the Upgrade America pipeline rather than performance mandates on individual homeowners. Inside the federal guardrails, states and cities will keep full authority to set tighter targets, extend coverage to smaller commercial and multifamily buildings, and add local requirements that fit their building stock and climate. Federal grants through the UALP and the Utility Electrification and Efficiency Performance Program will pay for the compliance pathway, with free benchmarking software, technical assistance for owners, and capital for the upgrades that bring a building to the standard.

Utility incentive realignment. The Utility Electrification and Efficiency Performance Program will reward utilities for the work that is actually theirs in the Mission, including filing a credible DPS, decommissioning gas service on the DPS schedule, and running on-bill financing for the rental and soon-to-sell buildings where repayment rides the utility bill. Bonus payments will go to utilities that hit neighborhood-level electrification targets, meaning entire blocks or developments switched off gas and gas distribution infrastructure decommissioned.

Grid-capacity sequencing. The retrofit pace cannot outrun distribution-grid readiness. Every utility receiving RFC capital will negotiate a neighborhood-by-neighborhood sequencing agreement with the RFC and its state public utility commission, matching retrofit dispatch to the substation and feeder upgrades scheduled ahead of it. Neighborhoods whose grid is not yet ready will move down the dispatch queue until the upgrades are done; neighborhoods whose grid is ready will move up. The Clean Power chapter details the grid buildout that makes this work; this chapter commits to pacing the retrofit pipeline against it.

What this delivers. A gas utility sector aligned with the transition, with the DPS framework unlocking federal capital for every utility willing to make the move. A national virtual power plant program that turns the country's retrofitted buildings into a working generation fleet, paying owners for the power they export and the storage they make available. A federal Building Performance Standard framework that brings every large commercial and multifamily building up to consistent metrics, with technical assistance and capital for the upgrades that get them there. Neighborhood-level electrification targets that match the financing and labor pipeline. Retrofit pacing agreements that keep distribution-grid upgrades ahead of new electric load.

Presidential Leadership

During the campaign, fixing the housing crisis and rebuilding the country's aging homes and buildings will be one of the candidate's defining promises. The campaign will tour working-class neighborhoods where heating bills are highest and housing stock is oldest, visit IRA-era retrofits and weatherization projects that preview what the Mission will scale, stop at union training halls and community college trade programs, and hold rallies in front of public housing complexes long overdue for investment. Stump speeches will spell out exactly what voters will get. The federal government will solve the housing crisis, homeowners will be paid to upgrade their homes, and jobs are waiting for anyone who wants one.

During the transition, the president's team will negotiate memoranda of understanding with governors and mayors on public housing construction and commercial-to-residential conversion pipelines, pre-commit bulk federal procurement orders to heat pump and HVAC manufacturers, and coordinate with the Mission for Workforce Development on the military training stand-up, the contractor training and apprenticeship framework, and the launch of the national online learning portal. HUD, DOE, and the RFC will map the communities with the deepest need, those with the highest energy burdens, the oldest housing stock, and the longest waiting lists for affordable housing, so the first wave of Upgrade America Loan Program outreach and community sign-up drives lands where the Mission's tools can do the most good from Day One. The team will also identify the first wave of landlords, small businesses, and apartment complexes ready to sign up under the Early Adopter framework. Legislative counsel will draft the Day One package (Faircloth repeal, doubled LIHTC, restored and expanded 25C tax credits, and the staggered-completion training stipend framework) so it is ready to drop on the morning of inauguration.

On Day One, the president and Congress will charter the RFC with the full authority to finance and coordinate every tool described in this chapter, from retrofit lending and manufacturer financing to modular factory expansion, housing development, and utility-side incentive payments, and will charter the American Building Corporation system — a set of competing regional public corporations — as the RFC's building-sector operating arm to run them. With that authority in place, the president will sign a package of executive orders to stand up the core of the Mission. The orders will direct the regional American Building Corporations to launch the Upgrade America Loan Program and finance voluntary manufacturer retooling for heat-pump-capable air conditioners. They will set federal procurement preferences for heat pumps and electrification equipment across the entire federal building portfolio (GSA, HUD, VA, DOD, USPS, DOE, and every other agency that owns or operates federal facilities) and launch a government-wide retrofit and electrification program to upgrade every federally owned building. They will authorize HUD to begin direct electrification grants to every public housing authority in the country and establish automatic enrollment for public housing, Section 8, USDA rural housing, and federally backed mortgage holders. A federal emergency heat pump replacement dispatch line will go live on LIHEAP's existing equipment-repair authority. The Workforce Mission's national online learning portal will come online with its initial buildings coursework. Alongside the RFC charter, Congress will pass the rest of the Day One package, including the repeal of the Faircloth Amendment, the doubled Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, the restored and expanded residential energy tax credits, and the statutory framework for staggered-completion training stipends.

What the Ten-Year Mission Delivers

Foundations by Year 1 (2030)

• Day One package passed; RFC chartered and Upgrade America Loan Program operational, with first wave of households signed up through door-to-door canvassing
• National online learning portal running since Day One; first entry-level credentials issued
• Staggered-stipend training programs launched at military bases, community colleges, union training halls, and contractor sites
• Restored and expanded 25C tax credit (now fully refundable, with direct pay) driving private heat pump adoption
• Utility Decarbonization Pathway Studies filed by every utility
• Neighborhood grid-capacity sequencing agreements in place with every utility receiving RFC capital, so retrofit dispatch is matched to the upgraded substations and feeders ready to absorb the new electric load
• CCC and Federal Construction Corps (sized in the Workforce chapter at roughly 500,000 each, spread across multiple Mission chapters) ramping into building electrification workstreams, with the first crews deployed in the hard-to-reach communities private contractors will not serve
• Early Adopter registry operational with the first landlords and businesses enrolled
• National reality-style video series launched; first featured workers and contractors profiled
• Emergency heat pump replacement dispatch line operational nationwide; regional inventory hubs stocked for same-week installation
• Automatic enrollment live across public housing, Section 8, USDA rural housing, and federally backed mortgages
• Trusted-intermediary concierge network operational in faith communities, labor halls, health centers, and civic organizations
• First bulk procurement cycle for window heat pumps complete, with units arriving at public housing authorities
• Faircloth Amendment repealed, first new public housing units under construction
• Public housing repair backlog drawdown underway

The Retrofit Scales by Year 5 (2034)

• 75 percent of new HVAC installations are heat pumps (up from roughly 53 percent of the gas-furnace-plus-heat-pump market in 2025), driven by point-of-sale subsidy, emergency replacement, and bulk procurement
• All-electric default for new construction in force through the federal building code and EPA emission standards, with federal housing, transit, and RFC capital conditional on compliance
• On-bill financing programs operational in 40+ states
• 500,000+ private contractor employees hired, trained, or retained through Mission-financed programs, with the retrofit workforce ramping toward its ~700,000 steady-state by the end of the decade
• Federal Construction Corps directly delivering a major share of the public-housing and federal-building retrofits as the public prime on that work, with CCC graduates feeding into its crews on top, reaching the remote and underserved communities private contractors will not serve
• Retrofit dispatch pace approaching ~5 million homes per year at the full mobilization rate
• Online learning portal popular and expanding, with enrollment growing year over year
• Community sign-up drives completed in thousands of neighborhoods; first-wave Early Adopter landlords have completed their upgrades and received public recognition
• Window heat pumps installed in 500,000+ multifamily units
• Public housing construction running in every state, with hundreds of thousands of new units under construction or complete
• Commercial-to-residential conversion pipeline producing new apartments
• Zoning reforms adopted in 200+ cities receiving federal housing grants
• Grid-upgrade pacing keeps ahead of retrofit demand in every state; no neighborhood that meets the sign-up threshold waiting on distribution capacity

The Mission Delivered by Year 10 (2039)

• 100 percent of new HVAC installations are heat pumps
• Majority of existing building stock retrofitted or on a financed pathway to electrification
• Every public housing unit in the country upgraded to Energy Star with full electrification
• A new generation of public housing built to zero-emission standards, with the Faircloth-era unit cap permanently gone
• Electrification workforce self-sustaining; CCC and Federal Construction Corps graduates feeding into private-sector careers at scale
• Millions of workers credentialed through the online portal and in-person certification programs, with the majority working at private contractors and union shops
• Trades pipeline positioned to absorb AI-displaced knowledge workers as displacement occurs
• Gas distribution infrastructure decommissioning underway in fully electrified neighborhoods
• Housing supply gap substantially closed through new construction, conversion, and zoning reform
• On-bill financing repayments flowing, RFC green bond program self-sustaining