Seven states are legally challenging the Trump administration’s controversial cancellation of offshore wind projects worth nearly $1 billion.
New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island, and Vermont are suing the Trump administration. Led by New York, the states are claiming that the cancellation of an offshore wind project off the coast of New York was unlawful and unjustified, and are asking the court to vacate the deal that allowed its cancellation.
French energy giant TotalEnergies paid the Biden administration $928 million in 2022 for a lease to build two offshore wind farms, one off the coast of New York and the other off North Carolina. In March 2026, four years after the lease was granted and with preparations already underway, the Trump administration announced the cancellation of both.
As climate change increasingly ravages our world and a global warming-fueled, potentially catastrophic El Niño seemingly forms in the Pacific, the Trump administration has made it its mission to attack climate-friendly clean energy sources. The administration’s top target has been offshore wind.
President Trump harbors a long-held distaste for offshore wind farms, at least since he failed to block the construction of one off the coast of his golf course in Scotland simply because he did not like the view. Besides the aesthetic concerns, Administration officials have bizarrely claimed that offshore wind farms are a national security hazard. Since he took office last year, Trump has fought an at times futile legal battle to cancel projects that are already underway.
That futility in the legal arena may have been the reason why the Administration took an unusual approach with TotalEnergies. Under a new, first-of-its-kind deal, the Administration paid back TotalEnergies the $928 million to abandon the project and reinvest the amount in oil and gas projects instead.
Since the success of the TotalEnergies deal, the Administration has signed similar deals with other energy companies building offshore wind farms.
“After repeatedly losing in court, this administration cooked up a sham deal to pay a foreign energy company hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to abandon offshore wind and invest in oil and gas instead,” New York attorney general Letitia James said. “We are fighting back to stop this illegal agreement that threatens to erase over a thousand union jobs and cheat millions of New Yorkers out of clean, affordable energy.”
The project’s New York arm would have provided electricity to over 1.3 million New York and New Jersey homes, the complaint claims, and the two states had relied on it in energy resource planning. The AG’s office also said the project would have delivered an estimated $25.6 billion in economic benefits to the state of New York, including $10 billion in savings on energy bills. The New England states, joining New York and New Jersey in the complaint, were also supposed to benefit from the energy production.
In a statement sent to Gizmodo, a Department of the Interior spokesperson called the initial lease “unlawful,” “unreliable,” and “unaffordable,” and said there were “serious national security risks that demanded immediate attention.” Again, that bizarre national security claim wasn’t backed up by any evidence.
“And let’s be clear: these were voluntary agreements. No one was forced to sign them,” the spokesperson said of the Trump administration’s deal. “Moreover, these settlements were reviewed and approved by the Department of Justice, underscoring that they went through the appropriate channels.”
But the attorneys general argue that the refund-and-reinvest deal violates the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which says that the Department of the Interior (DOI) must follow a rigorous formal legal process in order to terminate any offshore wind leases.
“The DOI must hold a hearing, specifically find that continuing the lease would likely cause serious harm to life, property, national security, or the environment, and determine that the benefits of cancellation outweigh the benefits of allowing the lease to continue,” AG James’ office said in the press release. “The DOI did none of that before canceling the Attentive Energy lease.”
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