Trump Weaponizes Bureaucratic Review to Stop Offshore Wind Project

The Trump administration has touted its desire to achieve energy independence for America. It has also made a big deal out of cutting the administrative red tape that it believes slows the development of fledgling industries. So why, one might wonder, would Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum halt the development of a major offshore wind farm over supposed concerns that the Biden administration “rushed through its approval without sufficient analysis?”

That’s a rhetorical question, of course. Seemingly, the reason is that Donald Trump and his cabinet simply don’t want clean energy to succeed and risk the bottom line for their donors in the fossil fuel industry. So Empire Wind, a project that started construction last year off the shore of New York and would have generated carbon-free electricity for 500,000 homes by the time it was completed in 2027, is now dead in the water.

Secretary Burgum said the decision to halt Empire Wind falls in line with Trump’s executive order, signed on his first day in office this term, which called for a halt on all leasing and permitting for new offshore wind projects—though, it’s worth pointing out that Empire Wind is not new, has held a federal lease for its efforts since 2017, already went through both state and federal permitting processes. Construction was already underway and the project, which employed 1,500 people, was projected to start generating power as early as next year.

According to a memo obtained by the Free Beacon, Burgum said Empire Wind would be stopped because “approval for the project was rushed through by the prior administration without sufficient analysis or consultation among the relevant agencies as relates to the potential effects from the project.” Last week, the very same Interior Department announced that it would cancel a Biden-era requirement to conduct a full environmental impact statement review for 3,244 oil and gas leases, calling the process “lengthy” and stating the decision was part of “reducing regulatory barriers for oil and gas companies and expediting domestic energy development.”

So the red tape is coming down for oil and gas projects. In a surely unrelated fact, oil and gas firms dumped more than $75 million into the coffers of pro-Trump PACs during the 2024 election cycle. Meanwhile, clean energy seems to be staring down a maze of artificial regulatory hurdles that the Trump administration will use to grind every project, even those already under construction, to a complete halt.

That isn’t a total surprise. Trump promised that there would be “no new windmills” during his term, and he’s long taken issue with the technology, which he falsely claims are endlessly slaughtering birds and are a visual blight (your mileage may vary on that one). But it is a little surprising that his administration is going so far as to axe projects that are already underway rather than just snuffing out new ones. It appears the administration is at war with clean energy, even though wind in particular is the fastest-growing and lowest-cost source of electricity in the country.