Posted on December 10, 2025
A coalition of 18 attorneys general prevail in their lawsuit, saying Trump’s freeze will raise their states’ energy costs and jeopardize climate goals.
President Donald Trump’s freeze on approvals of new wind energy projects has been deemed “unlawful” in a federal court.
On Monday, Judge Patti B. Saris of the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts ruled in favor of 18 state attorneys general who had challenged the temporary ban on onshore and offshore wind permitting, which has been in place since Trump issued an executive order on his first day in office.
Led by New York, the coalition of states and the District of Columbia was joined by the Alliance for Clean Energy New York, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Albany. The lawsuit cited, among other things, harms caused by a stop-work order that paused construction of New York’s Empire Wind 1 in April, which had cited the president’s executive order. (The pause was later reversed after a lobbying blitz.)
The attorneys general also claimed that the wind ban on new projects on federal lands and waters impeded their ability to “lower energy costs” and “reduce greenhouse gas emissions” through wind energy generation.
States with ambitious offshore wind plans were especially hard-hit. Almost all offshore projects are built in federal waters, where the government acts as a kind of landlord. The executive order halted seven offshore wind projects that were in the process of being permitted and several others in earlier stages of development, according to data collected by Canary Media from the federal permitting dashboard. In total, roughly 40 offshore wind leases are scattered across the waters offshore of Maine down to the Carolinas, across the Gulf of Mexico, and along the California coast.
Saris ruled that the executive order was “arbitrary and capricious” on multiple grounds. For example, the Department of the Interior had failed to provide a “reasoned explanation” for suddenly changing course from the decades-long practice of issuing wind permits.
“Whatever level of explanation is required when deviating from longstanding agency practice, this is not it,” wrote Saris, referring to four paragraphs of Trump’s presidential memo, which were the basis of the lawsuit.
The ruling is the latest in a series of major losses for the Trump administration as it seeks to defend the president’s anti-wind agenda in court. Last week, a federal judge denied the government’s attempt to revoke approvals for US Wind, a project slated to be Maryland’s first offshore wind farm. In September, a federal judge ruled in favor of the Danish energy giant Ørsted, whose $6.2 billion New England offshore wind project was halted by the Interior Department, which cited the executive order to justify the move but, as the judge put it, didn’t provide any“factual findings.”
The government had defended the order as temporary, pending the completion of a review of permitting and leasing practices. Federal lawyers argued that this assessment was “underway” but submitted no documents to the court to support such claims. Saris struck down this argument, blasting the review for having “no anticipated end date” and creating the risk of a de facto indefinite permitting moratorium.
A former Interior Department official who spoke with Canary Media on the condition of anonymity said that there was little evidence that the agency had even initiated this kind of review, at least within the first half of the year.
“We were ready to support a review at any time we were asked,” said the staffer, who has since left the agency, adding that “no formal request” to start the review described in the presidential memo ever reached the desks of career federal employees.
The Interior Department was not the only agency that harmed the embattled offshore wind sector in the name of Trump’s “day one” order.
The Environmental Protection Agency in March revoked an essential Clean Air Act permit from Atlantic Shores, an offshore wind development slated to be built off the New Jersey coast, using the order as one of the main justifications. An EPA decision based on little more than Trump’s direction — essentially a presidential memo — raised eyebrows among experts.
“It’s not unprecedented,” Stan Meiburg, a former acting deputy administrator of the EPA, told Canary Media, referring to the use of a presidential order to revoke an EPA permit.“But it still seems unusual that you would cite it that heavily in a case.”
Even with the wind order now set aside, the federal government is unlikely to start approving wind farms anytime soon. There is little legal precedent for courts compelling agencies to issue permits. And some see the damage done by Trump’s “unlawful” order as irreversible.
“It’s sad,” said a current Interior Department staffer, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, but discussed with Canary Media how the permitting freeze had prompted many wind companies to lay off staff and hit the brakes on projects that were years in the making.
“All the regulatory uncertainty … I think that is the goal that this department and this administration is trying to put forward,” said the staffer.
