Posted on March 23, 2026
When the Interior Department announced that it was pausing leases for all large-scale offshore wind construction in the United States, it cited national security risks described in a classified Defense Department report.
Experts immediately questioned this all-too-convenient justification, which came in December, mere weeks after a federal judge struck down one of President Trump’s executive orders that targeted the offshore wind industry, calling the order “arbitrary and capricious and contrary to law.”
President Trump is a longstanding and vocal critic of wind energy, going back to at least 2012, when he opposed an offshore wind farm that was developed near one of his golf courses in Scotland, which he said ruined the view.
One after another, federal judges have sided with all five wind farms impacted by the Interior Department’s pause, allowing them to resume construction, at least temporarily.
Royce Lamberth, the district court judge who issued a preliminary injunction allowing the Sunrise Wind project in New York to continue, had the opportunity to review the classified report on wind’s supposed national security risks—but was not persuaded.
“Purportedly new classified information does not constitute a sufficient explanation for the bureau’s decision to entirely stop work on the Sunrise Wind project,” Lamberth said from the bench.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has vowed to appeal, insisting wind farms “represent real national security risks… These are not made-up things.”
It’s true: National security concerns about wind farms are not new, or fake. To demonstrate this, the Trump administration pointed to previous, unclassified reports that large wind turbines can create “clutter,” or radar interference.
But the record is clear: The threat that radar interference poses can be (and has been) drastically reduced through a Defense Department program designed to work with private companies, state, local, and tribal governments, regulators, and non-governmental organizations to minimize adverse impacts to the military. The supposed national security threat that the Trump administration has used as a rationale to try to kill five energy projects that would provide cheaper, cleaner electricity to 20 states and Washington D.C. is largely a mirage.
Much ado about clutter. In February 2024, the Energy Department issued a report to Congress titled “Update on the Efforts of the Wind Turbine Radar Interference Mitigation Working Group.”
The authors write that the “clutter created by wind turbines typically increases the false alarm detection rate of a radar. To suppress this, the radar system will raise the threshold for what is considered a detection and, as a result, may miss actual targets.”
(It’s interesting to note the use of the word “targets”—which the Interior Department highlighted in its announcement pausing offshore wind leases—because it conjures up images of enemy attackers hiding behind turbine blades. But many of the radar systems that could be impacted by clutter are doing far more prosaic things, like monitoring storm systems or air traffic.)
As the title of the report suggests, there are ways to reduce the impacts of wind farms on radar systems. And that sort of mitigation is precisely what a consortium of federal agencies—including the Defense Department, Energy Department, Federal Aviation Administration, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—have been working with wind companies to do.
The easiest way to reduce the impacts of wind farms is to site farms in places where they won’t significantly interfere with radar. There is an entire congressionally funded effort—the Military Aviation and Installation Assurance Siting Clearinghouse—dedicated to evaluating alternative energy projects for adverse impacts to national security and military missions, and to ameliorating those impacts.
All of the wind projects the Trump administration is attempting to stall or kill have gone through extensive permitting and review processes with the Defense Department and other federal agencies.
Longstanding concerns resolved. In 2017, James Balocki, then a deputy assistant secretary for the Navy, wrote a letter to Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) about the dangers of building wind farms near naval bases. Balocki cited a recent Defense Department study: “The general conclusion of the study confirmed that primary radar detection may be significantly degraded in airspace immediately above wind farms and in some cases beyond the windfarm,” he wrote.
“Determining when the overall impact of wind turbine development has reached the ‘tipping point,’ and determining when further operational mitigations by the Department of Defense represent an unacceptable risk to national security, presents a complex and difficult issue,” he added.
Previously, the US military opposed a wind farm in North Carolina. In 2014, General John Kelly told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he was concerned it could interfere with a ROTHR (Relocatable Over-The-Horizon Radar) system in Virginia. “We are working within the Department of Defense and with developers and stakeholders to develop potential mitigation solutions, but I have little confidence we will succeed,” he said.
Under the Obama administration, the Defense Department reversed its stance and allowed the wind farm to proceed, although an expansion was blocked in 2018.
“While initial studies indicated a potential conflict between the Amazon wind project and the ROTHR, additional data collected since that time determined that the project is not likely to affect the mission,” Lt. Chika Onyekanne, a Navy spokesman, said in 2017.
Since these concerns were first raised, the wind and defense industries have continued to work on solutions to reduce radar interference, including developing new wind turbine hardware and software and developing interference-resistant radar systems.
Now, according to the US Energy Department, “thoughtful wind farm site selection, planning, and other mitigations have resolved conflicts and allow wind power projects to coexist effectively with radar missions.”
A losing battle. Now that judges appear to be rejecting the argument that wind farms pose a national security risk, the Trump administration seems to be looking into alternative ways to stifle wind development. Specifically, the administration has proposed buying off a company that won leases to build farms off the East Coast, in New York and North Carolina, but has yet to start construction. In exchange for the $928 million payoff, the company would cancel its wind farms and promise to invest in natural gas infrastructure in Texas.
If the company does not accept the deal, the Trump administration has indicated it will cancel the leases anyway, paving the way for more costly lawsuits. But, the preemptive buyout offer could indicate that the Trump administration would like to avoid this scenario, and the possibility of racking up even more losses against the wind industry.
