By Kennedy Maize
Gen. Arbitrary and Dr. Capricious have again derailed the Trump administration’s declared war against renewable energy. The day before April 22nd’s Earth Day anniversary, Judge Denise J. Casper, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, granted a preliminary injunction halting the Interior Department and Army Corps of Engineers from implementing two White House executive orders stopping all agency actions related to wind and solar on federal land.
The case brought by a series of environmental and green energy groups charged that the Trump executive orders violated the venerable Administrative Procedures Act (APA) across the board. As a result, all of the steps taken by the executive branch agencies were “arbitrary and capricious” under the act.
Judge Casper agreed. She concluded the administration is likely to fail when the case comes before the federal courts for a final ruling. 
The latest administration defeat is a reprise of five federal court actions this year putting holds on the administration’s December 2025 stop work order to the Interior Department on five offshore wind projects nearing completion. In each of those cases, before four different federal district court judges, the decisions cited the failure of the administration to follow the APA, ruling that the administration’s actions were arbitrary and capricious.
In a 73-page order, Casper concluded, “After careful consideration of the parties’ filings, briefs from amici curiae and oral argument by the parties, the Court ALLOWS Plaintiffs’ motion as to their request to enjoin the Agency Actions preliminarily…”
In her order concluding that the plaintiffs are likely to win their case when it comes before the federal courts for a final disposition, Casper also noted that the Trump administration’s orders violate the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act and the Federal Land Policy Management Act.
Casper cited a report by Charles River Associates that he groups submitted challenging the administration’s actions. The report said the orders would impact projects of “approximately 57.2 GW of wind, solar, hybrid, and offshore wind capacity” cancelled or “placed at material risk of delay or cancellation beyond 2029,” representing “roughly $905 million in sunk capital invested in projects.” The actions also jeopardize $8.4 billion to $25.6 billion of federal tax credits for renewable energy developers over three years.
The court decision strikes down five Interior Department actions to implement Trump’s executive order. One of those is a July 2025 directive that an agency news release trumpets as ending “Preferential Treatment for Unreliable, Subsidy-Dependent Wind and Solar Energy.” The news release says this roadblock requires that “All Department-related decisions and actions concerning wind and solar energy facilities will undergo elevated review by the Office of the Secretary, including leases, rights-of-way, construction and operation plans, grants, consultations and biological opinions. This enhanced oversight will ensure all evaluations are thorough and deliberative.”
In other words, the plaintiffs in the case charge, the review process is designed to gum up the procedures such that nothing gets final action in a designed administrative traffic jam. The Army Corps issued a similar set of gum-up-the-works orders.
Following the administration’s legal defeat, the plaintiffs’ coalition issued a statement: “Our coalition has demanded and received an immediate halt to the Trump administration’s unlawful permitting actions, which have discriminatorily placed wind and solar technologies into second-class status. This is an undeniable victory for members of our coalition and the broader clean energy industry, as well as American households and businesses.”
The administration had only an irrelevant, anodyne, and inaccurate response to the court ruling. An Interior Department official told the Associated Press, “America sets the global standard for energy production. We do it cleaner, safer, and more reliably than anywhere in the world.”
Judge Casper, 58, a 2010 Obama appointee and a Harvard Law graduate, was an assistant U.S. Attorney in Boston from 1999 to 2005 and an assistant district attorney in Cambridge from 2007 until confirmed as a federal judge. In 2013, she presided over the trial, conviction, and sentencing of notorious Boston crime boss Whitey Bulger.
The Quad Report