By Kennedy Maize
Three words — “arbitrary and capricious” — are coming to define the Trump administration’s approach to trying to slap down long-established energy programs it doesn’t like: offshore wind power under the Department of Interior and clean energy grants at the Department of Energy.
In a ruling from the bench Monday (Jan. 12), Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia used those key words from the 1946 Administrative Policies Act to describe a December DOI order stopping work on one of five offshore wind projects from Massachusetts to Virginia. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum stalled them for at least 90 days in a December order, citing what appears to be a concocted and classified “national security” pretext.
In a preliminary injunction, Lamberth gave a green light to resume work on Ørsted’s Revolution Wind, a 704-MW, 65-turbine project off Rhode Island with an estimated cost of $1.5 billion. The project is 87% complete. It was the second time Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, had overturned a Trump order stopping construction on the project. He issued a September ruling killing an August administration order aimed at Revolution Wind.
All of those wind projects, ranging from Massachusetts to Virginia, that Burgum attacked have filed suit against the order. Those cases will likely come up for federal court review in the next several days.
Lamberth took aim at the claimed new data on national security that Burgum claimed cast doubt on the wind projects. He ruled that “purportedly new classified information does not constitute a sufficient explanation for the bureau’s decision to entirely stop work on the Revolution Wind project.”
Trump’s irrational ire toward wind energy — dating back to his development of a golf course in coastal Scotland where from 2006 to 2012 he battled and lost against an offshore wind farm — is no secret. At a White House meeting with oil industry executives on Venezuelan oil last Friday (Jan. 9), the New York Times reported, Trump said, “My goal is to not let any windmill be built.”
Trump’s tilting at windmills has so far had about the same success as the fictional Don Quixote, spawning the apposite adjective “quixotic.” In early December, Judge Patti Saris of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts struck down a major portion of Trump’s year-old “temporary” across-the-board freeze on federal permits for offshore and onshore wind projects in a challenge brought by 17 states, the District of Columbia, and ACE NY, a New York clean energy trade group.
Saris ruled that the portion of the order aimed at onshore wind projects was entirely — that’s right — “arbitrary and capricious.” She didn’t take up the offshore portion of the order. New York’s embattled Attorney General Letitia James, reviled by Trump, led the challenge.
In another case last Friday, the D.C. District Court overturned the Department of Energy’s October termination of seven Biden-era clean energy grants worth about $27.5 million, part of a larger $7.5 billion grant termination project. In a case brought by a coalition of energy groups and the city of St. Paul, Minn, Judge Amit Mehta, an Obama appointee, ruled that DOE’s action was partisan and violated the U.S. Constitution’s 5th Amendment, guaranteeing equal protection under the law. He wrote that the entire $7.5 billion cancellation program targeted Democratic states: “The terminated grants had one glaring commonality: all the awardees (but one) were based in states whose majority of citizens casting votes did not support President Trump in the 2024 election.” 
Mehta outlined a convoluted and apparently duplicitous Trump administration process that resulted in the grant terminations. “In May 2025,” he wrote, “DOE Secretary Christopher Wright issued a press release announcing the agency’s plan to conduct a ‘case-by-case’ review of some of the grants awarded by the prior presidential administration….The agency, however, did not notify Plaintiffs of any change in their grant status. Their grants therefore remained in effect.
“That changed in early October 2025. On October 1, 2025, the day the most recent government shutdown began, [White House Office of Management and Budget] Director Vought posted on X that ‘[n]early $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled. More info to come from @ENERGY. The projects are in the following states: CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA…..None of the listed states voted for President Trump in the 2024 election.’
“The next day, President Trump posted on Truth Social that he had met with Director Vought to ‘determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut’ during the shutdown….That same day, DOE issued a press release stating that it had terminated ‘[315] financial awards supporting 223 projects, resulting in a savings of approximately $7.56 billion dollars for American taxpayers.’ The agency had ‘determined that these projects did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs, were not economically viable, and would not provide a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars.’ Plaintiffs’ grants were among the 315.”