By Kennedy Maize
Attorneys general from seven east coast states are challenging the Trump administration’s planned buyout of TotalEnergy’s Interior Department offshore wind leases for $1 billion in taxpayer dollars. It’s one of several cases of Trump’s irrational anti-wind policies clashing against the U.S. legal system and losing. 
The seven states — New York, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont — sued the Interior Department, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, two DOI officials with offshore wind leasing responsibilities, the Justice Department, and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on June 2.
New York Attorney General Letitia James, the lead plaintiff in the case, told the New York Times, “This administration cooked up a sham deal to pay a foreign energy company hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to abandon offshore wind and invest in oil and gas instead.” James has taken the lead in several of Trump’s wind legal mishaps.
This judicial assault on Trump’s wind vendetta is the latest in a series of stunning defeats for a president who, on the first day of his second term in office, issued an executive order targeting federal wind projects for destruction.
His defeats in the courts over his assault on wind began almost a year later, when a federal judge in Massachusetts Dec. 9 ruled that his executive order was an illegal abuse of the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) as “arbitrary and capricious,” a phrase that would come to haunt the administration’s anti-wind moves. The administration filed an appeal at the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston.
Not long after that (Dec. 22), the Interior Department issued a “stop work order” to five large offshore wind projects, claiming that the Defense Department had identified “national security risks,” specifically issues related to military radar installations.
Lawsuits in multiple federal jurisdictions followed. It did not take long for the courts to start finding that the administration’s actions were, no surprise, “arbitrary and capricious.” Ultimately all five of the billion dollar projects were allowed to return to work. By March, four judges in five different federal courts overturned the stop work orders, in each case citing the administration’s failure to follow the venerable Administrative Procedures Act in issuing the construction halts.
Interior was not the only executive branch agency to try to put a hurt on renewables. In August, the Treasury Department sent the tax collectors after wind and solar, aiming at the way renewables projects could qualify for tax credits. The key was how the Internal Revenue Service calculated the “beginning of construction” or “BOC” that triggers the tax breaks.
As the Troutman Pepper Locke law firm expains, for years, the IRS used two methods to make the BOC determination: either the “Physical Work Test” (requiring “physical work of a significant nature”) or the “Five Percent Safe Harbor” (incurring at least 5% of total project costs), a safe harbor provision. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act authorized speeding up the phasing out of the wind and solar tax credits, setting a date of July 4, 2026 as the beginning of construction test.
Treasury quickly issued IRS Notice 2025-42, killing the 5% safe harbor test for all wind and all large solar projects, creating a new bottleneck for wind. The safe harbor provision had been in effect since 2013. Predictably, a broad group of renewable supporters, led by the Oregon Environmental Council, challenged the IRS in court.
On June 6, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia killed the IRS notice. Senior Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, vacating the IRS action, wrote — hold your breath — that the government removal of the safe harbor test was “arbitrary and capricious.” Kollar-Kotelly said, “Because the Defendants failed to articulate a reasoned explanation for this consequential decision or give due consideration to the serious reliance interests engendered by its prior policy, Notice 2025-42 is arbitrary and capricious.”
Having made that determination, what to do next? The administration argued that the judge should remand the issue to the Treasury to allow them to issue a quick fix. The plaintiffs argued for vacating it entirely, forcing the administration to start over from the beginning if they want to try again.
Kollar-Kotelly concluded that the Treasury never gave the issue the serious consideration it deserved but began the rulemaking with the conclusion they wanted in advance. She wrote that the plaintiffs “are entitled to relief in this case because the record does not show that Notice 2025-42 was, as the APA requires, a ‘product of reasoned decisionmaking.’” She added, “That defect calls into question ‘whether the agency chose correctly’ because it indicates that the Defendants did not fully consider all the relevant interests and alternatives before acting.’”
Is the White House getting tired of its serial losses in its self-declared war against wind? It’s unlikely that Trump has given up. But there is an indication that the White House lawyers are weary of the wind war. On June 10, Heatmap reported, “Trump’s Department of Justice is giving up on defending the president’s wind permitting moratorium.”
DOJ moved to drop the appeal of the December 2025 ruling against the executive order, which has long been rendered mostly moot. The plaintiffs did not oppose the move.
