Seven Democratic-controlled states sued the Trump administration on Tuesday over its move to block a planned wind farm off the coast of New York.
The lawsuit seeks to overturn an extraordinary deal that the Trump administration reached in March with the French energy giant TotalEnergies. That agreement saw the government pay TotalEnergies $928 million to abandon plans to build the wind project off New York and another one off North Carolina.
The New York attorney general, Letitia James, filed the suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Ms. James, a Democrat, said in a statement that the deal violated at least two federal laws and that it would harm New York’s economy and power grid.
“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,” she said. “We are fighting back to stop this illegal agreement that threatens to erase over a thousand union jobs and cheat millions of New Yorkers out of clean, affordable energy.”
The attorneys general of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Vermont joined Ms. James in the litigation, arguing that their states could have gotten electricity from the project.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment. Representatives for the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
President Trump has disparaged offshore wind power since 2012, when he tried unsuccessfully to stop a project visible from one of his golf courses in Scotland. The president has claimed falsely that offshore wind turbines do not work and that they are killing whales.
Under the March deal, TotalEnergies forfeited its lease in federal waters for the planned wind farm. The Justice Department then reimbursed the company the $795 million it paid for the lease during the Biden administration.
In exchange, TotalEnergies pledged to invest that money in U.S. oil and gas infrastructure, which Mr. Trump has prioritized over clean energy. However, it remains unclear whether the company will build new projects that it had not already outlined before the deal.
The planned wind installation, known as Attentive Energy, would have been built 54 miles south of Jones Beach, N.Y. It would have produced enough electricity to power more than one million homes and businesses.
The Trump administration and TotalEnergies also reached a similar agreement in March to scuttle a smaller wind farm off North Carolina that could have powered 300,000 homes and businesses. The suit filed Tuesday did not challenge the cancellation of that project, known as Carolina Long Bay.
Both agreements were unusual transfers of taxpayer dollars to a foreign company. To pay TotalEnergies, the Justice Department used the Judgment Fund, an unlimited account created by Congress to settle lawsuits against the federal government, even though the energy firm had not sued the United States.
(The Justice Department has proposed to use the same account to create a $1.8 billion fund to compensate victims of what the administration argues is political persecution. On Friday, however, a federal judge temporarily barred the department from taking steps to set up that fund, and now Mr. Trump is backing away from the idea.)
The complaint by the blue states argued that the deal with TotalEnergies was an illegal use of the Judgment Fund because it did not settle an existing lawsuit against the government. The suit also accused the government of violating the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which allows the cancellation of an offshore wind lease only after a hearing and a comprehensive review.
If the blue states prevail, the court would void the deal with TotalEnergies, returning the lease to the energy company and the money to the government.
But even then, the wind farm off New York might not be built. In November 2024, Patrick Pouyanné, the chief executive of TotalEnergies, said the company would “put the project on pause” after Mr. Trump was re-elected. And Mr. Pouyanné said recently that “offshore wind is too expensive from our point of view.”
Scientists and environmentalists, though, say that offshore wind farms could play a crucial role in the fight against climate change. Unlike burning fossil fuels, wind turbines do not generate any of the greenhouse gases that are dangerously warming the planet. And unlike large-scale solar farms, they do not take up vast amounts of valuable land.
The Trump administration has pursued a shifting strategy for stifling America’s offshore wind industry, which is in its infancy compared with those of China and Europe.
In December, the Interior Department ordered a halt to construction of five wind farms off the East Coast, saying the projects could interfere with military radar and threaten national security. But federal judges struck down those moves, saying the government had not substantiated its claims.
After that, the administration began dealing directly with offshore wind developers. Following the deal with TotalEnergies in March, it struck similar deals in April with the developers of Bluepoint Wind, a project off New York and New Jersey, and Golden State Wind, off California.
A spokeswoman for Ms. James declined to comment on whether the Democratic states would bring a similar suit over the cancellation of Bluepoint Wind.
