Six states sued the Trump administration on Tuesday over a nearly $1 billion agreement that paid the French energy company TotalEnergies to tear up a major offshore wind lease off the coast of New York, arguing the deal violates federal law and was cooked up after the administration repeatedly lost legal fights over its attempts to stop offshore wind.
The lawsuit, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James and joined by the attorneys general of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Vermont, targets a March 2026 agreement in which federal officials agreed to pay TotalEnergies roughly $1 billion in taxpayer money to cancel plans for two offshore wind projects off New York and North Carolina. Under the deal, TotalEnergies also pledged not to pursue any new offshore wind development in the United States and committed hundreds of millions of dollars to oil and gas projects instead.
The suit contends the deal violates the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which limits the Interior Department’s authority to cancel offshore wind leases. It also alleges a breach of the Judgment Fund Act, which governs how federal appropriations are used to pay court judgments, awards and settlements. The plaintiffs are asking a federal court to strike down the agreement, halt the lease cancellation and prevent administration officials from taking further steps to implement the deal.
James accused the administration of circumventing the courts. Federal judges had repeatedly struck down President Donald Trump’s executive orders and stop-work directives that aimed to block offshore wind development, ruling them unlawful and arbitrary. “After repeatedly losing in court, 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 said in a statement.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said when the agreement was announced that it represented “another win for President Trump’s commitment to affordable and reliable energy for all Americans.” He described offshore wind as “expensive, unreliable, environmentally disruptive and subsidy-dependent” and said the industry had been forced on U.S. taxpayers.
The coalition of states argues the deal threatens more than a thousand union jobs involved in constructing the wind farms and would deprive millions of New Yorkers of the clean, affordable energy the projects were designed to deliver. James said the administration was “trying to kill clean energy projects and destroy good-paying jobs for New Yorkers.”
Pro-offshore wind groups also criticized the agreement. Sam Salustro, a senior vice president at the Oceantic Network, said: “Paying to remove affordable, homegrown energy out of the equation leaves American consumers struggling to pay their electricity bills.”
Going deeper: Read MSI’s analysis of offshore wind lease buyout litigation →