Seven Democratic-led states filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday challenging the Trump administration's decision to pay nearly $1 billion in taxpayer funds to a French energy company to abandon plans for a major offshore wind project.
New York Attorney General Letitia James filed the suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, joined by the attorneys general of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Vermont, challenging an agreement reached by the Department of Justice, reported 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 said in a statement.
The lawsuit targets a March agreement in which the DOJ paid $928 million to TotalEnergies to surrender its lease for the Attentive Energy wind farm, a project 54 miles off Jones Beach that would have powered more than one million homes and businesses and supported over a thousand union jobs.
The states argue the deal was illegal on two counts. First, the Justice Department used the Judgment Fund — a congressional account designed to settle lawsuits against the federal government — even though TotalEnergies had never sued the United States. Second, the administration allegedly bypassed the required hearings and review process mandated under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act before canceling an offshore wind lease.
In exchange for the payout, TotalEnergies pledged to redirect the money toward U.S. oil and gas infrastructure, a priority of the Trump administration, but it's not clear whether that investment will produce any new projects beyond those already in the works.
The president has opposed offshore wind since at least 2012, when he unsuccessfully tried to block a wind project visible from one of his Scottish golf courses. His administration has pursued multiple strategies to dismantle the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry, including a December halt to East Coast construction orders that federal judges later struck down.
The Justice Department declined to comment.