Trump's War on Wind Power: $4 Billion of Taxpayer Money Spent to Cancel Electricity America Needs

I don’t think wind power is a moral cause. Turbines are big, they change a coastline, and some projects were signed at prices that looked generous even when they were signed. A President who wanted tougher contracts, a closer look at radar interference or a fairer deal for fishermen would have had a reasonable case to make.

That isn’t what this President has done. He has gone after wind with a hostility that no cost test, reliability test or national security test can explain.

Not partly irrational. Not irrational at the margins. Irrational.

Ask who pays

Start with the money, because that’s where the policy is easiest to judge. Since March the Interior Department has signed about a dozen deals paying developers to give up offshore wind leases. TotalEnergies got $928 million. RWE got $1.22 billion. Invenergy, Bluepoint, Golden State Wind and Duke Energy got hundreds of millions more. By the end of September the total was about $3.9 billion to $4 billion, as set out in our news post on the buyouts, paid from the Treasury’s Judgment Fund, and about 19 gigawatts of planned capacity was gone. All of it cancelled at public expense.

Who collects that money? The developers, who in several cases agreed to put it into fossil fuel projects instead. Who was it meant to help? Ratepayers in New Jersey, New York and New England, who now face rising power bills with less supply on the way. Eight states have sued over the buyouts. New Jersey’s attorney general put it simply: the administration “is paying developers to abandon building new sources of energy.”

A party that talks about waste should be able to explain this line item. It can’t.

Ask what the courts found

The second test is legal. If the administration’s case against wind were strong, it would survive a judge. It hasn’t.

When Interior stopped work on Revolution Wind in August 2025, the project was about 80% built. Judge Royce Lamberth called the order “the height of arbitrary and capricious action.” When Interior paused all five offshore projects under construction in December, citing classified radar concerns, five separate rulings blocked it within weeks. One judge said the department had failed to “adequately explain or justify” itself. Interior didn’t even appeal. In June the government dropped its appeal of the ruling that struck down the January 2025 wind permitting freeze, so that ruling is now final. In August a Trump-appointed judge in Oregon ordered the Pentagon to resume the security reviews it had quietly stopped, which had stalled at least 125 mostly onshore projects in 25 states.

Revolution Wind sent its first power to the New England grid in March. Vineyard Wind finished construction the same week. The grid operator, ISO New England, had warned that delaying these projects “will increase risks to reliability.” That’s the institution responsible for keeping the lights on, not an environmental group.

Ask what the President says

The third test is the President’s own words, and here the problem is plain. In March he told reporters, with Ireland’s Taoiseach beside him, “we’re going to try and have no windmills built in the United States,” because “they kill the birds, they’re unsightly, they make a lot of noise.” Later that month he boasted to the Interior Secretary that “we have not approved one windmill since I’ve been in office.” At the UN in 2025 he called windmills “so pathetic and so bad.”

Those aren’t arguments about reliability or China or subsidies. They’re about taste. Policy built on taste ends up paying billions to stop power plants that are already half-built.

The case I still don’t accept

I understand the administration’s better argument. Wind is intermittent, the grid needs power that can run on demand, and DOE has warned about blackout risk as old plants retire. Fair enough. But the answer to intermittency is more of everything, including gas, nuclear, storage and transmission. Gas turbines are sold out into the next decade, and new nuclear is years away. Wind and solar are what can be built this year and next, while data centres push demand up for the first time in a generation.

The President could have struck tougher bargains. He chose to buy the projects out of existence and call it savings.

That’s not an energy policy. It’s a grudge with a budget line.