Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that oil and gas lobbyists have been quietly urging the Trump administration to back off of his assault on offshore wind. This is not because they’ve seen the light on wind, importantly, but because Trump’s crusade is torpedoing the one legislative prize the industry has spent years trying to win: permitting reform.
It’s an uncomfortable position for an industry that has largely cheered the administration’s energy agenda — and the fact that they would venture to challenge the president demonstrates that the collateral damage of his war on wind has extended well beyond the projects he’s trying to kill.
Since taking office, Trump has escalated his campaign against offshore wind in nearly every direction. On Day 1, he signed an executive order withdrawing the entire Outer Continental Shelf from wind leasing and pausing all permits and approvals. In April, he issued a stop-work order for Empire Wind 1 (a fully permitted project that, at the time, was roughly 30% through construction), stating that it was “rushed through.” In July, BOEM rescinded all designated Wind Energy Areas. In December, the administration paused construction on five East Coast projects at once, citing national security concerns.
Courts have repeatedly blocked these moves, finding the administration failed to justify its rationale. And Trump has repeatedly responded by appealing and escalating.
“My goal is to not let any windmill be built,” he told oil executives at the White House last month.
The legislative casualty
For the fossil fuel industry, the more urgent problem isn’t the uncertain fate of the wind projects themselves. It’s what the fight is doing to Congress.
The House passed the SPEED Act in December 2025, the most significant proposed overhaul of the National Environmental Policy Act in decades. For oil and gas, the bill does three specific things. It would:
- Cut litigation filing deadlines from six years to 150 days;
- Restrict courts to remanding projects for correction rather than halting them outright; and
- Bar presidents from rescinding permits on approved projects without a court order.
That last provision was written with Trump’s wind actions in mind, but its protection would run in every direction.
Pipelines have spent decades fighting a litigation playbook designed to make approved projects economically unviable through attrition. The Atlantic Coast Pipeline, an $8 billion Dominion-Duke project, was cancelled in 2020, not because it lost in court, but because successive legal challenges made it economically unviable even after winning at the Supreme Court. Offshore wind is facing something more direct: a sitting administration halting construction by executive order, on national security grounds that courts have repeatedly rejected.
The SPEED Act was designed to close both gaps by protecting approved projects from exactly the kind of executive interference the Trump Administration is now deploying against wind. The bill’s permit protection would run in both directions, but that’s precisely the problem for the Trump administration: passing it would mean making their own attacks on offshore wind illegal.
Four days after the House vote, the Trump administration suspended construction on the five wind projects. Senate Democrats immediately froze negotiations, saying there was no path to permitting reform while the administration refused to follow court orders on wind. The bill has been stalled for over two months since.
The American Petroleum Institute, which called permitting reform its number one legislative priority, has made its position clear to the administration. “If you think that permanent reform is hard to get done now,” API’s president said last month, “just wait until the Democrats control the United States House of Representatives.”
The window may be closing; midterm elections are coming up in November.
The deeper problem: What a permit is worth
The legislative stalemate is visible and measurable. The second problem is harder to quantify but may matter more in the long run.
Empire Wind 1 had every federal approval in hand. It had cleared years of environmental review across multiple agencies, including the Department of Defense (now Department of War). Then a stop-work order arrived citing a classified national security report, and the project went dark for weeks before courts intervened.
Revolution Wind, 87% complete at the time of the December pause, had much the same experience; a judge called the national security argument cited by its own stop-work order “arbitrary and capricious.”
For anyone financing a large energy project that will take years to build — a deepwater oil platform, an LNG terminal, a new transmission line, an offshore AI data center — that sequence sends a message. A completed federal permit is not a guarantee of protection. A future administration can halt your project at will, on national security grounds you’re not allowed to see, with no obligation to explain itself to a court in real time.
That’s not a wind problem. It’s a rule-of-law problem for every capital-intensive energy project in federal waters or on federal land.
The oil and gas sector’s own surveys reflect the anxiety. The Dallas Fed Energy Survey’s business activity index turned negative in Q2 2025 and stayed there for the rest of the year. Its uncertainty index jumped 21 points the moment Trump took office and hasn’t come back down.
One executive in the survey put it plainly: “Investors are avoiding energy of all types because of the volatility and the ‘stroke of pen’ risk that the federal government wields over long-duration energy developments. The sword being wielded against the renewables industry right now will likely boomerang back in 3.5 years against traditional energy.”
The permitting climate Trump has created for offshore wind is the same one any developer trying to power AI infrastructure offshore will face. Data center demand is pushing developers to look beyond congested grids for new solutions — and offshore wind, surprisingly, is one of them.
Just this morning, Aikido Technologies announced plans to build a floating offshore wind platform co-located with AI-grade compute and battery storage, moving data center infrastructure offshore to sidestep grid constraints. It is an early-stage bet facing enormous technical challenges, but the idea alone illustrates that the work at risk goes well beyond the projects Trump is explicitly trying to kill.
There’s a version of this story in which Trump’s hostility towards offshore wind could make strategic sense for fans of fossil fuels. You could argue that the Trump administration’s halting of Empire Wind in April, then lifting the order in May after New York signaled openness to new gas pipeline capacity, is an example of Trump’s signature deal-making. Governor Kathy Hochul denied that any formal deal had been struck, but Interior Secretary Doug Burgum publicly praised her “willingness to move forward on critical pipeline capacity” the same day construction resumed. That dynamic, whatever its precise terms, looked like a trade.
However, leverage only works if you eventually use it to get something valuable. Right now, Trump is burning his own allies’ top legislative priority, and no one can identify what he’s getting in return. Senate Democrats have offered a clear off-ramp: progress on wind for permitting reform. The oil industry is asking him to take it.
The longer the stalemate goes on, the more his wind war continues to look less like energy strategy and more like a personal vendetta with an increasingly long list of victims.
