Think of the Washington Monument.Imagine it sitting on the surface of the sea,with blades as long as a football field slowly spinning.It’s futuristic and white with rounded edges,like a rocketship.But there are no blasts or flares.There is no noise at all but calling gulls.
Sitting on the stern of a shrimp boat in early November,this is what I saw.The captain steered us directly under one of two“pilot”turbines.In the distance,I saw foundations for 176 more,poking a few dozen feet out of the sea.The Hoover Dam came to mind,another landmark feat of energy engineering.Each new turbine will be roughly the same height as the famous dam,from blade tip to the surf below.
“Why do people think they are an eyesore?Doesn’t bother me none,”said the captain,Bob Crisher,a commercial fisherman.He’s in favor of the wind farm and believes it will bring down his electricity bills.
Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind,America’s largest planned offshore wind farm,was then being built about 27 miles east of Virginia Beach.It’s slated to power up to 660,000 homes in a region with the highest concentration of data centers in the world.With energy demand skyrocketing and electricity costs rising,Virginia needs the last construction push on this project to go smoothly.The developer,utility Dominion Energy,promised the turbines would start feeding the grid by March 2026.
How quickly things fell apart.
Last week,the Trump administration ordered a pause on all five in-progress offshore wind projects in America—including Virginia’s—citing unspecified risks to“national security.”It was the largest blow yet to a once-growing industry that Trump has brought to its knees in just 11 months.While Trump spent much of 2025 slowing the incredible rise of renewables,his unrelenting war on so-called“windmills”has been more vicious and personal.
In many ways,Trump’s attacks on offshore wind this year encapsulate this new era of politics.He throttles long-held norms in favor of retribution and personal grievance,acting with dizzying speed.He contorts facts and pushes officials in his administration to do the same.
Left in the wake are everyday citizens—including dozens I’ve interviewed over the past year—who are losing the prospect of good-paying jobs.They and their neighbors are also losing access to public goods like lower emissions,revitalized ports,reliable electricity,and a buffer against skyrocketing power bills driven by an AI boom.
Trump’s grudge against offshore wind began more than a decade ago,when he tried—and failed—to stop 11 turbines from being built within view of one of his Scottish golf courses.He has been disparaging offshore wind turbines as“ugly”and“eyesores”ever since.
He cranked up the intensity when he embarked on his second presidential campaign in 2023,branding big ocean turbines as dangerous.“[W]indmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before,”he said that year—a false statement.Still,attacking offshore wind seemed little more than an odd punchline for his campaign rallies.After all,the Trump administration backed the sector for much of his first presidential term,executing multiple offshore wind auctions that had been queued up by the Obama administration.
But Trump’s hyperactive second term has turned fringe movements and personal grudges into full-blown policies.Like his attacks on vaccines and higher education,his blitz on offshore wind farms is having far-reaching implications that will take years to fully enumerate.
Here’s some initial accounting:In-development wind projects have been paused,delayed,and paused again.One fell apart.Two are essentially mothballed after Trump sunsetted wind tax credits.Port revitalizations got cancelled.Developers lost billions.Related manufacturing is drying up.Tens of thousands of once-promised jobs may never be created.Workers already on the job are sitting idle.
One Trump-voting fisherman called the president’s anti-wind campaign“madness.”
But while vaccines and universities will endure through Trump’s political attacks,in one form or another,the U.S.offshore wind industry may not.Despite the ubiquity of offshore turbines in northern Europe and China,there is only one large-scale wind farm fully operational in American waters today.When Trump moved back into the White House,the industry was just taking off.
J.Timmons Roberts,a Brown University professor of environmental studies who tracks opposition to offshore wind,put it simply:“They’re killing the baby while it’s still in the cradle.”
Dismantling offshore wind
When Trump’s first term ended,there were no federally approved plans for offshore wind farms.When President Joe Biden left office,there were nearly a dozen.All together,there were 40 active leases in various stages of planning,development,and construction in waters along the East Coast from Maine down to the Carolinas,across the Gulf of Mexico,and along the California coast.
But,on the first day of his second term,Trump signed an executive order that froze offshore wind permitting,blocking proposed projects that didn’t already have federal approval.And he ordered a new review of the projects that did have federal permits but were not yet fully completed,throwing their future into doubt.(The executive order was ultimately struck down by a federal court on December 9.)
Unease amongst state leaders,developers,and investors immediately took root.
Within days,the first permitted project began to fall apart due to“uncertainty”over federal actions.In late January,Shell—one of two developers of the Atlantic Shores wind farm slated to be built east of New Jersey—announced it was withdrawing from the project.New Jersey then abandoned plans to purchase power from the installation.The final blow came weeks later when Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency revoked a Clean Air Act permit for the project.One former EPA official called the move“unusual.”
Research cuts and funding clawbacks soon followed.
In May,Lincoln Varnum was called into his supervisor’s office at the University of Maine,where he worked as an instrumentation engineer.Varnum was one of nine employees laid off from the university’s high-profile engineering and offshore-wind research center due to the Trump administration pausing funding.The administration also cancelled federal funding for Maine’s first floating offshore wind array,which had been fully permitted;the project was then mothballed.
“I obviously got a little emotional in the meeting…Something that I cared about was getting terminated,”Varnum told me.“It was also the first time I had ever been laid off.”
He sees himself and others who’ve been working on offshore wind as collateral damage.
In the following weeks,Varnum,who once identified as a conservative,was hopeful that Republican members of Congress would speak up about the funding cuts,but none of them did—not even Maine’s Sen.Susan Collins,a long-time offshore-wind supporter.He described Collins’silence as“rough,”especially since he had voted for Collins in the past.
“We’re a poor state.We need industry.To have a new industry that is unique to us,floating offshore wind,now targeted by the feds…It feels like a kick in the teeth,”said Varnum.
Trump yanked funding in other ways.
In September,the Department of Transportation pulled back$679 million for infrastructure projects that supported offshore wind,including one that would have cleaned up and revitalized a massive California port.Mandy Davis,a California resident and anti-wind activist,aligns herself with Trump’s false narrative that turbines harm the ocean environment.She was elated by cuts that might block turbine construction in California’s waters,but her joy was short-lived.
In November,when the Trump administration announced plans for new oil drilling off the California coast,she told me it was a“betrayal.”
New England communities,which spent over a decade preparing to build America’s first offshore wind farms,also felt betrayed.Prior to Trump’s December halt,two massive projects had been paused by the Interior Department earlier in the year.One of the projects,Revolution Wind off the coast of Rhode Island,was already 80 percent completed.
“It’s like having the rug pulled out from under you,”Jack Morris,a Massachusetts-based scalloper and Trump voter,told me earlier this year.“Nobody understands why Trump did it.I don’t know what Trump’s agenda is.”
Revolution Wind had employed 80 local fishermen,including Morris,to help with construction.The project’s pause caused Morris and others to lose some of the part-time income that helps them pay their bills as fishing revenues dry up.
The stop-work orders for Revolution Wind and New York’s Empire Wind were each lifted or reversed after about a month.But some damage was permanent.According to Harrison Sholler,an energy analyst for BloombergNEF,the orders were a signal to companies that America is not a sound investment.Foreign firms had invested heavily in the sector,lost billions,and are now looking for the door.
Trump’s more sweeping wind halt last week only reinforced that assessment.
What America lost
“What exactly will America have lost?How do you even begin to answer that question?”pondered Elizabeth Wilson,a professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College.
We could start by looking at how much new electricity capacity won’t be added to America’s increasingly strained grid.
Before Trump was elected last November,BNEF expected 39 gigawatts of offshore wind to be built in the U.S.by 2035.BNEF’s latest forecast is for just 6 gigawatts by 2035—and even that number could come down thanks to Trump’s latest pause.
Another lens is employment.Together,the five wind farms currently underway have been slated to generate about 10,000 jobs.Now some of the highly skilled workers who have already trained for those projects face an uncertain future.And the 77,000 offshore wind jobs that the Biden administration had projected the country would see in the coming decades may never materialize.
Varnum,the laid-off engineer,said that if Maine’s nascent offshore wind industry rises from the ashes sometime in the future,he“certainly would want to help.It’s not something I’m turning my back on.”
He has since found a job working for a hydroelectric company.But Varnum said he fears for America’s energy future and how far Trump might take his broader war on carbon-free energy.The president has already boosted fossil-fuel production and nuclear power while trying to tamp down clean energy.His political revenge against offshore wind may be paving the way for more.
“The guy torpedoes us on Day One and how far is he going to go?How far will this go?”wonders Varnum.
Wilson of Dartmouth says that Trump’s assault on offshore wind is ultimately a battle over facts and truth.
Fossil fuel–backed activists and groups have for years been spreading misinformation about wind turbines harming whales.They lit the match and Trump fanned the flames.The president ranted and made false claims about offshore wind throughout 2025,in front of reporters,foreign heads of state,and the entire United Nations General Assembly
Meanwhile,his administration quietly axed over$5 million for research into the impact of offshore wind on the giant mammals,ending the best and longest-running studies on the issue,as Canary Media first reported.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum justified the Trump administration’s pause of the Empire Wind project by claiming the Biden administration approved it based on“flawed&bad science”about impacts on marine life,but the Interior Department refused to share the report that supposedly backed that up.The project’s developer and Democrats in Congress are still waiting for an unredacted version.
“There’s no proof,right?There are no receipts,”Sen.Martin Heinrich,Democrat of New Mexico,told me in June.He said the administration hid the report and then used the permitting process as a“political tool,”something he sees as typical of“a banana republic.”
Without new offshore turbines going up,millions of households across the Northeast will soon pay more money for dirtier and less reliable electricity.According to a recent report,offshore wind power could help keep the lights on year-round in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic regions,especially during harsh winter weather when gas plants can fail.Cuts to planet-warming pollution,mandated by several East Coast states,are also now out of reach.All signs point to Trump’s second term creating a hotter and less affordable future for Americans.
Few people interviewed for this story expressed hope that the damage from Trump’s war on“windmills”could be reversed anytime soon.
“What Trump really killed was hope,”said Wilson.“And what is the value of hope?”
