In Federal Lawsuit, States Urge Judge To Reject Trump's Offshore Wind Policy

Attorneys for several states, including Massachusetts, and the Trump administration sparred in federal court in Boston on Thursday over the president's attempts to pause offshore wind permitting.

More than a dozen attorneys general, including Massachusetts AG Andrea Campbell, filed a lawsuit in May challenging Trump's Jan. 20 directive ordering federal officials not to issue permits for wind projects before completion of a "comprehensive assessment" of leasing and permitting practices.

Their case emerged for oral arguments before Judge William Young in the John Joseph Moakley federal courthouse on Thursday.

Plaintiffs, including Massachusetts Assistant Attorney General Turner Smith, contended that Trump's order runs afoul of the APA by pausing all permitting nationwide without a specified end date.

"States are already suffering significant harms as a result of this pause. We're eight months in and counting with no end in sight," Turner said. "We have harms to our ability to provide reliable and affordable energy to our residents. We have harms to our ability to meet our state statutory clean energy and climate goals, as Your Honor recognized. We have significant economic harms that are playing out on the ground already."

"The fact that the agency has discretion or doesn't face strict timelines for every single action that has to happen or be approved before a wind energy project can go forward doesn't mean that the agency can just shut down that program willy-nilly on the basis of a presidential directive that invokes a couple of buzzwords like national security or the environment," added James Auslander, an attorney for the Alliance for Clean Energy New York. "The Administrative Procedure Act would be rendered meaningless if agencies could just point to the president's words and provide no administrative record for their actions."

Michael Robertson, an attorney for the Trump administration, contended that the president's order does not outright declare that no permits will ever be issued for wind power.

"If we look at the wind directive, the key parts of it are that there is going to be an assessment and review attached to this, that it's going to be consistent with applicable law, and the president's justifications that he provided for the wind directive," Robertson said. "We might be in a different scenario under the APA if none of those three things were there, if the president just said, full stop, 'That's it.' But even if it's abbreviated, that explanation is sufficient under the APA to address these decisions."

According to the New Bedford Light, Judge Young "expressed some skepticism about the multistate lawsuit."

“[Trump’s] view of the presidency is, those people who are subordinate to me are going to follow my instructions. That’s the presidency as we know it today,” Young said, as reported by the Light. “Given the president’s view, where does that get you? … He’ll tell [agencies] to deny [permits] and they will, because they have to follow orders.”

The judge did not indicate when he will issue a decision in the case.