The Trump administration has spent $2.7 billion of taxpayer money on its campaign against wind power and another $1.125 billion propping up coal, according to a Guardian accounting. Since March, the Interior Department has struck four deals with energy companies, paying them to cancel a total of eight offshore wind projects and to pledge investment in fossil-fuel power instead. The first, with the French company TotalEnergies, prompted a lawsuit from seven Democratic-led states alleging an illegal use of taxpayer funds. The most recent was with Duke Energy, which took a $129 million federal buyout to abandon its lease in the Carolina Long Bay area off Brunswick County, North Carolina.
The terms are explicit. Under the TotalEnergies agreement, the company pledged roughly $1 billion, the value of the offshore wind leases it surrendered, toward oil, gas, and LNG production, including the Rio Grande LNG plant in Texas, and the government agreed to reimburse it dollar-for-dollar up to what it had paid for those wind leases. Interior has struck similar lease-termination deals covering waters off California, Maine, New Jersey, and New York, and has advertised them: its press release on the TotalEnergies deal was headlined “Interior and TotalEnergies Agree to End Offshore Wind Projects, Lowering Costs for American Families.”
What makes this different from ordinary policy reversal is the mechanism. Previous administrations slowed or killed energy projects through permitting, litigation, or regulation. There is no precedent for the federal government directly paying developers to give up offshore wind leases they had lawfully acquired, said Jenny Rowland-Shea of the Center for American Progress. “They are trying to snuff out an entire form of energy,” she said, “and it's at a time when the United States needs more energy... as people's rates are going up for electricity, as we see datacenters gobbling up more energy.”
Trump has called wind energy “ugly” and “disgusting” and described efforts to cut planet-warming pollution a “scam.” Critics note that the fossil-fuel companies benefiting donated record sums to his campaign, while the working-class Americans he promised lower energy bills are paying more. Former Washington Gov. Jay Inslee: “Trump is getting Americans coming and going. He's forcing higher power bills on them by blocking clean energy, then he's fattening the wallets of his cronies, all with billions of our tax dollars” (see Trump Orders Pentagon to Buy Coal Power, Receives 'Undisputed Champion of Coal' Trophy, and Renames DOD 'the Department of War').
On July 14, 2026, Reuters reported an analysis by the BlueGreen Alliance, a labor-environmental coalition, finding that Trump's rollback of federal clean-energy support has stalled or canceled 223 manufacturing and clean-energy projects representing $82.9 billion in investment and 111,765 jobs, with a further $695.2 billion and nearly 1.2 million projected jobs at risk under the tighter tax-credit rules in his signature spending law.