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Interior Secretary Doug Burgum's announcement last month that the administration was cancelling two offshore wind leases and reimbursing the lessee, TotalEnergies, nearly $1 billion, raised a host of questions. What authority was he using to do this? Where would the money come from? Was this legal? Could the Trump administration kill the offshore wind industry by paying it exorbitant sums to go away?
A newly unearthed copy of one of the agency’s official lease cancellation decisions begins to fill in the picture. It confirms what the Department of the Interior has thus far refused to acknowledge: The agency intends to pay TotalEnergies using the Judgment Fund, a cache of public money overseen by the Department of Justice intended for agency settlements.
Tony Irish, a former solicitor in the Department of the Interior, was digging around in a public Bureau of Ocean Energy Management database on Tuesday when he stumbled upon the document, which is dated April 9, 2026 — more than two weeks after Burgum’s lease cancellation announcement.
The document is a letter to Jen Banks, the permitting and development director for TotalEnergies’ Carolina Long Bay project, which is the smaller of the two leases that were cancelled. It says the agency reached a settlement agreement with Carolina Long Bay on March 23, in which the Interior Department “determined that cancelling Lease OCS-A 0545 is in the public interest,” and established that Carolina Long Bay “would have asserted claims in litigation against the United States related to the lease.”
It ends by saying that, pursuant to the settlement agreement, “DOI will, through the Department of Justice, request payment in the amount of $133,333,333 to Carolina Long Bay from the Judgment Fund Branch at the United States Department of Treasury.”
The letter does not include a copy of the settlement agreement or reference the stipulation that TotalEnergies reinvest the money into U.S. oil and gas development, as described in Burgum’s announcement.
While the Judgment Fund is essentially bottomless, there are strict rules about when it can be used. Agencies can draw on it to settle litigation that cannot be remedied by injunctive relief and requires monetary compensation. They can also request a payment from the Judgment Fund to settle “imminent litigation” — claims that have not yet been filed in court.
As there’s no record of claims filed in court, the TotalEnergies settlement likely falls into the latter category. But Irish, the former solicitor, told me it's hard to see how litigation could have been credibly imminent. TotalEnergies’ lease terms, which the Biden administration updated and the company agreed to in January 2025, explicitly state that the lease cannot be canceled “unless and until” the Interior Secretary has suspended operations for at least five years and extended the company’s lease for an equal amount of time. Given that TotalEnergies’ lease is less than five years old — it was purchased in 2022 — and there’s no evidence that it had been under suspension for any period of time, there appears to be little basis for any claim of imminent litigation.
It’s also unclear what claim TotalEnergies could have brought to warrant monetary payment. “It looks like the result of any viable claim TotalEnergies would have brought forth is not monetary damages, but enforcement of this lease provision that requires suspension and extension first,” Irish told me.
There is not yet any decision document in the database for TotalEnergies’ second lease, called Attentive Energy, for which the company stands to receive $795 million in reimbursements. Secretary Burgum will appear before the House Appropriations Committee on Monday morning, where Representative Chellie Pingree of Maine has vowed to question him on the deal. “The appropriations process for Fiscal Year 2027 will be getting underway soon with budget hearings, and I intend to press for answers,” she said in a statement shared with me by email in March. “Secretary Burgum should be prepared to provide them.”
