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A group of Northeast attorneys general led by New York’s Letitia James is suing the Trump administration for paying TotalEnergies nearly $1 billion to walk away from its two U.S. offshore wind leases.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Tuesday, alleges that the government’s settlement agreement with Total violates the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, the statute governing offshore wind, as well as the Judgment Fund Act, which controls the pot of money the federal government uses to pay legal settlements. The other plaintiffs are New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
“After repeatedly losing in court, this administration cooked up a sham deal to pay a foreign energy company hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to abandon offshore wind and invest in oil and gas instead,” James said in a press release. “We are fighting back to stop this illegal agreement that threatens to erase over a thousand union jobs and cheat millions of New Yorkers out of clean, affordable energy.”
On March 23, the Interior Department announced it had reached an agreement with Total to cancel two offshore wind leases in the New York area and refund the $928 million cost back to the company; in exchange, the announcement said, Total would invest an equivalent amount in U.S. oil and gas projects. In a later release, the department said it would pay Total from the Judgment Fund, a permanently appropriated pot of money overseen by the Treasury Department used to settle ongoing or imminent litigation.
According to the signed settlement agreement, the Trump administration said that it would have suspended construction on the lease indefinitely due to national security concerns, after which Total would have claimed breach of contract, but instead, the two parties settled.
James’ lawsuit claims that this does not meet the Judgment Fund’s standard for imminent litigation. “A hypothetical lawsuit to challenge an agency action that had not even been threatened — here, the suspension or cancellation of the Lease — does not constitute actual or imminent litigation under the Judgment Fund Act,” it says.
The lawsuit also contends that there was no actual disagreement between the parties. Both Total and the Trump administration wanted to cancel the leases, it says, citing reporting from Axios in which Total’s CEO asserted that the agreement “came from us — we took the initiative.”
If the parties wanted to cancel the leases, they could have done so legally under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act. But the government’s actions violate that statute as well, according to the lawsuit. Proper procedure would have required a hearing to investigate whether continued activity on the lease would cause serious harm to the environment or national security, and whether the advantages of cancelling outweigh those of continuing to honor the lease. The law also requires the administration to notify and coordinate with the governors of affected states, which the Interior Department did not do, the suit argues.
The states that brought the lawsuit allege the terminations will harm their economies, energy grids, and climate goals. New Jersey awarded a contract to one of Total’s offshore wind projects, called Attentive Energy Two, in 2024; the finished development would have provided the state 1.3 gigawatts of power, enough to power about 650,000 homes. On its own, the agreement would have gone a third of the way toward fulfilling a state law passed in 2018 that required New Jersey to procure 3.5 gigawatts of offshore wind energy. In addition to feeding the state’s tight electricity market, in which demand is now outpacing supply, the Attentive Energy Project would have delivered an estimated $3.1 billion in direct, indirect, and induced benefits into New Jersey’s economy.
New York did not have an active contract with any projects under development within the leased areas, but it was anticipating Total bidding into the state’s next round of offshore wind solicitations, according to the lawsuit. The state has many aging power plants nearing retirement, and its grid operator has warned that the New York City area faces a reliability risk without new generation coming online. Total’s project would have provided “critical energy diversity benefits” to the city, the suit says.
The Interior Department disputed the basis for the lawsuit, telling Heatmap that “the only thing blatantly unlawful here was the process by which these offshore wind leases were negotiated and imposed under the Biden administration.” A spokesperson reiterated that “there were serious national security risks that demanded immediate attention,” although did not elaborate on what those risks were. They also emphasized that the settlement agreements were voluntary and were approved by the Department of Justice.
“Attempts to rewrite history now cannot erase the reality of these projects and the damage they could cause,” they said.
Offshore wind advocates, however, applauded the suit. “We commend the Northeast Governors for standing up again against actions that threaten jobs, investment, and the nation's ability to meet growing electricity demand with an affordable and reliable energy source,” Liz Burdock, the president and CEO of the Oceantic Network, said.
