Washington DC – Seven states have sued President Donald Trump's administration over its decision to sign a $1 billion deal that will end major offshore wind developments on the East Coast.
The attorneys general of seven Northeast states, including Connecticut, New York, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont, filed the lawsuit with the US District Court for the District of Columbia on Tuesday.
It takes issue with a deal the Department of the Interior reached with French energy company TotalEnergies in March to halt construction of wind farms and instead invest in fossil fuels.
At a cost of $928 million, TotalEnergies will "redirect capital from expensive, unreliable offshore wind leases toward affordable, reliable natural gas projects," an Interior Department press release announced at the time.
According to the lawsuit, the Trump administration illegally appropriated taxpayer money to fund the deal. It also alleges the deal violates the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act.
"Interior Defendants did not hold a hearing before canceling the Lease, or make the necessary determination that cancellation was required by national security or defense," the lawsuit argues.
In a statement put out by New York Attorney General Letitia James' office on Tuesday, she declared the Trump administration is "trying to kill clean energy projects and destroy good-paying jobs for New Yorkers."
"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.
"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 for the Department of the Interior told ABC News in a statement.