New York v. U.S. Department of the Interior

New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont filed a complaint in the federal district court for the District of Columbia challenging the cancellation of Attentive Energy’s offshore wind lease and its settlement agreement with the U.S. Department of Interior. The complaint named the U.S. Department of the Interior, Secretary of the Interior Douglas J. Burgum, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), Acting Director of BOEM Matthew Giacona, the U.S. Department of Justice, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, and Attentive Energy LLC (Attentive) as defendants. On March 23, 2026, the Department of the Interior announced that it had entered into an agreement with TotalEnergies, the parent company of Attentive, in which it would cancel TotalEnergies’s existing offshore wind leases, including the Attentive lease, and reimburse TotalEnergies for the amount it had paid for its leases. In exchange, TotalEnergies agreed to reinvest those funds in constructing a new liquefied natural gas plant and developing conventional oil and shale gas projects and pledged not to develop new offshore wind projects in the U.S. The settlement agreement stated that the Department of War had “raised classified national security concerns” that would have prevented construction of the project. The states challenged the lease cancellation as arbitrary and capricious and unlawful under the Administrative Procedure Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA). Additionally, they claimed that the settlement agreement violated OCSLA and the Judgment Fund Act, and was in excess of statutory authority and ultra vires. The states requested declaratory relief and injunctions against the implementation of the lease cancellation and settlement agreement in addition to requesting that the court vacate them.

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