The Trump administration’s move to rescind all designated Offshore Wind Energy Areas (WEAs) in the United States is being characterized as a “major policy reversal,” but what it truly represents is a refreshing application of rationality in a field too long dominated by dogma, groupthink, and the wishful economics of green technocracy.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) announced the decision to rescind every single federally designated wind energy area on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf, which brings to an end the federal protection of more than 3.5 million acres previously targeted for “offshore wind development.” The scale of the reversal cannot be overstated: this is not a minor adjustment or a routine regulatory tweak. This is, in the words of the article, the effective “end” of offshore wind leasing in the United States—at least for the time being.
To understand the gravity and necessity of this move, let’s remind ourselves how we got here. The Obama and Biden administrations, along with their European counterparts, threw unprecedented support behind offshore wind, an industry that—despite the tidal wave of public subsidies—has shown a knack for floundering economically and technologically whenever taxpayer money is not propping it up. In fact, the very need for designated wind energy areas is itself an admission that offshore wind cannot compete on a level playing field; it requires the full faith, credit, and political muscle of government to exist.
BOEM’s action follows the Interior Secretary’s Order 3437—titled, with unintentional irony, “Ending Preferential Treatment for Unreliable, Foreign Controlled Energy Sources in Department Decision-Making”—a move that aligns with a Presidential Memorandum from January 2025. That memorandum, let’s recall, ordered the temporary suspension of offshore wind leasing, setting the stage for this more comprehensive rollback.
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