From stalled offshore wind turbines along the Eastern Seaboard to an oil drilling boom off the Gulf Coast, the Trump administration’s moves to shake up the energy sector are getting their day in court in 2026.
This year, federal judges will decide the legality of the Trump team’s reversals of advances in the offshore wind industry and its push to open more of the nation’s waters to fossil fuel development. The court battles are expected to help shape the U.S. energy mix for decades to come.
“The next 12 months are going to be extraordinarily important for the nation’s long-term protection of the environment and commitment to renewable energy,” said Basil Seggos, partner and senior policy director at the law firm Foley Hoag.
Last month, a federal court in Boston ruled the Trump administration had failed to properly support its decision to halt all new wind approvals. At the Interior Department, regulators have moved to block individual authorizations for several offshore wind projects near completion. And just this week, a federal judge has intervened to allow a New England wind farm to move forward, with more legal challenges for other projects pending.
“I think for the rest of this administration, offshore wind is going to have a lot of problems,” said Keith Hall, director of the Energy Law Center at Louisiana State University.
Other federal courts are poised to decide whether the administration had legal grounds to reverse protections against offshore oil and gas drilling instituted during the Obama administration and expanded under former President Joe Biden.
Meanwhile, environmental groups are pushing for more analysis of how a renewed push by the Trump administration and Congress for more offshore oil and gas leasing is likely to affect marine life and ocean habitats.
“The climate is at stake,” said Brettny Hardy, a staff attorney at Earthjustice, which is challenging plans to expand offshore leasing.
“All these sensitive areas — especially in Alaska — they’re going to be marred by infrastructure, production, potentially oil spills, noise, seismic activities,” she said, “all of it for something we don’t need right now.”
Offshore wind
The Trump administration’s anti-offshore-wind directives are spurring new lawsuits that will define the bounds of the president’s power to block individual projects and issue sweeping bans on new approvals.
After a year of stymieing offshore wind development, Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management issued a new order in late December halting construction of five projects along the East Coast: Vineyard Wind 1, Revolution Wind, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, Sunrise Wind and Empire Wind 1.
The new actions are vulnerable to litigation, said Michael Gerrard, faculty director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.
“All these wind projects underwent intensive, multiyear environmental review across numerous federal and state agencies,” Gerrard said.
He said BOEM’s order halting construction will “deepen the chill” on a range of domestic manufacturing and threaten to “worsen the crisis over electric bill affordability.”
Democratic-led states and nearly all the developers targeted by Trump’s order have individually sued over the directive. On Monday, a federal district court judge in Washington, D.C., issued an order from the bench blocking the administration’s construction pause for Revolution Wind off the coasts of Connecticut and Rhode Island. The court found that the Trump administration had failed to explain its rationale for blocking the project.
Earlier in December, a federal judge in Massachusetts rejected sweeping directives to halt all new wind approvals issued soon after Trump began his second term, finding the administration had failed to properly explain its moves.
The decision was a spark of optimism for advocates in a year that has otherwise seen a lot of setbacks for offshore wind and renewable energy, said Seggos, who previously served for nearly a decade as commissioner for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
“The district court ruling on offshore wind, that’s the beginning of the fight,” he told POLITICO’s E&E News before BOEM’s order halting the East Coast projects. “No doubt that it’s going to go on appeal, and that appeal is going to take an enormous amount of time to work its way through the courts.”
The Trump administration has declined to comment on its plans for an appeal. Interior does not comment on pending litigation as a matter of policy.
Offshore oil and gas
Federal judges are also poised to rule this year on the president’s power to reverse indefinite bans on new offshore oil and gas drilling implemented under prior administrations. So far, no appeals court has ruled on the issue as the Trump administration pushes to open more federal waters to fossil fuel developers.
Environmental and Indigenous groups are fighting to reinstate protections for more than 625 million acres of U.S. offshore waters. Some of the protections date back to the Obama administration, while others were advanced under Biden.
The legal fight could come to a head as soon as this year, the earliest point the Trump administration has proposed holding a lease sale in the Beaufort Sea off the coast of Alaska, said Earthjustice’s Hardy, who is representing opponents of the sale.
“Opening these areas to leasing is just going so far backwards from where we are right now,” Hardy said. In 2023, Biden indefinitely shielded from development about 2.8 million acres of the Beaufort Sea off the coast from the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
The groups filed an amended complaint in October alleging the Trump administration violated the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act by allowing drilling to resume. Section 12(a) of the law empowers the president to withdraw unleased federal waters, but no part of the statute authorizes the president to undo those withdrawals, the groups said in their complaint.
“President Trump’s order exceeds his constitutional authority and his statutory authority under OCSLA,” the groups told the court.
Their claims repeat Chief Judge Sharon Gleason’s rationale for striking down an order Trump issued during his first term to open up federal waters protected during the Obama administration. (Gleason, an Obama appointee to the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska, is also considering the lawsuit over the Trump administration’s latest action.)
The Trump administration fought Gleason’s prior ruling in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, but the case was ultimately tossed out as moot once Biden took office and shifted the country’s offshore policy again. When Trump returned to office in January 2025, he issued Executive Order 14148 reversing the withdrawals of federal waters from Obama and Biden.
OCSLA does not address a circumstance where a president rescinds the withdrawal of certain areas from development, said Hall of LSU. But, he added, “it would be a little bit unusual to allow one president to bind forever future policy.”
OCSLA, he said, was designed to encourage offshore drilling.
NEPA
Interior’s decision not to analyze the environmental impact of lease sales is another key legal target for opponents of the Trump administration’s offshore energy strategy.
Such cases will be the latest battleground over the scope of the National Environmental Policy Act after the Supreme Court ruled in June in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County that the statute only requires agencies to study the impacts of proposed projects themselves — not the effects of future or related projects.
In November, environmental groups sued Interior in federal court in Washington for failing to analyze the likely effects of its Dec. 10, 2025, oil lease sale mandated by Congress under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
The issue is likely to come up in future sales, as the Trump administration has said it does not plan to conduct any NEPA reviews for any of the 30 lease sales mandated under the new law. The statute spreads out the sales over a 15-year period, and all are set for the Gulf of Mexico, which Trump has renamed the Gulf of America.
Hall said agencies only have to do NEPA analysis when they have discretion to act.
“The jurisprudence is pretty clear. You don’t need to do a NEPA analysis if an action is mandated by the statute,” Hall said. “And here there’s a congressional statute compelling the Department of Interior to hold offshore sales, so there’s no discretion left for the agency.”
He added: “I don’t see how that case survives.”
Environmental groups have critiqued BOEM’s decision to break with decades of agency practice by skipping NEPA review of its national offshore drilling program, or five-year plan. The agency plans instead to review individual lease sales offered under the program.
The proposal would offer 34 oil and gas lease sales between 2026 and 2031, and would include new areas in the Pacific, Arctic and eastern Gulf of Mexico. The proposed sales are in addition to the 30 sales approved by Congress under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
“I don’t see any universe where we don’t challenge it in court,” said Kristen Monsell, oceans program litigation director at the Center for Biological Diversity. The organization is already part of the coalition challenging the Dec. 10 lease sale.
In November, BOEM stated that it was discretionary for the agency to conduct environmental review at the planning stage, citing two opinions from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The agency instead said it would do an analysis under OCSLA.
Irrespective of the D.C. Circuit case law, Interior has still been doing thorough NEPA reviews of its five-year plans until this point, said Monsell.
“I don’t see how the agency can reasonably analyze all of the factors that it is supposed to under OCSLA, without doing a comprehensive analysis of all the environmental impacts,” she said.
While the D.C. Circuit has said that NEPA review isn’t ripe at the planning stage, she continued, “there’s a distinction between challenging the analysis that they did — versus them not doing any analysis whatsoever.”
