Federal courts have blocked each Trump offshore wind stop-work order
After the Trump administration issued a series of stop-work orders halting construction on major offshore wind projects, building-trades unions and climate advocacy groups mounted a multi-state mobilization to defend the jobs under threat. The Climate Jobs National Resource Center (CJNRC), founded to replicate a New York model nationally, has worked with state labor federations this year to launch climate jobs coalitions in five states and the United Kingdom, according to labor leaders.
Federal courts have blocked each of the administration’s stop-work orders on offshore wind projects since April 2025. The administration moved against Empire Wind off New York in April 2025, against Revolution Wind off Rhode Island and Connecticut in August, and in December ordered work stopped on New York’s Sunrise Wind and Empire Wind, Massachusetts’s Vineyard Wind, Revolution Wind, and Virginia’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind. After each order, courts sided with unions and developers. Vineyard Wind is now completed and fully operational; Revolution Wind and Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind began generating power in March; and Sunrise Wind and Empire Wind have resumed construction.
Ryan McElroen, an IBEW Local 3 member who left New York City subway repair work for offshore wind construction, was on the job at Sunrise Wind when the December stop-work news arrived. “Electricians were considered essential to make sure that things weren’t deteriorating in the ocean while the shutdown was happening,” McElroen said. “They didn’t want to just completely abandon the place, so we were just out there making sure things could still function. But it was a crazy, uncertain feeling.”
The legal victories came after workers and labor leaders joined state officials in opposing the orders. Workers at Revolution Wind had faced the loss of about 1,000 union jobs, while Massachusetts unions and officials rallied against the December Vineyard Wind order. Chris Erickson, business manager of IBEW Local 3, said: “These weren’t theoretical jobs we were facing losing, it was people looking at actively losing paychecks. We had press conferences, we rallied, we brought attention to the issue.” The administration’s stop-work orders had temporarily disrupted construction — workers were sent home and developers incurred additional costs — but each order itself was reversed in court.
Even as the projects resumed, the administration moved to cancel future offshore wind development. In 2026, the administration spent $2.7 billion in taxpayer funds to cancel 12 offshore wind leases across five deals with developers. BloombergNEF’s October projections put US offshore wind capacity at 6 gigawatts by 2035, down from a pre-election forecast of 39 gigawatts, meaning no new projects or jobs were likely to come online. CJNRC president and executive director Mike Fishman said that, by some estimates from building trades, the dropoff represents a loss of 3 billion work hours.
Erickson called the administration’s actions a “complete chilling effect” on future offshore wind development. In New Jersey, he said, several proposals have collapsed amid market and regulatory uncertainty, leaving “zero offshore wind happening off the coast of New Jersey, where there’s thousands of IBEW members and where our New York members could have worked.” Erickson said he fears the damage to the domestic offshore wind industry will be long-lasting, with companies reluctant to continue investing in ports, vessels, factories, and workers without a steady pipeline of projects.
The mobilization draws on organizing that began more than a decade ago. Mike Fishman, then secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union, said Hurricane Sandy’s 2012 impact on the New York metropolitan area served as a wake-up call for organized labor. “We came to the realization, as you can imagine, that climate change is real and it’s only getting worse, and that workers are getting hit first and worst,” Fishman said. At the time, he said, climate advocacy organizations were focused on emissions reductions “at any cost” while paying little attention to job quality.
Lara Skinner, founding executive director of Cornell’s Climate Jobs Institute, worked with Fishman and New York building trades and transit union leaders to draft a statewide clean-energy blueprint that centered workers. In 2019, the coalition recruited organizations representing 2.6 million workers to launch Climate Jobs New York and pushed for a nine-gigawatt offshore wind target, larger than what other climate groups were then demanding. Then-Governor Andrew Cuomo adopted that target that year, and the legislature later enshrined it in the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. In 2021, Climate Jobs New York helped secure labor and equity provisions for renewable energy, including prevailing-wage and project-labor-agreement requirements for large projects and labor peace agreements on operations and maintenance work.
In 2020, Fishman and other labor leaders formed the CJNRC to replicate the model in other states, winning unionized clean-jobs commitments from Texas’s AFL-CIO and strong labor standards for clean energy in Connecticut, Illinois, Rhode Island, and Maine. The federal breakthrough came in 2022 with the Inflation Reduction Act, which attached prevailing-wage and apprenticeship requirements to clean-energy tax credits. John Podesta, Biden’s climate and energy adviser and a CJNRC board member, said at a New York City convening held by the group: “One of the things that was fundamentally different about the IRA, was, in addition to the massive commitment to investing, it was done in a way that supported good jobs. That was the first time that ever happened, where labor standards were attached to private sectors.” Biden’s administration also accelerated offshore wind development, approving 10 commercial-scale offshore wind projects totaling more than 15 gigawatts by September 2024.
Chrissy Lynch, president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO and chair of Climate Jobs Massachusetts, said: “The IRA solidified our ability to work with the environmentalist groups on the same side to fight climate change by creating good, family-sustaining jobs.” Lynch added: “By the time the attacks from Trump began, we were married to the environmentalists. We weren’t on the same page about everything but we were used to working together.”
Trump won re-election in 2024 and moved to reverse much of Biden’s climate agenda, including by targeting the federal incentives that helped drive clean-energy investment. The president has singled out offshore wind, claiming it causes cancer, kills birds and other wildlife, and destroys property values.
McElroen, who has completed six one-month rotations constructing Sunrise Wind and Empire Wind projects, said he hoped to continue in offshore wind work. “I would love to continue doing this for the rest of my career,” he said in an interview at his union’s Electrical Industry Training Center in Long Island City, Queens. When he began working in offshore wind, he set a goal of saving for a down payment on a home; during his interview, he received a text message informing him he had been prequalified for a mortgage.
Despite the setbacks, Fishman said the broader alliances built during the campaign will endure. “The wind will change direction on offshore wind,” Fishman said, citing the industry’s potential to generate large amounts of electricity near coastal demand centers. “The work we’ve done across the country … has set a completely different tone in the industry and in the climate world. People now incorporate thinking on wages and jobs into their thinking about building new energy and dealing with emissions. Every governor is talking about affordability. None of that is going away.”