When federal officials sought this month to halt an offshore wind project planned off the coast of Maryland, they reached for a new rationale: impaired search and rescue operations.
The Trump administration has sought to impede five permitted wind projects in the Atlantic over the past five months, but the move to cancel approval for the Maryland Offshore Wind Project took a different tack with its rescue concerns.
In a Sept. 12 court filing, lawyers for the Trump administration asked a federal judge to cancel the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s December 2024 approval of the wind project under former President Joe Biden. The reason, the administration’s lawyers wrote, was because BOEM had identified an error in its prior work.
“BOEM underestimated impacts to operations by search and rescue helicopters attempting to navigate throughout the project area,” acting Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson said in the filing with the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.
