When NOAA scrutinized a wind project off the coast of New York this spring, it turned to a new hire who had spent years criticizing offshore wind.
Annie Hawkins — who helmed a fishing industry group opposed to coastal wind projects before joining NOAA as its top lawyer — was one of several senior officials included in a planning email in the days leading up to an Interior Department order that halted construction on Empire Wind, according to emails obtained by POLITICO’s E&E News.
The emails — obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request — provide a glimpse into President Donald Trump’s sustained attack on the wind industry. They show that administration officials moved quickly in April to assemble findings that would later be cited by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum as the rationale for halting construction of the 54-turbine project.
It is unclear what role Hawkins played in deliberations over the Empire Wind stoppage, which was later reversed. The documents indicate she was included on one email and later removed. NOAA, which is part of the Commerce Department, declined to comment. Interior and its Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which oversees offshore wind, did not respond to requests for comment. Hawkins referred questions to NOAA.
But Hawkins’ presence on the email chain is likely to raise questions among offshore wind supporters.
The emails also show that senior officials at Interior received detailed recommendations from Green Oceans, a Rhode Island group opposed to offshore wind, for how to cancel leases granted to offshore wind developers. Interior issued a stop work order last week to Revolution Wind, a project off Connecticut and Rhode Island.
The administration’s deliberations around Empire Wind came shortly after the project developer, Equinor, began offshore construction and amid a public campaign from congressional Republicans and offshore wind opponents to have the project stopped.
Matthew Giacona, who was then deputy director at BOEM, thanked officials at NOAA in an email dated April 11 for their “engagement this week” and invited them to assist in Burgum’s review of offshore wind leases and permits. On the first day of his second term in January, Trump halted all new wind permits and ordered a review of existing leases.
If NOAA “has any reports or analyses that can be provided to inform the Secretary’s comprehensive assessment, these inputs would be extremely helpful as we ensure the Secretary has full information available as he continues his review,” Giacona wrote in the April 11 message.
Erik Noble, NOAA’s principal deputy assistant secretary for oceans and atmosphere, replied: “Message received. We will be in touch.”
Included on Noble’s email were officials such as Hawkins, Interior policy adviser Brittany Kelm, Interior Deputy Solicitor Damon Hagan, Interior Associate Solicitor Karen Hawbecker and BOEM chief of staff Jennafer Foreman. Hawkins was later removed from the email chain, according to the documents.
BOEM officials appear to have begun drafting the stop work order before they received the report from NOAA. Bureau officials shared a draft of an order to Equinor to shut down construction on Empire Wind on the morning of April 15.
In a separate reply 20 minutes before noon on April 15, Noble replied to Hawbecker, Hagan, Kelm and other administration officials with a “technical screening analysis” of the Empire Wind project.
Hawbecker promptly forwarded the report to BOEM’s then-acting Director Walter Cruickshank and James Anderson, BOEM’s associate director of the Office of Budget & Administration.
“FYI — here’s NOAA’s document,” Hawbecker wrote. “I’m assessing it now.”
Less than three hours later, Cruickshank sent an email with a draft of the order to two BOEM officials. “This is close hold until it’s sent. No word yet on when that will be, as the Secretary’s Order needs to come first,” he wrote.
‘Flawed science’
That NOAA report became the administration’s justification for taking the rare step to halt construction. In an email April 17, Anderson called the report “the basis of” another memo from Burgum ordering the construction halt. Burgum himself posted on social media that NOAA scientists had “revealed” the project’s approval was “built on bad & flawed science.”
But Interior has not released the contents of the report. In response to a prior records request from E&E News, the department blacked out all 27 pages of its findings.
Interior’s deliberations came as offshore wind opponents called for the Trump administration to stop Empire Wind.
Rep. Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican, sent Burgum a letter in late March calling on Interior to halt the project. The leader of a fishing group penned an opinion piece in the New York Post on April 10 warning of ecological destruction if the Trump administration allowed Empire Wind to move forward.
Steve Milloy, a conservative activist who questions climate science, followed with an opinion piece in the Daily Caller saying Interior needed to stop construction of offshore wind projects underway to satisfy the intent of Trump’s Day 1 executive order.
Trump lifted the work stoppage in May after claiming to strike a deal with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, to permit two pipelines in the state. Hochul rejected that claim, but said she was open to permitting pipelines that complied with state law.
The order nevertheless represented a massive setback for Equinor, which has estimated it cost the company more than $200 million. It also raised issues for other offshore wind developers like Ørsted, which suddenly found itself unable to sell a share of a nearby project under construction at an attractive price.
Equinor declined to comment on the emails.
Matt Walker, a regional campaign manager at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, called the administration’s stop-work orders “reckless, rushed and entirely unjustified.”
“According to email records, the administration apparently needed no more than a few hours to assess information about the Empire Wind project before putting a stop-work order in place,” he said by email.
Hawkins was one of the leading critics of offshore wind before joining NOAA, regularly criticizing the industry as the head of the Responsible Offshore Development Association.
RODA, as the group is commonly known, repeatedly criticized the Biden administration’s for moving too quickly to permit offshore wind projects. In 2020, before Biden took office, the group called for a five-year moratorium on new offshore wind leasing. It later filed an unsuccessful legal challenge to Vineyard Wind, a 62-turbine development being built off the coast of Massachusetts.
Hawkins previously worked as an attorney representing the Fisheries Survival Fund, an industry group for the scallop industry that unsuccessfully challenged Empire Wind’s lease in court.
‘We’ll talk soon’
But Hawkins has not always been critical of Empire Wind. In 2021, she hailed negotiations between Equinor and fishermen over Empire Wind’s turbine placement as a model for collaboration between the fishing and wind industries.
“Is it a solution to all the problems, and if we do this there are no impacts? Absolutely not. Is it a potentially good, effective way to minimize some of the impacts? Yes,” Hawkins told E&E News at the time. “It does highlight that there are things we can do working together to minimize the impacts.”
The records also show how one anti-wind nonprofit, Green Oceans, shared detailed recommendations with Interior for how to revoke offshore wind leases and scored a meeting with a senior Interior official in May.
In emails to Burgum and acting Assistant Secretary for Lands and Minerals Management Adam Suess, the organization shared a 68-page report called “Cancelling Offshore Wind Leases.”
The report includes detailed analyses of relevant laws and regulations, pointing out potential law violations for wind projects off the coasts of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. It was written by Maureen Koetz, president of Planet A* Strategies, who previously worked at the Nuclear Energy Institute and as aide to former Sen. Pete Domenici, a New Mexico Republican.
One of the potential issues the report flagged was national security.
BOEM and the Department of Defense “still do not have an adequate analysis or evaluation of the cumulative impacts to national security” of the projects in New England, the report stated.
The Green Oceans group sent the report to Suess on May 2 — two weeks after the Empire Wind stop-work order — along with a reminder about a meeting scheduled the following week.
“I appreciate it,” Suess wrote back to the group. “We’ll talk soon.”
Last week, BOEM halted work on Revolution Wind, a 65-turbine project off of Rhode Island that is 80 percent completed. BOEM said in a letter to Ørsted that the stoppage was needed to address “national security interests of the United States.”
Green Oceans, which was founded in 2023 by a group of property owners, has emerged as one of the leading offshore wind opponents in New England.
Elizabeth Knight, a co-founder of Green Oceans, could not be reached for comment.
