Saylesville, Rhode Island

On August 22, 2025, the Trump administration issued a stop work order on the Revolution Wind project off the coasts of Rhode Island and Connecticut. The project was 80 percent complete, with 45 of 65 wind turbines installed. Its cancellation left Patrick Crowley feeling more than a little ticked off.

Designed to power 350,000 homes in Connecticut and Rhode Island, Revolution Wind was one of about a dozen offshore wind farms planned for coastal New England, with electricity rates locked in at less than half of what residents currently pay on average. It was the upshot of a multi-year planning process in which Crowley had been deeply involved, both as President of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO and as a co-founder of Climate Jobs Rhode Island, a coalition of labor, environmental, and community groups dedicated to building “an equitable, pro-worker, pro-climate green economy.”

At an August 25 press conference in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, Crowley stressed the jobs at stake, “a thousand good-paying union jobs,” and sounded a warning to President Trump: “We’re not going to sit down and take this lightly. We’re going to fight you at every step of the way.” Another speaker, Michael Sabitoni, President of the Rhode Island Building & Construction Trades Council, told CNN that many of his union’s members “voted for this administration, and this isn’t what they voted for. They didn’t vote for them to put them on the unemployment line.”

Both of the state’s U.S. Senators were also on hand, along with Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee. The project shutdown had jeopardized hundreds of millions of dollars of Rhode Island investments, McKee said, adding that it would force Rhode Islanders to pay higher utility bills and “impact grid reliability across New England.”

The stop work order came from the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which was vague about the reasons, citing unspecified “national security” concerns and possible interference with “reasonable uses” of “the high seas, and the territorial seas.” But Donald Trump has a long record of opposition to offshore wind projects, dating back to one that opened in 2018, over his objections, near one of his Scottish golf courses. He has compared wind turbines to “garbage in a field” and claimed that they “obviously” kill whales, although scientists have found no evidence of that.

Trump and his energy policy team have been equally emphatic about their enthusiasm for coal, oil and gas. In April 2024, Trump hosted a gathering of top fossil fuel industry executives at Mar-a-Lago, and, according to several witnesses, invited them to pony up $1 billion for his campaign. It would be a “deal,” he reportedly said, in view of the tax and regulatory benefits they could expect from a second Trump administration. The industry ended up contributing about half that amount to Trump and other Republican candidates last year, according to an analysis by a pro-renewable-energy group called Climate Power.

Since he re-entered the White House, Trump and his appointees have been dismissive of renewable energy across the board. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, formerly the chief executive of the second largest hydraulic fracturing company in North America, has called wind and solar power “worthless” because they’re not always available, even though batteries allow both forms of energy to be stored for use anytime.

Orsted, the Danish company developing Revolution Wind, filed a lawsuit against the shutdown, and the states of Rhode Island and Connecticut announced plans to do the same. In mid-September a Reagan-appointed federal judge authorized Revolution Wind to resume work, describing the stop work order as “the height of arbitrary and capricious action.”

The administration continues to talk tough, however. The court’s ruling, a White House spokesperson declared, “will not be the final say on the matter.” At an oil-and-gas industry gathering in Milan Italy,  Interior Secretary Doug Burgum went further, suggesting that offshore wind “likely” has no future in the U.S.

Crowley, as he made plain in August, is undeterred: “What Donald Trump doesn’t understand is he did not just take on a Danish company, or a project; he took on the entire state of Rhode Island.” 

Posted on September 25, 2025