September 19, 2025 — A top-level Interior Department official is backing up the federal government’s about-face on offshore wind energy by saying its prior approval of a Maryland offshore wind project downplayed potential impacts on ocean rescues, commercial fishing, and environmental concerns – and that the approval process may need to be scrapped and redone.
Adam Suess, an acting Interior Department assistant secretary who oversees the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), said that even after BOEM had approved construction and operations plans for the offshore wind farm by developer US Wind, his agency has a duty to keep checking whether the project really meets the law.
Agency officials under President Joe Biden’s administration “failed to account for all the impacts that the Maryland Offshore Wind Project may cause,” Suess wrote in a Sept. 12 filing, one attached to the same federal lawsuit that the Town of Ocean City is fighting against the Interior Department over offshore wind.
“As part of its ongoing review of the project, the department has initially determined that these impacts may not be sufficiently mitigated and, therefore, the project, as approved, is not preventing interference with other reasonable uses” of the outer continental shelf, the filing states.
While Biden’s Interior Department cleared the project last year, attorneys for the Trump administration now argue that those approvals were flawed. They said BOEM’s approval “was not properly informed by a complete understanding of the impacts from the project,” and that some impacts were “understated or obfuscated.”