June 4, 2026 — U.S. Senator Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) took credit for the recently extended ban on Russian seafood during a Congressional committee hearing 2 June, stating that “Americans are buying American freedom fish, not communist fish from Russia.”
The hearing, titled “The Blue Economy: Advancing American Fisheries, Maritime Strength, and Coastal Economies,” took place more than a month after U.S. President Donald Trump opted to extend the ban on Russian seafood imports into 2027.
June 3, 2026 — Seven states are suing the Trump administration over a nearly $1 billion deal to end French energy company TotalEnergies’ offshore wind development off the East Coast, accusing the deal of being “unlawful.”
In March, the U.S. Department of the Interior reached a $928 million deal with TotalEnergies to halt construction of the wind farms and redirect the investment into domestic fossil fuel initiatives. The “landmark agreement” was described by the Interior Department as a way to lower energy costs and strengthen the nation’s energy security.
Attorneys general in seven states in the Northeast, including Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont, filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Tuesday, alleging the Trump administration illegally used nearly $1 billion in taxpayer dollars for the deal.
The coalition also accuses the deal of violating the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which restricts the Interior Department’s ability to cancel offshore wind leases.
June 3, 2026 — Seven Democratic-controlled states sued the Trump administration on Tuesday over its move to block a planned wind farm off the coast of New York.
The lawsuit seeks to overturn an extraordinary deal that the Trump administration reached in March with the French energy giant TotalEnergies. That agreement saw the government pay TotalEnergies $928 million to abandon plans to build the wind project off New York and another one off North Carolina.
The New York attorney general, Letitia James, filed the suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Ms. James, a Democrat, said in a statement that the deal violated at least two federal laws and that it would harm New York’s economy and power grid.
“This administration cooked up a sham deal to pay a foreign energy company hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to abandon offshore wind and invest in oil and gas instead,” she said. “We are fighting back to stop this illegal agreement that threatens to erase over a thousand union jobs and cheat millions of New Yorkers out of clean, affordable energy.”
June 3, 2026 — The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) has announced plans for a new set of sweeping Section 301 tariffs against 60 separate economies.
The USTR said it will impose duties on 59 different countries and the entire European Union for what it calls a failure to enforce prohibitions on the importation of goods produced with forced labor. In its publication to the Federal Register, the USTR said it will propose a tariff rate of between 10 and 12.5 percent depending on the commitments the countries or blocs have made to opposing forced labor.
June 3, 2026 — The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump is dismantling a deep-ocean observation system put in place over a decade ago, leaving gaps in scientific data that assists in everything from storm forecasting to fishery health.
The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) consists of six different underwater monitoring arrays that the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) said is the most advanced continuously-operated observing systems in the world. Using hundreds of different instruments, the arrays provide openly-accessible data to oceanographers, researchers, educators, and the public.
June 1, 2026 — The dock that launched U.S. offshore wind is mostly empty now. The 200-foot-tall tower pieces that loomed like skyscrapers over a harbor of fishing trawlers are gone. So too are the house-sized gearboxes and turbine blades stretching the length of a soccer field.
The big turbine parts were supposed to represent a new era in a city where fish houses and abandoned factories line the waterfront. They were assembled here, sent out to sea and installed as part of Vineyard Wind, the largest renewable energy project built to-date east of the Mississippi River. All that was left on a recent April day were empty blade racks, a pair of red cranes and three broken blades.
It wasn’t supposed to look like this.
Vineyard Wind was supposed to be the first of many. Instead, it may be the only offshore wind project ever built in New Bedford.
This city of Portuguese, Latino and Cape Verdean residents is ground zero for America’s offshore wind industry, a test case of whether a blue collar fishing town can forge a new economic future by raising massive turbines out at sea.
May 29, 2026 — A national environmental organization Thursday filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration for failing to protect American horseshoe crabs under the Endangered Species Act.
The Center for Biological Diversity is among more than two dozen organizations that petitioned the National Marine Fisheries Service to protect horseshoe crabs in 2024.
May 21, 2026 — In the year since President Donald Trump signed an executive order promising to create a deep-sea mining industry from scratch, businesses have raised millions of dollars from investors, stock prices have soared and federal regulators have raced to fast-track a permitting process.
At least nine companies are in talks with the government for access to seabed minerals, according to an Associated Press review. Sections of the seafloor from American Samoa to Alaska could be auctioned for offshore mining this summer and through the fall.
All the action suggests the U.S. may soon give the green light for companies to commercially mine the seabed — something that’s never been done in international waters.
But a close look at some of the companies involved reveals uncertain track records and histories spattered with legal disputes, while major questions about how the minerals would be processed and refined remain unanswered. Watchers of the nascent industry are skeptical the promised riches will ever materialize.
May 21, 2026 — Forty-Two Acres of vacant industrial land — a patchwork of asphalt, weeds, and grass — sit waiting in Salem’s harbor. In the center is a coal power plant, shut down in 2014 after a decade of community activism, and a natural gas plant, retired in 2018. The city identified the lot, roughly 30 football fields in size, to be the site for Salem’s offshore wind terminal, which would be the third in the state after the New Bedford Marine Commerce Terminal opened in 2015 and the city began its phased opening of the Foss Marine Terminal in 2023.
But strong political winds have, at least for now, changed the course for Salem.
For the city’s climate advocates, the prospective terminal represents decades of work toward a cleaner, renewable energy future, one that the state has been putting money and policy behind for years and that has promised to bring thousands of jobs and other community investments. Salem and New Bedford both received millions from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) to develop the sites of retired fossil fuel power plants into terminals that would serve as logistics and operations centers for the construction of offshore wind. But wind projects have long been struggling to get off the ground. During the Biden administration, global supply chain disruption, climbing inflation, and high interest rates drove up costs for developers. The Trump administration’s anti-wind actions — issuing executive orders that block new projects, pausing existing leases, and rescinding grants — drove both cities further from the economic boon they expected.
In New Bedford, the influx of tenants that was hoped for never materialized. In Salem, the plan was to build two berths to receive ships carrying crew and materials for wind projects. But construction is stalled and there’s no start date in sight.
“We expected a lot of jobs, like a lot of life-changing … career sustainable jobs that were going to come from this, and that’s what hasn’t materialized,” said Sam Lambert, deputy chapter director for the Sierra Club’s Massachusetts’ chapter, of the Salem terminal and the offshore wind projects it might have supported.
In New Bedford, the terminal has had to shift its vision. It’s leaning on general cargo and marine construction for additional revenue.
“We were operating under a plan where, when the first [wind farm] gets first electricity, it would start doing its operation and maintenance work out of our facility,” said Andrew Saunders, president of the New Bedford Foss Marine Terminal. But with the current political climate, “the terminal has had to pivot in order to generate revenue, and figure out something of a different identity.”
May 20, 2026 — Atlantic fishermen could be allowed to catch even more sharks, if the Trump administration’s newly proposed updates to fishing regulations are approved.
The regulations would impact protections for the endangered blacknose shark, which has seen its population cut by more than half over the last quarter of a century. They would also raise the number of sharks recreational fishermen can catch per species and alter how big the sharks that are caught need to be.
The proposed changes are necessary to make it easier for recreational and commercial fishermen in the Atlantic Ocean by reducing the shark population, the administration says.