Filed Date: June 2, 2026
Clearinghouse coding in progress
[This summary is temporary while we research the case]. On June 2, 2026, the States of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island, and Vermont, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts filed suit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia against the U.S. Department of the Interior (Interior), the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), and named officials in their official capacities, challenging the cancellation of an offshore wind lease in the New York Bight.
The lease at issue, which covered over 84,000 acres in the New York Bight, had been awarded to Attentive Energy LLC in February 2022 following a competitive auction in which Attentive bid $795 million, making it the highest-grossing competitive offshore energy lease sale in U.S. history. The lease area was expected to support more than 2.7 gigawatts of wind capacity, enough to power over 1.3 million homes, and both New York and New Jersey had incorporated the lease into their long-term statutory energy planning targets. On March 23, 2026, the Department of the Interior announced a "Settlement Agreement" with TotalEnergies/Attentive to cancel the lease and reimburse Attentive from the federal Judgment Fund, with TotalEnergies agreeing in exchange to invest those funds in oil and gas projects and to develop no new U.S. offshore wind projects.
The complaint alleged that the cancellation was not a genuine arm's-length settlement, that TotalEnergies' own CEO acknowledged the company had proposed the deal, and that the stated national security rationale was pretextual given numerous public statements by federal officials characterizing wind energy as a "scam" and expressing a goal of halting all wind development. The plaintiffs asserted five claims under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA), and sought declaratory relief, vacatur of both the lease cancellation and the Settlement Agreement, and injunctive relief.
Summary Authors
(6/7/2026)
For PACER's information on parties and their attorneys, see: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/73426597/parties/state-of-new-york-v-us-department-of-the-interior/
Kelly, Timothy James (District of Columbia)
Dimenstein, Libby (District of Columbia)
Wagner, Monica Blong (District of Columbia)
See docket on RECAP: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/73426597/state-of-new-york-v-us-department-of-the-interior/
Last updated July 3, 2026, 3:13 a.m.
State / Territory:
Case Type(s):
Special Collection(s):
Trump Administration 2.0: Challenges to the Government
Key Dates
Filing Date: June 2, 2026
Case Details
Other Dockets:
District of District of Columbia 1:26-cv-01910
Case Summary of New York v. U.S. Department of the Interior, Civil Rights Litig. Clearinghouse, https://clearinghouse.net/case/48197/ (last updated 6/7/2026).