The Trump administration is paying this company $1 billion to quit building wind farms. Experts question the arrangement’s legality

After failing to stop multiple offshore wind projects from moving forward on the East Coast, the Trump administration is trying a new tactic: paying companies not to build wind farms.

Last week, the government announced that it would pay TotalEnergies approximately $1 billion to give up on building two planned offshore wind farms in the U.S. and to invest in oil, gas, and LNG production instead. But experts say that the federal government can’t legally spend taxpayer money this way. And Total was already planning to build new fossil fuel projects before striking the deal.

In the past, when energy companies decided to give up offshore leases, they ate the loss. Other companies, for example, have given up offshore oil and gas leases in Alaska.

“They may or may not have spent a lot of money on the lease, but they routinely will expire, and the companies are not going to ask for reimbursement because they’re not going to get it,” says David Hayes, a law professor at Stanford who worked on climate policy in the Biden administration. “That money has gone into the U.S. Treasury. The Interior Department can’t simply on its own say to the U.S. Treasury, ‘Please give that money back because the company decided it doesn’t want to proceed with the lease.’”