Trump's $2.6B Wind Buyouts Hit Union Jobs
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- Thomas Kilday, an IBEW Local 99 furnace electrician, was aboard a vessel working on the Revolution Wind Project off the Atlantic coast when the Trump administration issued a stop-work order last August, leaving him uncertain about his pay during a planned 28-day shift.
- Revolution Wind is over 90% complete and began delivering power to New England in March, with more than 1,000 local union workers on the build, and is expected to power more than 350,000 homes and businesses.
- The Trump administration has completed four wind lease buyouts totaling more than $2.6 billion, including $765 million to Invenergy to abandon four projects in California, New York, and Maine, and nearly $900 million to Bluepoint Wind and Garden State Wind to cancel offshore leases in New York and California.
- Pat Crowley, president of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, called the buyout policy "foolish" and said labor is "five for five" beating the administration in court on stop-work orders for Rhode Island wind projects, calling the buyouts "throwing money away for the sake of their ideology."
- Will Gonzalez, a Laborers' Local 385 construction laborer who worked on the now-operational Vineyard Wind 1, called the opposition a "personal vendetta" tied to Trump losing a December 2015 appeal to block a wind turbine project near his Scotland golf course.
- The Department of Interior denied any job impact from the cancellations and stop-work orders, with a spokesperson stating "no jobs were eliminated because none of these leases were operational or supporting employment."
Why it matters: The Trump administration's $2.6 billion wind lease buyout program has triggered a labor-versus-administration fight that federal courts have repeatedly sided against, with two injunctions blocking stop-work orders on Revolution Wind alone. With that single project employing 1,000+ union workers and a Rhode Island AFL-CIO leader saying labor is 5-0 in court locally, the buyout strategy is reshaping a union-friendly clean energy sector while Interior insists the projects "were not producing jobs in the first place."
