Judge orders Pentagon to restart stalled wind project reviews

A federal judge ordered the Pentagon on Aug. 6 to restart reviews of proposed onshore wind projects, after the Defense Department froze the process even though federal law required those national security reviews to be finished within 75 days.

The ruling turned a fight over wind power into a rule-of-law test. The Pentagon had halted all military reviews in April 2025, and by May it had stopped processing wind project reviews altogether, leaving developers without the federal sign-off needed to move projects forward.

The scale of the freeze reached far beyond one project or one state. One tally put the number of stalled wind projects at at least 125. Another counted 155 projects in 24 states, covering about 44 gigawatts of capacity and costing developers about $2 billion. Clean energy groups said the Defense Department’s foot-dragging had blocked wind farm development across the country.

The Trump administration defended the pause on national-security grounds, citing concerns about drones and radar interference. The administration’s broader campaign against wind power had already taken shape in January 2025, when the White House temporarily withdrew all areas on the Outer Continental Shelf from offshore wind leasing and ordered a review of federal wind permitting practices.

The court order pressed the Pentagon back toward the process Congress wrote into law, a routine review with a fixed deadline rather than an open-ended veto over wind development. For the wider U.S. wind pipeline, the ruling raised the stakes for how the Defense Department and other agencies can use national-security screening: as a defined review, not as a way to stall projects indefinitely.