The National Security Shell

In early June, the Trump administration paid French energy giant TotalEnergies nearly $1 billion from the U.S. Treasury to abandon its offshore wind leases in American waters and redirect the money into a Texas liquefied natural gas plant. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum cited "national security concerns" as the justification. ^[1]

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. — Letitia James

The payment came after federal courts had already blocked the administration's earlier attempt to freeze those same wind projects. Judge Royce Lamberth ruled that the classified national security concerns the government offered were insufficient, and a separate court found the original executive order "arbitrary, capricious, and unlawful." ^[2][3] The administration dropped its legal fight in mid-June. ^[4] Then it simply paid the developer to leave. New York Attorney General Letitia James called the arrangement a "pay-not-to-play scheme" orchestrated "after repeatedly losing in court." ^[1] The TotalEnergies deal is the most explicit transaction in a pattern that now spans at least five federal agencies. The administration invokes "national security" to obstruct renewable energy and accelerate fossil fuels — and, in the record of actions to date, never the reverse. The Pentagon has halted 165 onshore wind projects on private lands, citing "military airspace and radar interference," and has not approved a single wind project since August 2025. ^[5]

is inherently complex and time-consuming because it involves balancing two critical, and sometimes competing, interests: developing energy sources while ensuring military operations and readiness are not degraded or impaired to the extent an unacceptable risk to national security is created — United States Department of War

The Environmental Protection Agency rolled back pollution rules to keep coal plants online, braiding "national security interests" into the same sentence as manufacturing growth and artificial intelligence. ^[6]

Coal-fired power plants are essential sources of baseload power necessary for addressing surging energy demand, increases in American manufacturing, national security interests, and turning the United States into the Artificial Intelligence capital of the world. — United States Environmental Protection Agency

In April, the administration invoked the Defense Production Act — a statute designed for national defense emergencies — to boost domestic production of petroleum, coal, and liquefied natural gas. ^[7]

Petroleum fuels the Nation’s Armed Forces, industrial base, and crucial infrastructure. Without immediate Federal action, United States defense capabilities will remain vulnerable to disruption. — Donald Trump

The same "national energy emergency" declaration that justified blocking wind also justified keeping coal plants open. Burgum framed the coal goal as "100% stay open, no more retirements, no more shutting down." ^[8][9] The administration also cut $35 billion in renewable energy projects, eliminated electric vehicle tax credits, and increased fossil fuel subsidies by $4 billion — all under an "energy dominance agenda." ^[10] In the administration's record of actions to date, no instance appears in which it used "national security" to obstruct a single domestic fossil-fuel project. ^{[2][5][1][11][10]} The pattern holds even where it should not. Nuclear energy, which the administration supports — Trump ordered a quadrupling of U.S. nuclear capacity in April — is framed around AI data-center demand and economic growth, not security. ^[12] That is despite the fact that Cameco, a major uranium supplier, explicitly positions itself as a "national security asset." ^[12]

one of the largest global providers of uranium fuel — Cameco

The administration reserves "national security" for the direction it wants to push, not the industries it supports. The framework did not originate in energy policy. It migrated there from the border. The visa statute that now bars entry to those who commit "economic sabotage" shows where the logic began: security as a tool to control economic outcomes, first at the border, now inside it. ^[13]

Today, State Department is imposing new visa restrictions to bar Far-Left Terrorists from entering our country. — Marco Rubio

In February, the U.S. imposed visa restrictions on Chilean officials to pressure Chile into blocking a Chinese-funded undersea cable project — the visa system deployed to dictate another country's industrial choices. ^[14] The TotalEnergies deal applies the same principle domestically: security as a lever to redirect private investment from disfavored industries to favored ones. Courts in two separate domains have identified the reasoning as pretextual. Judge Lamberth, reviewing the offshore wind freeze, found the government's classified national security concerns may have been "pretextual" — a mask for fossil-fuel priorities. ^[2] In a separate case, Judge Rita Lin of the Northern District of California found that the Pentagon's broad measures against AI firm Anthropic — designated a "national security supply-chain risk" after refusing to remove safety guardrails preventing military use for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons — "do not appear to be directed at the government's stated national security interests" and were likely First Amendment retaliation, though an appeals court later upheld the blacklisting. ^[15]

These broad measures do not appear to be directed at the government’s stated national security interests. — Rita F. Lin

Two federal judges, reviewing actions in two different domains, reached the same conclusion: the security rationale did not match the action. The administration can tell the difference between a genuine security emergency and a pretextual one. In June, after a 109-day war with Iran depleted over a thousand Tomahawk missiles and half of U.S. Patriot and THAAD inventories, Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to replenish munitions. ^[16]

I hereby find that conditions exist which may pose a direct threat to the national defense or its preparedness programs. — Donald Trump

That was a real national defense emergency. The distinction makes the directional use in energy more clearly deliberate, not reflexive. The same administration that can identify a genuine munitions shortage and respond with emergency powers also chose to pay a French company nearly a billion dollars to stop building wind turbines and start building a gas plant — and called it security. After the courts blocked the wind-project freeze, developers allege the Interior Department is now "slow-walking" approvals through procedural barriers. ^[4] But the TotalEnergies deal remains the clearest case. A government that pays a foreign company to abandon wind leases and redirect the money into liquefied natural gas is not performing security analysis. It is running industrial policy through a security shell. A federal judge has already said so in plain words.

the stated national security reasoning may have been “pretextual,” to mask the true motives for stopping offshore wind. — Royce Lamberth