Day one: Trump freezes clean energy funding and bans new wind energy projects (January 20, 2025 )
January 20, 2025 — Alongside his Paris Agreement withdrawal, President Trump signed Executive Order 14154, titled "Unleashing American Energy," ordering all federal agencies to immediately halt disbursement of funds appropriated under the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law — tens of billions of dollars in congressionally enacted clean energy investment — pending review. On the same day, he signed a memorandum imposing a moratorium on all offshore wind leasing and suspending new permits and approvals for both offshore and onshore wind energy projects, citing alleged inadequacies in prior environmental reviews.
Other day-one energy orders reversed Biden's offshore drilling bans across more than 625 million acres of U.S. coastal waters, directed Interior to expedite oil and gas permitting on public lands, ended federal support for electric vehicle adoption, and revoked dozens of Biden climate actions. The net effect of the package was a full-spectrum assault on the clean energy transition: freezing its funding, halting new renewable infrastructure, and reopening federal lands and waters to fossil fuel extraction.
Courts moved quickly to limit the moratorium's reach. In December 2025, a federal district court struck down the wind energy ban as unlawful in New York v. Trump, ruling in favor of 17 states and Washington, D.C. Even so, the moratorium had already caused $22 billion in clean energy manufacturing project cancellations in the first half of 2025 alone — more than 10 percent of all additions since 2022 — as investors and developers retreated from a market reshaped by policy uncertainty.
| https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/policy-regulation/trump-orders-freeze-on-inflation-reduction-act-infrastructure-law-funding |