America is entering the biggest energy expansion since the post-war boom, particularly with artificial intelligence fueling a massive data center construction race. Politicians in both parties talk constantly about winning the future and strengthening domestic industry, but those ambitions all depend on one thing: abundant, reliable energy.
Yet across the country, more than 2,000 gigawatts of generation and storage capacity are stuck waiting for approvals. That’s more than the entire existing installed generating capacity of the United States, just sitting there. Projects wait five years or more on average from application to commercial operation, a timeline that has more than doubled over the past 15 years. A new transmission line takes more than a decade to permit and build. Electricity demand is rising fast, driven by data centers and the reshoring of manufacturing and electrification, and we do not have the infrastructure to meet it. That broader dysfunction provides important context for the controversy surrounding recent offshore wind projects.
Over the past several months, the Trump administration has cut deals with the developers of four offshore wind projects (TotalEnergies, Bluepoint Wind, Golden State Wind, and others) to walk away from their projects in exchange for the return of lease fees they had originally paid the federal government. Several Democratic attorneys general have sued. Environmental groups are furious. A number of activists have framed this as a taxpayer-funded bailout for the fossil fuel industry.
As someone who is an “all of the above” energy advocate, I get the frustration. I share real concerns about where this administration is taking U.S. energy policy. But before the outrage fully calcifies, my fellow Democrats need to reckon honestly with two things, and the Bluepoint Wind deal is a useful place to start.
The first is a basic factual correction. This is not taxpayer money. Global Infrastructure Partners, a part of BlackRock, paid $765 million to the federal government for the right to develop an offshore wind project near New York and New Jersey. Private capital raised on behalf of pension funds and other investors was placed in a competitive bidding process designed and run by the federal government. When the administration decided the project couldn’t go forward, it struck an agreement to give back what it had collected, on the condition that the investor put those same dollars into other domestic energy infrastructure instead. Whatever one thinks of that decision, it was not a taxpayer-funded bailout but the unwinding of a transaction the federal government itself had initiated.
But focusing exclusively on the lease payments misses the larger issue.
These projects did not fail solely because of President Donald Trump. They failed because we have a permitting and regulatory system that makes it extraordinarily difficult to build anything in this country, whether we’re talking about affordable housing or new energy projects, and for far too long, Congress and policymakers from both parties have had opportunities to fix it and mostly didn’t.
I supported clean energy throughout my time in Congress, and I still believe in it. But I’ve watched with growing frustration as too many in my party have decided that permitting reform is a dirty word.
Offshore wind was supposed to be part of the answer. Instead, the sector spent years stuck in a regulatory framework never designed for projects at that scale, watching costs balloon and timelines stretch while investors lost confidence. Those problems predated this administration. They were well documented. They were largely ignored by the people who had the most invested in offshore wind’s success.
In 2024, senators from both parties put together the Energy Permitting Reform Act. It cleared the Senate energy and natural resources committee 15-4. It would have streamlined approvals across the board: renewables, transmission, conventional energy. It never got a floor vote, in part because too many decided any permitting bill was a giveaway to fossil fuels. Politics is the art of inclusion and give-and-take. The irony is that killing that bill didn’t slow down oil and gas. It slowed down everything. Including the offshore wind projects that the same people were counting on.
Bluepoint is unfortunately what that failure looks like in practice. Serious institutional investors put real money into a project under rules the government set, and then found those rules gone and the economics shattered. What came next was a negotiated exit. You can fairly criticize the administration for creating the conditions that made that necessary. I do. But pretending the underlying dysfunction didn’t exist long before Trump got back to the White House isn’t serious.
A SIMPLE WAY TO CURE AMERICA’S SELF-INFLICTED INFRASTRUCTURE PARALYSIS
I’m a proud Democrat. I want us to build clean energy. That’s why this bothers me. We have spent years treating permitting reform as a threat rather than a tool, and the result is that important projects, not just offshore wind but transmission lines, pipelines, and grid upgrades, are stuck in a broken process while we argue about who has the right politics to wield a shovel.
The lesson here isn’t that offshore wind was never going to work. It’s that promises about what we’re going to build don’t mean much if we can’t actually build anything. Democrats who are serious about the energy transition should be leading on permitting reform as part of the solution, not blocking it. We cannot continue to give up that ground, and Bluepoint is part of what we have to show for it. Hopefully, we can get around to addressing it before other projects meet a similar unfortunate fate.
Patrick J. Murphy was the 32nd undersecretary of the Army. He also represented Pennsylvania’s 8th District as a congressman and served on the energy and water subcommittee of the House appropriations committee.