Doug Burgum Just Used Biden’s Own Wind Money Against Him

Joe Biden handed a French energy company nearly $1 billion in federal ocean leases to build wind farms Americans never wanted.

Doug Burgum just took that money back – and sent it somewhere Biden never imagined.

What Burgum did with Biden's wind billions has Democrats demanding answers.

Biden Handed a French Company Nearly $1 Billion in Ocean Real Estate

In 2022, the Biden administration handed energy giant TotalEnergies two of the most coveted ocean wind leases in the country.

The price tag: $795 million for a tract in the New York Bight and $133 million off the Carolina coast – nearly a billion dollars in federal ocean real estate handed to a foreign corporation to build wind farms Americans would be forced to subsidize.

Biden called it the clean energy future.

The turbines were never built.

In 2024, the flagship of Biden's entire offshore wind program – Vineyard Wind off the Massachusetts coast – snapped a 350-foot turbine blade and dumped thousands of pounds of fiberglass onto Nantucket beaches.

Debris floated for weeks.

The entire farm was shut down.

GE Vernova's own investigation found a manufacturing flaw so widespread it threatened more than 60 blades already installed at the site.

That was Biden's clean energy future in practice – foreign-built machinery, rushed approvals, and fiberglass washing up on your family's beach.

Burgum Announced the Deal at CERAWeek and Didn't Mince Words

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum walked into the CERAWeek energy conference in Houston and announced that TotalEnergies was walking away from both leases entirely.

They won’t put those taxpayer dollars back into the pockets of the hard-working Americans who earned them of course.

Instead, the company will invest $928 million – every dollar it received back – into a liquefied natural gas plant in Brownsville, Texas, shale gas production, and conventional oil development in the Gulf of America.

The United States will terminate both Biden-era wind leases and reimburse TotalEnergies dollar-for-dollar after the oil and gas investments are complete.

TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné said offshore wind development in the United States is "not in the country's interest" – and that investing in Texas LNG that supplies Europe and fuels American data centers is "a more efficient use of capital."

Burgum called Biden's offshore wind program "one of the most expensive, unreliable, environmentally disruptive, and subsidy-dependent schemes ever forced on American ratepayers and taxpayers."

Attorney General Pam Bondi said the deal "prioritizes affordability for hardworking American consumers over the prior administration's ideological, ineffective energy policies."

Why the Attorney General is commenting on energy policy makes about as much sense as her defense when hauled before Congress last month to answer over her bungling of the Epstein Files – “the DOW is over 50,000.”

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Theft is theft

Biden's offshore wind agenda was already collapsing before Trump took office.

Danish developer Ørsted scrapped two New Jersey wind projects in 2023 after supply chains buckled and tax credits fell short.

New England developers canceled contracts for 3.2 gigawatts of promised power – projects already years behind schedule.

By the time Biden left Washington, his 2030 target of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind was being called a "pipe dream" by the industry's own analysts.

The TotalEnergies deal is the final verdict on everything Biden built.

The company's own internal studies found that U.S. offshore wind was "costly and might have a negative impact on power affordability for U.S. consumers."

That's not a conservative talking point – because conservatives tend not to promote stealing.

That's the company that held the leases telling you the projects weren't worth building.

Why they didn’t determine that before taking your money – or if they did and still took the money – is unknown.

Trump didn't just cancel bad projects – he converted nearly $1 billion in Biden's green ideology paid for with your tax dollars into American oil production, American LNG exports, and American jobs in Texas.

The Rio Grande LNG plant in Brownsville will supply Europe with the gas it desperately needs and fuel the artificial intelligence data centers driving the next American economic boom.

Biden tried to lock that same billion dollars into turbines that shatter and litter beaches with fiberglass.

Trump turned it into something America can actually use.

Do you think socialism is cool?

Sources:

• Peter Pinedo, "Trump Admin Dumps Biden-Era Wind Projects for Billion-Dollar Investment in US Oil," Fox Business, March 23, 2026.
• "Interior and TotalEnergies Agree to End Offshore Wind Projects, Lowering Costs for American Families," U.S. Department of the Interior, March 23, 2026.
• "Offshore Wind Project Cancellations Jeopardize Biden's Clean Energy Goals," PBS NewsHour, November 4, 2023.
• "Feds Shut Down Vineyard Wind Project Following Turbine Blade Failure," Offshore Magazine, July 2024.
• "Trump Administration Reimburses TotalEnergies $928M to Scrap Offshore Wind Leases, Pivot to LNG," gCaptain, March 23, 2026.